[Vwing]

First of all, we all know how ROTK won all its 11 nominations. I have a question though. How was it not nominated for cinematography and sound editing? How did it win for editing, when the editing of the movie was horrible (or if you say that an editor doesn't cut a movie just edits different scenes into others, than I'll say the same thing for how it won for director)? I don't care what you think about the movie, but how was Matrix Revolutions not even nominated for special effects, while a boat was? Actually, even more than that, it wasn't nominated for a nomination. I think 8 movies were up for nomination in that category, and Revolutions was not one of the 8. Why wasn't Revolutions nominated for best score when it really does have a great score? Why was Sean Astin not nominated for Best Supporting Actor, when in my opinion he made the movie? Just a bunch of questions you guys can discuss.

[civilian_number_two]

REVOLUTIONS was confusing and not very likeable. So it was bound to be snubbed, in the same way that the new STAR WARS movies have been.

The Special effects in MASTER AND COMMANDER are less impressive if you don't think about how much they filmed in studio and how much it looked like they were on the open sea. Effects-laden movies that look like effects-laden movies are less impressive.

I think politics kept ROTK out of the Cinematography category, because I think everyone wanted to see the very very beautiful SEABISCUIT win. That M&C took the award, I think, will have upset some people.

Sean Astin certainly made the movie ROTK, but there were some great performances nominated. Too bad for him, but I think his other recognitions will have to do.

All in all, it was a pretty boring, predictable ceremony. I haven't seen HOUSE OF SAND AND FOG or COLD MOUNTAIN, but from the clips they showed, Renee Zelwegger stole that award. What a joke. Stupidest Best Actress win since Marisa Tomei.

[Laura]

damnit... I thought this thread was going to be about Stephen Frye's brilliant performance in Wilde. Or perhaps the scary latest Importance of Being Earnest, which did for the original what the animated version did for The King and I (i. e. unnecessarily added hot-air balloons).

[Laura]

But while I'm on the subject...

Revolutions and Star Wars are not only crappy blockbusters, but they are sci-fi movies. It doesn't matter how big-budget a movie is or how much of a fan following it has, it will not get an award (except possibly for special effects) if it is a sci-fi (or, until now, fantasy) movie. Generally, if you make a sci-fi movie, you're giving up any notion you had at being an Oscar winner for this particular film. Generally, this is also because people make stupid-ass sci-fi movies. (After all, the original Star Wars was good, and it got nominated... but it didn't win. (But, you know, Annie Hall was good too, so we can let that one slide.))

The big wins of Lord of the Rings constitute an unprecedented exception, but that doesn't mean the geeks have won... It's also dramatic, cinematographic, and culturally pervasive in a way that few movies have ever been before, and it's based on a generally respected book*.

* yes yes I know it's three books. I'm counting the trilogy, both the movies and the books, as one unit, as the Academy has done. Which is fine--it would make for three really boring ceremonies if each movie won all those awards.**

** Not that the ceremonies aren't always boring. Yawn!

[Chefelf]

(After all, the original Star Wars was good, and it got nominated... but it didn't win. (But, you know, Annie Hall was good too, so we can let that one slide.))

I am a very big "Annie Hall" and Woody Allen fan in general. I can't fault "the academy" there.

Generally I think any awards presentation (i.e. Oscars, Grammies, etc.) are total bunk. But one thing to remember is that even though the original Star Wars movie was a smash success at the box office is that it was pretty much universally panned by critics. Critics didn't like the OT (ESB is the possible exception) the same way they don't like the new trilogy. I think the reviews were pretty much the same for both, sadly.

[Vwing]

Chef you're wrong there. I highly doubt the original Star Wars would have been nominated for Best Picture, Lucas would not have won for original screenplay as I believe he did (heh isn't that ironic) or have been nominated for best director (heh) if critics panned it. Again, I can't know because I wasn't around for reviews back then but it seems like it was liked by most critics. I know Ebert gave it 4 stars though.

And about Revolutions, I'm just talking about special effects, since Sci-Fi movies do get nominated for that. How could it not be nominated for special effects?Though I loved it, again, I don't care if you liked it or hated it, it has to be nominated. Those are the best effects I've ever seen in a movie. Period. And it wasn't even considered for a nomination. I don't get that. I also can't imagine how someone would not be, at the very least, entertained by Revolutions, but that's just me.

