Quote:
|
Originally Posted by alatar
But as they are professionals, isn't that their job?
|
Well, yeah, but that doesn't make it easy (I, like Glirdan, act and hope next year to start an acting major). Acting intense emotion is much more rewarding when you finally hit it just right than when you deliver a joke that makes the audience laugh, though, so in the end, it balances out. And Glirdan is right: it is harder than you'd think to keep a straight face, especially if this is the tenth time through, and you and/or the other person in the scene are still forgetting lines.
Quote:
|
Originally Posted by alatar
The only reason that I cried during Titanic was that the movie seemingly would never end . Please, James, sink the boat so that I can go home! Anyway, what I liked in FotR was that Aragorn could cry - Frodo's not as masculine, and so he's more likely too. Here's a real tough guy, a virtual killing machine in the Hollywood stereotype, yet he still can shed tears (or at least well up) for his fallen brother. That to me was cool.
|
That's very true. Sometimes in LOTR it's not so much that something incredibly sad is happening (though often enough it is) as that the characters are devastated and in tears over something. I guess it's an empathy impulse. If Aragorn is crying, you know it's serious.
Quote:
|
Originally Posted by dancing spawn of ungoliant
Also, in LotR's case - what if you hadn't read the books before the film? Or what if you had? In any case, different people consider different moments on screen worth of tears, whether they are tears or sadness or joy, and I personally don't feel that PJ would have been "shy" when dealing with emotions in RotK.
|
I remember vividly that one of the (ten) times I saw FOTR in the theater, I was sitting next to this woman in her fifties, who, it was obvious, had never seen the movie or read the book before. She kept gasping when Frodo got hurt (any one of the times that it looked like he was dead), and then started sobbing when Gandalf fell. Her teenage daughter was looking kind of embarrassed, and I heard her whisper out of the corner of her mouth "Don't worry, mom, he comes back." For this lady, the real emotional impulse came from the fact that she was fond of Gandalf and didn't know he came back later. Watching that scene the first time I saw it, the emotional impulse came from the (re)acting that the remains of the Fellowship did, because I knew what was coming. I still got a little teary-eyed, but much more out of just watching everyone onscreen cry.
I agree, also, with Dancing Spawn's assessment of humor in the movies.
The role of humor in a comedy is to make the audience laugh because that's the whole point. That's where shallow, vulgar humor finds its home, unfortunately. The role of humor in a film like LOTR is definitely to allow a small relaxation before diving into darkness again. Just like there are different kinds of crying, there are different kinds of laughter. Where PJ went wrong was trying to inspire the kind of laughter that a comedy inspires: shallow, situational humor (which is good enough in its place), and not the sigh of momentary relief and quieter, almost nervous laughter that it should inspire. I actually found Gimli's "box" scene to be fairly close to what comic relief in that moment should be...at least in my opinion.