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Old 10-26-2005, 04:33 PM   #14
Lalwendė
A Mere Boggart
 
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Join Date: Mar 2004
Location: under the bed
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Lalwendė is battling Black Riders on Weathertop.Lalwendė is battling Black Riders on Weathertop.
Never mind the prologue, this was the important bit for me. If they had got The Shire and the Hobbits wrong, I'd have been out of that cinema. I've always very much pictured The Shire as Tolkien's own art portrays it, and this portrayal was a little different. I often think how messy the gardens look, and as a keen gardener like a Gamgee, I know that they would probably be a lot tidier. But strangely, I was very taken with this view of The Shire indeed. In fact I watch it with no small measure of nostalgia.

Those messy gardens are like the gardens I knew when I was a child, haphazard and slightly wild, their owners being too busy farming to be fussy about the flowers. The characters all seem to make me think of some mad character I knew when growing up, including the chap with the ear wax problem. Mr Proudfoot makes me smile because he's like my father but with more hair, secretly enjoying the fireworks but feeling he has to appear disapproving. I like the group of Hobbits sat round doing some hardcore smoking, and I love the Hobbit who cracks up with laughter when he draws himself a pint off from the barrels - he's having fun!

Ian Holm is splendid as Bilbo. Interestingly, he's an actor who can 'do evil' very well, as anyone who has seen From Hell will know. He also interacts very well with Ian McKellen; I'm sure they will have worked together before in the theatre. I have to say here, imagine if they had chosen Sean Connery as Gandalf? Noooo! But to see both of them together as soon as possible after the start of the film was important to me, not just as it matched the book, but because it just seems right that Hobbits and Wizards are seen together, they go together like cheese and apple pie.

Interesting point on the design - I was watching a travel documentary about New Zealand on one of Sky's 500 channels of tripe and they showed the farm where The Shire was filmed. That big tree is still there, in fact it was a major selling point in choosing that location. The son of the farmer said in typically breezy antipodean style that they had actually been thinking of chopping it down before they chose the location!

The detail again is one of the things which grabs me. I liked how the hillsides had lychets marked into them, the remains of old terraced fields; you see these all over the place in Yorkshire, so it gave it an authentic touch. I also like Bag End, and I laugh when I se the books all over the place. That's like my house.
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