This post has been edited by Vwing: 09 April 2004 - 02:41 PM

[civilian_number_two]

Yes, Chef is definitely wrong there. I remember after the critics lampooned TPM Lucas said "the critics have never liked my movies." I was curious about that, and like all good kids I searche dthe Internet por published reviews. I found a few dozen reviews by big and famous critics working fro the big papers and magazines. I found exacly one negative revew; the others were glowing. It was just another case of Lucas rewriting history to get himself ou of the interview. "

"Yeah, I have nine stories planned."

[Jordan]

His back is up against the wall, George is only human, he will fight and make every excuse possilbe before admitting that he murdered the Saga.

George is now playing the martyr, the "everyone hates me and always has" routine is the last of what he can truely work with.

I'm going to see the 3rd installment, I will enjoy disliking it.

[Just your average movie goer]

George is now playing the martyr, the "everyone hates me and always has" routine is the last of what he can truely work with.

Very true....

And now everyone hates him and they always will!

[Just your average movie goer]

But to get back onto Vwing's original topic... Return of the King should not have won all those awards. They were the awards that the Fellowship of the Ring was supposed to have won.

And did Return of the King really get an award for editing? I can't believe that. It had the most amateur, awful editing I've seen for a long time - it was a very bad cut-and-paste montage of little snippets of film.

And Sean Astin should have been nominated for a best supporting actor award and won it - I completely agree with you.

When I was watching it, Sean Astin was the saving grace of the film. At the climax of the movie when everyone was in and around Mordor, the film was getting hard to bear....

The channel flicking effect was at its worst and the whole film felt like it was in super fast forward. The dialogue was getting weaker and the actors who'd been so good before didn't seem to care any more.

All realism had disappeared - and the authentic looking Mordor of the first film was now very cartoonish and the tower of Baradhur had become a freakin' angry lighthouse.

And let's not forget the biggest continuity error - as the free peoples of Middle Earth ride to the Black Gate on HORSES and prepare for battle on HORSES and get ready to attack the orcs and suddenly.... whoosh! Where did a thousand horses just go?

I would like to say that the reason I kept watching was because I really wanted to see the end - see Frodo finally complete his quest and destroy the ring. But to be honest, the film had become so terrible since the attack of the green CGI ghost army (that wiped out all the orcs at Minas Tirith in a wave of green washing detergent)... that I just didn't care anymore. I was disinterested, bored and really ready to stop watching. But I didn't stop watching.

And the reason I didn't stop watching was because Sean Astin didn't stop being Sam. When everything else had fallen apart - the directing, the editing, the pacing, the effects, the realism - Sean Astin kept going and he had me with every one of his moments onscreen. He kept me emotionally attached to the movie through all of the above. And that should have earned him an award.

I'd also like to say that Billy Boyd was fantastic too and I loved most of the Pippin scenes as well.

There was some really powerful stuff in the movie - like Faramir riding to almost certain death, while his father feasted. And I really thought the first charge of the Rohirrim was wonderful. However, once the oliphants attacked, I felt like I was watching Episode II and of course the arrival of the CGI dead army was stupid - it completely undermined the heroism of the Rohirrim. And Legolas' stunt with the Oliphant was plain silly.

As we all know, a lot of stuff was cut out of this film which shouldn't have been. But the huge problem with this is that when I watched the movie, I could FEEL that lots of things had been cut out. And a good editor wouldn't let that happen. The whole time I was watching, I couldn't help thinking "They axed something there, and there and there..."

And everybody knows that they cut the seven minute scene featuring Saruman. Big mistake. He should have been there - they should have found those seven minutes.

On my first viewing, I found plenty of minutes that could go. Let's look at this. The first thing that would go would be the slow extreme close-up of Gollum eating a catfish... because that was really gross. And then I'd cut everything with the stupid pasty faced leader of the orcs. He was very cartoonish, even though he was a guy in a costume and every line of his dialogue was weak Hollywood rubbish - the worst of these being "The age of man is over. The time of the orc has begun." What makes this line even more stupid is that in the credits, we learn this orc is called Gothmog - and in the book, Gothmog was a man.

And the Witch King, stupid leader of the hyped up Nazgul... I didn't care too much for the Nazgul in the books and I didn't care too much about them in the movies either. They were great in the Fellowship of the Ring but I think after that, they had worn their welcome. They had tried to get the ring and they had failed. Their sad, short careers were over. It was a mistake of Tolkien's to bring them back and it was a mistake in the movie. The Nazgul had no more use. However, the scene of Eowyn killing the Witch King is a wonderful scene and so I'm happy to have the Nazgul stay so we could have it.

