But to me, he was....
Jan. 9th, 2019 06:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
selenakWinter always reminds me of the Hobbit trilogy. Which belongs to the flawed canons which I love fervently despite being aware of just how faulty they are. Too bloated, shouldn't have been three movies, ridiculous Action!Legolas scenes (and too many action senes in general), yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm with you, but listen: These flawed movies made me care about their characters in a way I just hadn't in the book (save for Bilbo). (Maybe I read it too late, and in the wrong order - i.e. I read LotR first, with 12 or 13, and was 21 by the time I got around to The Hobbit.)
The dwarves, whom the movies made into individuals for me (the book did this solely for Thorin and Balin, at least in my dim memory of how I felt during my first reading). The humans - I really love that we got to meet Bard not the screen equivalent of a page before he kills the dragon, but that we got to know him and his family half a movie before that happens, that the plight of the people of Laketown became correspondingly more urgent, emotionally. The elves - I loved all the Galadriel scenes (which also made me ship Galadriel/Gandalf). I know a lot of people feel Thranduil got written too unsympathetically, but to me he came across as something out of an earlier Middle Earth Age, and the conflict between him and Tauriel in the last two movies was interesting because neither was positioned as evil. (Tauriel was right about isolationism, but she, being much younger, also had no idea what losing someone to death really felt like, and Thranduil did. Also, "people arguing because of their convictions" and "being the opposition to someone you don't consider evil" are among my favourite tropes, and those movies delivered both with Thorin and with Thranduil as the Leaders whom people who respected them still needed to stand up to.)
Mind you, caring about most of the characters also meant - and still means, years later - grieving in a way the book didn't make me, and not just relating to events in The Hobbit. Now I'm with Gimli when the Fellowship discovers Balin's tomb (and Ori's skeleton with the book, little Ori!) in Moria, and I want to bawl my eyes out. Also, the idea of Bilbo post-Hobbit and pre-Frodo's arrival in his life: gut wrenching, because while the book reassures us that Bilbo lived happily to the end of his days, the movie leaves him raw with grief and utterly alone in a cleaned out Bag End. As for the three deaths at the end of the Hobbit: yep, still mentally sobbing at the thought of them. Good lord, but caring makes all the difference to thinking "yep, The Hobbit is a nice and charming tale for kids" and going "Tolkien, you bloodthirsty man, how could you?!?"
Also: Thorin is the Boromir phenomenon writ large for me: i.e. character I could take or leave in the book whom by virtue of acting and some writing addendums to the basic material I now love to bits with all his flaws (much like the movies themselves). Because my post last month with the dancing and/or singing scenes from movies and tv episodes which aren't musicals was meant to be cheery, I couldn't include this, but dear readers of this utterings, the Far over the misty mountains sequence is still perfection, and works beautifully on a Doylist and Watsonian level alike as when the comedy tone of the story so far shifts, and Bilbo for the first time feels that longing for mystery and adventure which ultimately lets him run off with the dwarves.
Yeah, that's Tolkien, you'll say, but none of the non-Tolkien based has that emotional power. But but but the acorn scene in "Battle of the Five Armies", say I, which is pure Philippa Boyens and Fran Walsh, with zero Tolkien basis. Whether or not you consider the decision to let Thorin not just be a stubborn bastard in that part of the story but to go not so slightly mad before he snaps out of it again a mistake, this scene, mid-"gold sickness" phase when Thorin is at his greedy and paranoid utmost yet capable of accessing his better self for Bilbo again is just immensely moving and wonderfully played by both actors:
It also foreshadows Thorin's death scene, which gives Thorin mostly Tolkien's lines but also makes me incapable of ever hearing "The eagles are coming" the same way I did post LotR again.
And because just thinking about it makes me sad, I checked whether there was new-to-me fanfiction relevant to my interests, and came up with these:
Exile: what Tauriel did next
From such great heights: There's a first time for everything: Gandalf/Galadriel.
