LOTR

[cellio]

We've been invited to dinner tomorrow by friends, so we went to see LOTR tonight. Well, first we went out for Chinese food (it's traditional), and the service was kind of slow, but we still made it to the theatre in time.

Side note: the theatre recording said the running time was 3:13, and I was curious about whether that included trailers. Commercials started at 7:29, trailers at 7:31, the movie at 7:41, and final credits started to roll at 10:30 sharp. We didn't stay through the credits, but unless they ran for more than 10 minutes their calibration was off.

But enough of that. The movie was visually stunning. The music worked really well -- which is to say, most of the time I didn't actively notice it but sometimes I did and it was setting the right moods. I still don't know how they shot some of the scenes with the hobbits and height differentials. (It apparently worked for the unaware: Dani asked me afterwards if the lead hobbits were played by mdgets.)

I hated the photography in most of the fight scenes, though I generally liked it otherwise. Yes, fights are fast and chaotic and you want to convey "action", but when things are actively jerky it just doesn't work for me. A secondary complaint about the fight scenes is the lack of tactics the combattants tended to show; I don't expect grand strategy, but you don't entirely stop a fight to watch someone die, nor do you run past an enemy and ignore a clear shot. Ah well, the price of high drama. :-)

But don't get me wrong -- I did enjoy the movie!

Comments

Hobbits

[rhysab.livejournal.com]

No midgets were used in the filming of this movie. All of the actors were 'treated' with CGI after the fact to shrink/enlarge them as necesarry to make the film. It's one of my personal pet peeves with the flick since I heard the first castings for it. When there are soooooo many actors of the 'sizes' needed for the cast, Why not cast them?

Re: Hobbits

[cellio]

When I heard some of the casting for the movie I wondered how the heck they were going to do it. (Dani hadn't been paying attention to that. So I guess the CGI was good enough to fool people who didn't know better -- it fooled him, anyway.) What did they do with the scenes with Gandalf in the middle of a group of hobbits -- digitally insert him? I noticed that they were being careful with scenes with close interaction (e.g. when Frodo hugs Gandalf -- that would be hard to film separately), and that there were a number of scenes where digital manipulation would be easy (e.g. Frodo and Gandalf standing side by side but not touching).

I agree with you on the casting choice -- it's got to be pretty hard for actors who fall outside the usual size parameters to get roles at all, so if they're good actors, why not cast them when these opportunities come up? I suspect the answer is marketing -- you want big-name actors in your promos, so the unknowns remain unknown if it's a "big" movie.