The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug

norrie rugger

Fair enough indeed. I get ya now.

Falthyron

Looks like Part 3 has been renamed to 'The Battle of the Five Armies'. Jackson's explanation is here.

Better than 'Into the Fire', which was rumoured to be the title change!

Antar Bolaeisk

It's a bit cumbersome but better than "There and Back Again" which is really the whole story since they'll already be there at the start of the film.

More shocking news is that they've managed to extend this by another 25 minutes! :eek:

SarahBM

I went to see a concert of Howard Shore's music in the NCH last Saturday. It was absolutely amazing (and I got his autograph he he)
The second half of the show they played The Prophecy and Concerning Hobbits from the Fellowship and a number of pieces from the Return of the King. I got goosebumps when I heard those pieces. They are an incredible work of music.
And in a conversation with another massive LOTR fan who had been there, we both agreed that the soundtrack for AUJ was good, but DOS was no where near the standard we have come to expect from Maestro Shore.
I have listened to the LOTR soundtracks so many times I can picture what scenes go with what songs. I can do it to some extent with AUJ even though I have only seen it twice, but for DOS - nothing. The more I think about it the less of an impression the music made on me in that film. I really hope the third film makes up for it.

I am also debating whether or not to buy the DVDs.

Zubeneschamali

SarahBM wrote: »

I went to see a concert of Howard Shore's music in the NCH last Saturday. It was absolutely amazing

Me too! Great fun: absolutely huge orchestra, I counted six double basses!

OwaynOTT

ah balls, that was on Saturday night. Balls and balls!

SarahBM

OwaynOTT wrote: »

ah balls, that was on Saturday night. Balls and balls!

I take it you are annoyed you missed it then. :rolleyes:

OwaynOTT

SarahBM wrote: »

I take it you are annoyed you missed it then. :rolleyes:

Yes.

SarahBM

well Im living in hope that the Light House put on another LOTR marathon this year.

Sad Professor

Mortensen reflects on his LOTR experience and Jackson's growing obsession with visual effects.

“Anybody who says they knew it was going to be the success it was, I don’t think it’s really true,” he says. “They didn’t have an inkling until they showed 20 minutes in Cannes, in May of 2001. They were in a lot of trouble, and Peter had spent a lot. Officially, he could say that he was finished in December 2000 – he’d shot all three films in the trilogy – but really the second and third ones were a mess. It was very sloppy – it just wasn’t done at all. It needed massive reshoots, which we did, year after year. But he would have never been given the extra money to do those if the first one hadn’t been a huge success. The second and third ones would have been straight to video.”

Mortensen thinks – rightly – that The Fellowship of the Ring turned out the best of the three, perhaps largely because it was shot in one go. “It was very confusing, we were going at such a pace, and they had so many units shooting, it was really insane. But it’s true that the first script was better organised,” he says. “Also, Peter was always a geek in terms of technology but, once he had the means to do it, and the evolution of the technology really took off, he never looked back. In the first movie, yes, there’s Rivendell, and Mordor, but there’s sort of an organic quality to it, actors acting with each other, and real landscapes; it’s grittier. The second movie already started ballooning, for my taste, and then by the third one, there were a lot of special effects. It was grandiose, and all that, but whatever was subtle, in the first movie, gradually got lost in the second and third. Now with The Hobbit, one and two, it’s like that to the power of 10.

“I guess Peter became like Ridley Scott – this one-man industry now, with all these people depending on him,” Mortensen adds. “But you can make a choice, I think. I asked Ridley when I worked with him (on 1997’s GI Jane), 'Why don’t you do another film like The Duellists [Scott’s 1977 debut, from a Joseph Conrad short story]?’ And Peter, I was sure he would do another intimately scaled film like Heavenly Creatures, maybe with this project about New Zealanders in the First World War he wanted to make. But then he did King Kong. And then he did The Lovely Bones – and I thought that would be his smaller movie. But the problem is, he did it on a $90 million budget. That should have been a $15 million movie. The special effects thing, the genie, was out of the bottle, and it has him. And he’s happy, I think…”

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/10826867/Viggo-Mortensen-interview-Peter-Jackson-sacrificed-subtlety-for-CGI.html

Hard to disagree with this, really.

david75

So the digital release of the extended edition of DOS was yesterday and includes 25 more minutes and a lot of people are saying it's a much more complete film and makes it a lot more faithful to the book as well as making the film seem a lot more whole and complete in and of itself.

It's out there. Gonna have a look at it.

humanji

I'm sorry if this has been mentioned before (it's a long thread), but is the 3D any good? I found the first film to be fine in 3D (watched on a TV, not in the cinema). Not amazing, but it didn't look like a load of 3d bits thrown in just to raise the price of a ticket like so many other films.

david75

Find the 3D distracting myself, but i guess it's all down to personal taste.

SarahBM

Watched both hobbit films last wknd on Netflix. Prefer the 2d. I found the 3d made me a bit motion sick in the cinema.