Perennial: Bilbo's life with Frodo between trilogies and beyond. (Bookverse, but works for movieverse as well.)
Unguarded: Thorin contemplating his burglar.
The dwarves, whom the movies made into individuals for me (the book did this solely for Thorin and Balin, at least in my dim memory of how I felt during my first reading). The humans - I really love that we got to meet Bard not the screen equivalent of a page before he kills the dragon, but that we got to know him and his family half a movie before that happens, that the plight of the people of Laketown became correspondingly more urgent, emotionally. The elves - I loved all the Galadriel scenes (which also made me ship Galadriel/Gandalf). I know a lot of people feel Thranduil got written too unsympathetically, but to me he came across as something out of an earlier Middle Earth Age, and the conflict between him and Tauriel in the last two movies was interesting because neither was positioned as evil. (Tauriel was right about isolationism, but she, being much younger, also had no idea what losing someone to death really felt like, and Thranduil did. Also, "people arguing because of their convictions" and "being the opposition to someone you don't consider evil" are among my favourite tropes, and those movies delivered both with Thorin and with Thranduil as the Leaders whom people who respected them still needed to stand up to.)
Mind you, caring about most of the characters also meant - and still means, years later - grieving in a way the book didn't make me, and not just relating to events in The Hobbit. Now I'm with Gimli when the Fellowship discovers Balin's tomb (and Ori's skeleton with the book, little Ori!) in Moria, and I want to bawl my eyes out. Also, the idea of Bilbo post-Hobbit and pre-Frodo's arrival in his life: gut wrenching, because while the book reassures us that Bilbo lived happily to the end of his days, the movie leaves him raw with grief and utterly alone in a cleaned out Bag End. As for the three deaths at the end of the Hobbit: yep, still mentally sobbing at the thought of them. Good lord, but caring makes all the difference to thinking "yep, The Hobbit is a nice and charming tale for kids" and going "Tolkien, you bloodthirsty man, how could you?!?"
Also: Thorin is the Boromir phenomenon writ large for me: i.e. character I could take or leave in the book whom by virtue of acting and some writing addendums to the basic material I now love to bits with all his flaws (much like the movies themselves). Because my post last month with the dancing and/or singing scenes from movies and tv episodes which aren't musicals was meant to be cheery, I couldn't include this, but dear readers of this utterings, the Far over the misty mountains sequence is still perfection, and works beautifully on a Doylist and Watsonian level alike as when the comedy tone of the story so far shifts, and Bilbo for the first time feels that longing for mystery and adventure which ultimately lets him run off with the dwarves.
Yeah, that's Tolkien, you'll say, but none of the non-Tolkien based has that emotional power. But but but the acorn scene in "Battle of the Five Armies", say I, which is pure Philippa Boyens and Fran Walsh, with zero Tolkien basis. Whether or not you consider the decision to let Thorin not just be a stubborn bastard in that part of the story but to go not so slightly mad before he snaps out of it again a mistake, this scene, mid-"gold sickness" phase when Thorin is at his greedy and paranoid utmost yet capable of accessing his better self for Bilbo again is just immensely moving and wonderfully played by both actors:
It also foreshadows Thorin's death scene, which gives Thorin mostly Tolkien's lines but also makes me incapable of ever hearing "The eagles are coming" the same way I did post LotR again.
And because just thinking about it makes me sad, I checked whether there was new-to-me fanfiction relevant to my interests, and came up with these:
Exile: what Tauriel did next
From such great heights: There's a first time for everything: Gandalf/Galadriel.
Perennial: Bilbo's life with Frodo between trilogies and beyond. (Bookverse, but works for movieverse as well.)
Unguarded: Thorin contemplating his burglar.
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Date: 2019-01-09 08:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-01-10 02:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-01-09 08:09 pm (UTC)Thank you for the post and for the links to fic! I always love LOTR/Hobbit fic but sometimes forget to go look for it.
