Hi Dark, Lol! Did I say the Twin Towers? My bad I know it is the Two Towers. I'm losing my mind.
As to your points about the title of the Two Towers and the American publics opinion of it that again is just another case in point of how uneducated the general public is. The fact someone asked, "who is this Tolkien guy anyway, ---- you'd think he wasn't even american," shows really how stupid or uneducated some people can be. First, he wasn't an American, and second, he wrote the book clear back in the 1940's. Sheesh, I sware some people have no brains any more. However, I hate to be canded, but some people are just down right illiterate. People now days are so use to watching television etc that very few people actually sit down and read books these days. As a result the general population is becoming less and less literate, and unaware of things they should know. I remember reading somewhere about the U.S. department of education did a survey on various things, math, reading, etc and most high school students actually failed the test on litature and didn't recognize famous authors like Edgar Allen Poe, Jack London, or Mark Twain let alone what they wrote. That's disgraceful in my opinion. Those are American classics and people don't know about them! I guess that has been my gripe with the Harry Potter books. Don't get me wrong I like them, they are good books, but every child knows who J. K. Rowling is, what she wrote, but high school students can't tell the Department of Education who Mark Twain was. That's nuts. Then again, that might be because Mark Twain's books aren't politically correct, and some parents have tried to get them band from school libraries because of certain racial slang there in. As for Tolkien writing his books as history rather than fantasy I definitely see that. His books are very good, precisely because they are written as a historical narative rather than in the present tense. In my opinion the Lord of the Rings is right up there in the ranks of the Iliad and Odyssey when it comes to laying down historical naratives set in a fantasy setting. That style of book or story has its own unique style that draws you into the storyline. When they convert them to movies they ruin the plot by dumbing it down for the masses. As you said its like taking a real historical event and adding a bunch of extra stuff to it to make it more interesting which ruins it for the historical purest. They have in fact done that a number of times. I'm not sure if you remember but about four or five years ago they came out with a new Pearl Harbor movie with a fictional plot. They didn't stick to history, and made up their own story very loosely based on the historical event. I didn't like the movie because if I go to see a movie about Pearl Harbor I expect it to be historically accurate not a fictional story. Yet, some yahoos in holliwood thought it would be a good idea to change events to suit the movie. Cheers! On 7/11/11, dark <[email protected]> wrote: > As an amusing point tom, you ctually justified my lotr statement by > referring to the 2nd film as "the twin towers" > > Because of shear bad luck the film came out only a couple of years after > september the eleventh, and a lot of americans were irritated at the title > "the two towers" even though it had nothing to do with the world trade > center (I remember reading one artical at the time where one extremely angry > American crytic asked "who is this tolkien guy anyway, ---- you'd think he > wasn't even american!" ;D). > > This is why, though the title of the film wasn't changed, in a lot of > promotional material, interviews etc they referd to it as "the twin towers" > which is not correct according to what tolkien wrote back in the 1940's at > all. > > As to It and harry potter I totally agree. > > The only potter film I thought came even close to the book is Prisoner of > Ascaban, and that was more because of it's dark, gothic atmosphere which > replaced Cris Columbus' shiny, happy directing that just didn't fit the > Potter world at all, ---- even aside from plot manglings. > > with lotr though for me the situation is worse. As The encyclopedia of Arda > said, Tolkien himself didn't think of what he did as writing fantasy, he > thought of it as writing history which just happened to be untrue. > > thus, Lotr is a historical novel set around the bakcground of a fully > documented and well accounted war. As such, monkeying with the events is not > just a case of hollywood dumming down things for the public and sticking in > lots of extra action scenes for no good reason, it's actually more like > having a novel about the second world war and suddenly deciding to stick in > lots of holywoodisms, extra battles, more heroic characters etc. > > Beware the Grue! > > Dark. --- Gamers mailing list __ [email protected] If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to [email protected]. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]. 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