[William Cloud Hicklin]

[QUOTE=Sauron the White;530679]

Awards such as the BAFTA's and the Academy Awards are a public expression as to how the people who make up the motion picture industry feel about quality films. You are being flippant when you claim it is hardly better than the measurement of box office. To the people who make films, they are of a very high importance. They are also an expression of a degree of quality.

Do you have any idea what really goes into Academy voting? A mixture of well-financed PR campaigns, politics, logrolling, backscratching, outright bribery...and that's just when the AMPAS members (who may or may not have actually seen the films nominated) don't delegate someone in their entourage to fill out the ballot

The idea that some in the Tolkien community have adopted - (and I stress the use of the word some because it has never been demonstrated that this is the dominant opinion) - that the films are failures because they are not faithful enough to the books IS A STANDARD THAT CAN NEVER BE SUCCESSFULLY MET BY ANY FILM MAKER ADAPTING A BOOK. A book and a film are two different things. Period. They are like comparing apples to cinderblocks....The idea of a book being "faithfully" adapted is immaterial and irrelevant to the success of a film as a film.

I take no issue with this- but it's the wrong argument. human intellect is of one nature whether a book or a film is being observed, and certainly can distinguish the degree to which it is being challenged, fulfilled, or fed junk food.

As to 'some'- I suggest you cross-reference those authors who have published scholarly books on Tolkien, or articles in Tolkien Studies or Mythprint, with their opinions on the MythSoc site or elsewhere on the Net. Aside from Shippey's (qualified) approval, and Salo who's hardly disinterested, you'll find that Hammond, Scull, Hostetter, Drout, Garth, Flieger, Croft, Rateliff etc etc etc are all *strongly* condemnatory.

Ah. So this is some type of payback then is it? The Literari dismissed something you liked - LOTR in book form - so now its your turn for payback since the film experts embraced and rewarded LOTR in film format. Not the strongest or most noble of motivations.

No, not at all. You misunderstand me. The problem is that Jackson has succeeded (on a massive scale) in reinforcing the critics' false impression of LR as 'simplistic'. Anyone who saw PJ's movies without having read the book would be entirely justified in believing Wilson and Toynbee and Greer et al were right all along- because, ultimately, PJ found no more in the book than they did.

Perhaps you watched it expecting that anything less than a slavish page by page translation to the screen would be less than acceptable?

An old strawman, and you know it. Adaptation is of course the operative and entirely necessary word here: but adaptation, one would have hoped, by a writer and director who actually understood what Tolkien was on about in the first place.