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Date: 2019-01-10 06:54 pm (UTC)Action Scenes: where remote control is your friend. :)
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Date: 2019-01-09 08:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-01-10 06:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-01-09 09:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-01-10 02:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-01-09 10:15 pm (UTC)ETA: I read that there's very heavy snowfall in southern Germany and Austria - hope you're okay!
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Date: 2019-01-10 06:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-01-09 11:04 pm (UTC)I read the Hobbit as a comic book as a kid (and adored it) but honestly, I loved Bilbo and the rest of the group didn't weren't characters that honestly stood out to me. And then the movies came and oh, fleshed out all of the dwarves with their own personalities and absolutely made me fall for Thorin. And caring about it turned it from fun, light-hearted adventure story, stealing gold from dragons, to a bit of a tragedy, a battle won at a high price.
Feelings make such a difference to a story.
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Date: 2019-01-10 02:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-01-09 11:22 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-01-10 01:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-01-10 02:33 am (UTC)I *LOVE* so much of the Hobbit movies--and did from the start (heck, I fell head over heels in love with the Dwarves with the trailer scene in Bilbo's parlor). I have a theory: most of the people I know (and this includes students in some short-term special topics classes I taught on the films) who read TH in grade school (most often third grade??), and who fell in love with it as one can at that age, disliked or hated the films.
I read TH about that time but disliked the book. I was this huge Oz fan, and the librarian gave me TH with a slightly dismissive comment that since I loved Oz, I'd like this book--she was one who was rather critical when I would stagger out with seven big fan Oz books to re-re-re-read, so I was dubious about her anyway.
I read it when I was eight but didn't like it. I felt 'talked down to' at the start (that intrusive narrator), and thought Bilbo was weird and squeaky, and didn't like the silly singing Elves, and...well. Two years later, 1965, my mom's friend shared LOTR with me, and I became Tolkien obsessed and eventually came to appreciate TH much more (as a prequel to LOTR, and especially the last half, after Bilbo's meeting with Gollum), when that intrusive "children's book narrator" is reduced and the Older World became more prominent (and I would cry when I read Thorin's death scene). But it was always...lesser for me.
Jackson made a "true" prequel to LOTR (yes, it had its flaws--BUT it had so much that was wonderful!): I adored Tauriel in the second film (she was the moral center), and was frustrated with how they wrote her in the third film (but LOVED her relationship with Kili). I loved ALL the Dwarves (so much better than Tolkien's version of them in much of the book!!!11!!). The scene with Gollum and Bilbo was BRILLIANT. Martin Freeman's Bilbo was so fantastic--I just start babbling when I try to say how much I love his portrayal.
I would have loved more with Beorn (but what we got was fantastic), and yes, the acorn scene!
ETA: A fic recommendation!
Sansûkh by determamfidd
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Date: 2019-01-10 01:58 pm (UTC)Martin Freeman as Bilbo: yes indeed. I think he got some Sherlock related backlash at first, but really, he was superb. I was so nervous ahead of time re: that scene with Gollum, because while I loved the BBC radio adaption of LotR, one of the few things I didn’t like about it was that they hit us over the head about the importance of Bilbo having pitied Gollum back then, and didn’t trust the listeners to get the point, so when Frodo first met Gollum in person, the radio version actually used a flashback to his conversation with Gandalf. And I was afraid PJ might be tempted to do something similar to make it clear to the audience what was going on, and that would have destroyed the emotional impact for me. But instead, he trusted Martin Freeman to get across what Bilbo was feeling in silence, just with his facial expression.
My friend
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Date: 2019-01-12 05:28 pm (UTC)Interesting - I think I was probably about that age when I read it, and I did love it though I always preferred LotR (read a year or two later?). I don't hate the films, but I have very mixed feelings about them. Some parts were brilliant (any scene with Bilbo and Thorin, Galadriel and the Dol Guldur plot, Bilbo vs Gollum and Bilbo vs Smaug, the spiders, Smaug emerging from the mountain at the end of DoS and gliding towards Laketown) and it definitely made me care about all the Company dwarves.
