Martin Freeman is Bilbo Baggins — Page 2

ChainsawAsh said:

Oh come on, not even a chuckle?

Tough room.

twister111 said:

 

ChainsawAsh said:

"But I've seen everything."

(Bonus points to anyone who gets the reference.)

The Kohler Commercial!!!!

 

Nope.

Fine, I'll tell you guys.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IURfntimnlA

I remember renting a fullscreen DVD in 2002 of FOTR, and I distinctly remember that the Nine Kings of Men in the prologue had more info on the top and bottom than the widescreen version.

Effects shots would probably have to be panned-and-scanned from scope, though, as you said.  And there are a lot of effects shots in LOTR.

What exactly is the point of Super 35?  It seems like all you're really doing is decreasing vertical resolution by shooting non-anamorphically, compared to something like Panavision.  Is it just because it's cheaper?

Having Martin Freeman as Bilbo is definitely good news--he both looks and sounds right for the part, and he's a good actor.  I liked him in the recent Sherlock series by Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss.

Still, I can't help but feel that I'll be obliged to dislike the Hobbit, if the LotR films are any indication of what their storytelling style and priorities are.  While they did get a lot of things right, there are an equal number that are completely and appallingly wrong, straying drastically from the sense of Middle Earth and its characters as Tolkien conceived them.

Everyone goes nuts over how great Gollum was, but I think it was a travesty.  That whole "good Smeagol, bad Gollum" split personality thing displays a fundamental misunderstanding of the character.  Gollum never had multiple personalities that threatened each other; nor was he schizophrenic and seeing a projection of himself that wasn't there.  He simply argued aloud with himself about how best to get back the Ring, and whether Frodo was worth his loyalty or not.  True, Sam does see him as having 'good' and 'bad' halves (Slinker and Stinker, as he calls them), but then again Sam never really understood Gollum's motivation, nor believed he had any good left in him.  This culminated in a haunting moment just before Shelob's lair where Sam shouts Gollum down when he was actually trying to be nice to Frodo, and this unthinking cruelty causes him to regress into his old wicked ways more deeply than ever.  It's a great scene, and one completely missing from the films, all because they had to be "dramatic" and have Frodo tell Sam to go away--something Tolkien's Frodo would have never, ever done.

Insofar as it exists, the split in Gollum's character is between himself and his perception of the Ring.  This, after all, is what he means by his use of "we" to refer to himself, and the reason he talks aloud to himself at all.  He is talking to the "Precious" Ring all the time, and to some extent in his mind he and the Ring have become one and the same.  The movie portrayal is a simplistic, psychologically-castrated rendition of one of the greatest villainous characters ever written; all of the subtlety has been bulldozed over and replaced straight from "Cheap Movie-Making Gags 101".  It is completely stupid and inane, and I can't abide watching those scenes.

And speaking of Frodo, the movie version has been robbed of nearly every single moment of greatness shown by his literary counterpart.  In the movies he is always screaming ineffectually and someone else has to save him, but Tolkien's Frodo has a quietly powerful presence that commands respect wherever he goes.  Gollum, even while liking him for his kindness, is also terrified of him.  Three times in the books Frodo commands him to obey, in what is shown as a lordly and terrifying manner (part of it may be because he possesses the Ring, but certainly much of it is his own strength of character), and three times Gollum is cowed and fearful.  Frodo also stands up to the Nazgul at the ford, defying them even with his seemingly last breath, before the flood consumes them.  Contrast the film where he passes out and someone else does it for him.  And the whole reason the Nazgul stabbed him in the shoulder at Weathertop, instead of through the heart, was because he fought back and the strike missed!  What the hell, movies?!  Complete character castration, again.  It's disgusting, it really is.

So it is perhaps understandable that I'm not exactly bursting with anticipation of seeing another film made by the same people responsible for such a misguided mess.

DON'T JUMP!!!

;-)

hairy_hen said:

What exactly is the point of Super 35?  It seems like all you're really doing is decreasing vertical resolution by shooting non-anamorphically, compared to something like Panavision.  Is it just because it's cheaper?

Yeah, it's basically because it's cheaper.  That and spherical lenses are much easier to shoot with than anamorphic lenses - they're nowhere near as long or as heavy, and they don't require as much light.  A lot of cinematographers dislike anamorphic lenses, but like the 2.39:1 frame, so for them Super 35 is the way to go.

It shoots a larger image than shooting 1.33:1 35mm, as it uses the full aperture, but it's still much less effective resolution than anamorphic.

That and the better compromise you can get when making the 1.33:1 version for TV/home video make it quite popular.

An easy way to tell while watching a 2.39:1 film is by looking at the circles of confusion in low-depth-of-field shots (that is, when the background is blurry, points of light show up as big circles).  Here's how they look when shot with an anamorphic lens (look out the window to the right at the lights in the background):

Note they're oblong, taller than a circle.

This is what they look like when shot with a spherical lens:

Circular.

Lens flares are another good giveaway, except in this case, for a spherical lens they're circular as above, but for an anamorphic lens, instead of being taller than they are wide, they're wider than they are tall.

I remember this bugged me about WALL-E, because they got the tall circles of confusion right for an anamorphic lens, but all the lens flares are circular.

It's the same thing as the whole "circles of confusion" business - the out-of-focus stuff gets stretched vertically as it goes out of focus.

I don't know the technical term for it, though.

Oh, and Se7en was, in fact, Super 35.