Why Can't Movies Be Like Books?

[William Cloud Hicklin]

And there's the rub. One of the main reasons why films and books cannot be the same. Now putting aside my view of what you say here (I'm not sure I agree with it 100%) - how CAN a director show that the Bilbo's look is something that only Frodo 'sees' and not what actually 'happened'. without a narrator to tell us this detail it can;t work.

Sure it can. One only has to create an 'unreality' vibe over the whole (Frodo-POV) frame- which is what PJ himself *did* with Arwen's entrance, and (excessively) every time Frodo put the Ring on. Depicting the protagonist's experience of being drunk/drugged/ill/whatever is one of the oldest tools in the director's box.



At any rate, that scene (though overdone and devoid of subtlety) doesn't bother me in itself- but it's an indication of PJ's misunderstanding of the Ring which led to his perversion of Faramir later.

And the Osgiliation not only inverted Faramir's resistance to temptation (I never said he wasn't, just that he didn't act on it), but also led to the utterly preposterous scene of Frodo offering the Ring to the Nazgul, a scene which makes absolutely no sense even in terms of PJ's movies, much less the books. Supposedly the same audience which couldn't accept Faramir resisting the lure of the Ring is expected to swallow whole the idea that, having seen that Frodo is non compos mentis and liable to hand over the ultimate weapon to the first Evil Minion he runs across, on that basis changes his mind and sets him loose. Bah!

Again, much better PJ had developed Faramir's character- which he doesn't do at all. All PJ shows us of Faramir is that Daddy hates him, and he's something of a bully.