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Originally Posted by Sauron the White
Bethberry ... if you reread my post you will see that I did not connect a dislike of the Jackson films with a denial of the historical record. That indeed would be an error of logic as you state. What I said was this
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You can hate Peter Jackson and his work all you want. But to ignore the success of the films is simply denying the historical record.
My statement was directed at those who want to imply that the LOTR films were some type of failure simply because they did not approve of them or of parts of them. I provided three industry standards to measure a films success. All three were achieved by the LOTR films ... and then some.
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Oh dear. Do forgive me for reading your "But" as an intensifier, since it began the sentence, rather than as a conjunction implying contrast.
This is really a matter of tomayto or tomahto. There are several measures of success viewers can point to and several definitions of success. Popularity and critical acclaim are some, and I applaud your endeavours to search out all these websites. (For the record, they do not record some of the negative reviews by critics in my town, but then I don't live in the centre of the cinematic universe--probably the suburbs.
) Yet these polls and statistics do not deprive viewers of the right of individual definitions of failure. If a person was not pleased with the movies, then the movies failed for them.
For me, I applaud the moving of Boromir's death to the end of the first movie, as it gave that movie a very dramatic climax and implied greater peril to come. It shook us (me?) out of the happy sweet depiction of the Shire and prepared for the darkness to come and gave a satisfying conclusion to the character we saw arguing at Elrond's Council. Well and good. I can't say, however, that Denethor's Plunge did anything but to turn the event into cinematic histrionics. It sacrificed a study of the terrible effect on Denethor of looking into the palantir for special effect. As well, Denethor's death paled substantively beside that of his son Boromir; had these two deaths been more closely related with similar emotional effect, I would have cared more about the fate of the White City. As it was, I kept thinking of the Emperor's fall in SW3 and that, for me, was a mistake. I laughed, instead of cried, I suppose I could say. I'm sure there are many who are quite happy with laughing.
Anyhow, that's all I have to say on the matter. I wouldn't for the world deny you your tętę ŕ tętę with others who may be more extreme than I in their condemnation of the movies, so do carry on without me.