Some things I thought were meh (CGI!Azog, Azog in general, Beorn's look (the actor was great, but he looked lupine not ursine), the barrel scene, Tauriel healing Kili) and then there were the things I really did not like at all! (Too much action in DoS and BoFA, way too much Legolas, too much Alfrid, WTF was the scene with the dwarves fighting Smaug and Thorin riding a wheelbarrow, why did the Goblin King have to sing, Thorin's cheesy framing with flowing hair in the Azanulbizar flashback and the cringy encomium that was only just saved from being completely unbearable by giving it to an actor of Ken Stott's calibre, cliched love triangle between Kili/Tauriel/Legolas etc.)
I can cut them a lot of slack for changes because I always thought TH would actually be harder to adapt than LotR, especially given the adaptation needed to fit with the LotR films in tone and continuity. And it's obvious from the extras for DoS and BoFA that they were winging it rather than in control of what they were doing, but I do rather mourn the missed opportunities because the good parts show that it could have been so much more.
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Date: 2019-01-12 04:59 pm (UTC)That pretty much sums up how I feel about what the films did well! I think most people only remember 5 dwarves from the book at most, and Thorin and Balin are the only ones where it is because of their personality. The others are: Bombur (because he's fat) and Fili and Kili (because they are the youngest and they die). And I was never really moved by the deaths in the book, but the film scenes had my crying forever.
I think though that the dwarves other than Thorin, Balin and Kili did still get short-shrift in films 2 & 3 (did Fili have more than a couple of lines?), which is where a lot of my frustration with the Action!Legolas and Comedy!Alfrid scenes comes from. It they'd cut that nonsense down there would have been time for more character stuff with the dwarves (it was their film, right? Legolas already had 3 films to show off in!)
Film 1 was better for that since they had to stick with the dwarves, and that is the one I am fondest of because we got a real sense of who these characters were. And I didn't mind the Dol Guldur plot with Radagast being part of the storyline because that does make so much sense to linking up with LotR and explaining what Gandalf is doing.
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Date: 2019-01-13 03:54 pm (UTC)re: the other dwarves in movies 2 and 3, I know what you mean, though there are some good bits: Dwalin has that heartbreaking scene with Thorin in 3, Oin gets to prove himself as the healer of the group in 2, and of course Dain gets to make a great entrance and become very vivid in just a short time in 3. (I also first wanted to write Bofur, but then I recalled my favourite Bofur bits are in 1.) Even so: I could tell apart all the Dwarves by the broad strokes even the ones with minimal lines had received - Dori as the fussy mother hen one, Ori as the shy nerdish one, and so forth.
re: Legolas in general - it's the lamentable effect of someone becoming an audience favourite. I mean, you could tell in Return of the King already that the Legolas vs Oliphant sequence was only there because people had cheered at the Legolas fighting at Helm's Deep in the previous movie. I wouldn't be surprised if one of the memos from the studio said, re: greenlighting The Hobbit: must include Legolas action! Sigh.
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Date: 2019-01-15 07:31 pm (UTC)I wouldn't be surprised if one of the memos from the studio said, re: greenlighting The Hobbit: must include Legolas action!
Oh, I am positive they did! Not sure whether they misunderstood what the audience would want from a Hobbit adaptation, or didn't trust that we would have become invested in the dwarves after a film and a half... I don't think I know anyone who didn't think he was overused. And I get that it would have been odd to visit the Woodland Realm without including him, but I found the amount he was involved really obtrusive, particularly in BotFA. For me, that should have been all about Bilbo's choices, the dwarves, and Thorin's tale coming to an end, not Legolas' origin story as a Fellowship member!