However, I was not happy with Gandalf confessing to Pippin that he was scared of this guy, while the camera cuts to Minas Morgul, showing the Witch King getting ready for battle in a very Batman fashion ("Gandalf's out there right now. And I've gotta go to work."). I don't know how many people are like me but when I watched this scene, somehow I could still remember that along with four of his buddies, the Witch King got his ass kicked by Aragorn (a MAN)... and that Gandalf (a WIZARD) killed a BALROG. If I were to place bets on who would win in a fight between Gandalf and the Witch King, I know where I'd be putting my money.

So that scene should have gone.

And the last thing that should have gone was the STUPID sub-plot of Gollum turning Frodo against Sam so he would send him home. I hate this for many reasons. The first is that if Gollum is going to lead Frodo to Shelob, what's the point of sending Sam away? He hates Sam - I would have thought he'd be quite happy for Sam to get gobbled up as well. So it's a pointless plan. The other problem is that it's a HUGE time waster. If they hadn't invented this stupid sub plot, they would have easily found the time for Saruman. And the last problem is that after working so hard to make us pity Gollum in the Two Towers, this undermines all of that and throws it out the window. And after losing our pity for Gollum, he becomes a completely uninteresting character and I didn't feel any emotion when he died. Had I felt something for him, the film's climax would have been so much more moving.

Anyway, all in all, Return of the King was a disappointment and the action sequences were all too long and complicated and self-indulgent... and they ended up just making me tired and uninterested.

I think the academy felt guilty about not giving the Fellowship of the Ring the credit and praise it deserved. So Vwing, you're right in that they were probably awarding the trilogy.

If anyone's interested, here is a great website that discusses the failings of the last Lord of the Rings movie. Some of the points the author raises are ones I mentioned here but there's a lot more stuff in there so have a look if you're interested:

http://westbynorthwe...inter_676.shtml


Lastly, I'd just like to voice my agreement with Civilian about visual effects. The idea of visual effects is not to go "Look at me! I'm a visual effect.". If you don't notice them, THEN they've done their job.

I think George Lucas does not understand this.

[Just your average movie goer]

I just re-read this post and realised that had I thought of "Grill a Movie" earlier, I could have done a Grill a Movie on Return of the King...

not because it is a bad movie per se... but because it was a major let down.

And in their own ways, sequels that let the audience down are probably worse than stand-alone bad movies.

Stand-alone bad movies, while they can horrendously awful, are probably not as bad as a lame sequel (or PREQUEL) in a good movie series.

But bad sequels and prequels (or in this case, a pretty big let down) hurt good movie series ([SIZE=1]now, what the hell is the plural of "series"? I don't think there is a different word but that last sentence didn't feel right to me[SIZE=1]).

And this is a serious offence. They can destroy our ability to enjoy a series from start to finish. Or if the series is just a lot of stand-alone stories, they can still irritate us by tarnishing the good name of the other movies in the series.

Return of the King damages The Lord of the Rings in a very large way by giving us a very average, unrewarding finale to what should have been the greatest movie trilogy ever filmed.

It always bothered me that the original Star Wars trilogy had a less than satisfactory, rather underwhelming conclusion. The trilogy that was my favourite movie series prior to the Lord of the Rings movies ended with a whimper, rather than going out with the spectacular, rousing finale it deserved.

With The Lord of the Rings, I had such high hopes that this wouldn't be the case. The second film faltered a little, being of a considerably lower standard than the first, but I believed the strength of the first film made it seem that Peter Jackson and his team could pull of a magnificent closing act. I was sure of it.

While Return of the King was not as big a disappointment as Return of the Jedi, it is not that much better either. Peter Jackson didn't put Ewoks in the movie but he gave us a flourescent green army of dead warriors that cleaned up the Pellenor Fields like washing detergent, a superhero charge by Ranger Man (aka Aragorn), Elf Boy (aka Legolas) and Dwarf Guy (aka Gimli) and the premature death of a good character in Gollum. That's right - Gollum died ages before he fell into the fires of Mt Doom. Gollum died about two scenes into the movie when he decided he'd screw being a tragic figure of pity and become just all out malicious and unsympathetically evil. A wonderful, very real three dimensional character became a boring 2-D villian stereotype. And let's not forget the Episode II style attack of the Mumakahl (the giant elephants).

Peter Jackson, I hold you in high-esteem and I respect you and your colleagues for the incredible contributions that you have made to the world of cinema.

However, you let me down with Return of the King. Moreover, you let down many of your fans around the world but the worst part is that you let your self down. You are on the most talented people in the film industry alive today and we know that you could have done a lot better.

[Just your average movie goer]

My apologies for all the stupid spelling, grammatical and format errors in that last post.