One thing LotR does very well: lets men show emotions that aren't anger. Frodo smiles, shouts Gandalf's name excitedly, cracks a joke with him, and gives him a hug. That's how you know they're old friends.
I can only tell if men are friends if they share a bicep-flexed hand clasp.
They need to shoulder bump too, otherwise they could just be former colleagues or perhaps two men who met for the first time yesterday.
Maybe an ass-tap just to be certain. A chest smooch couldn't hurt either.
Yeah, if made in last 10 years, they might have turned Aragorn into some kind of Conan the Barbarian ripoff. Not necessarily, for example, RDJ’s Iron Man has a lot of complex emotions and nice arc. But, they could. I mean, look at Galadriel in Rings of Power.
One thing I've noticed with newer movies is they do a lot more "tell, don't show" than old movies.
For example, compare the live action Disney Cinderella to the original animated version. The live action version is mostly a voiceover telling the story of Cinderella. They literally say "Her stepsisters weren't very good at art or music" and then have a scene showing them being bad at art and music. The animated version spent the first 20 minutes or so like a Tom & Jerry cartoon.
And this is across movies. I watched Predator recently and there wasn't a lot of exposition about how they're there to fight communists or whatever. You pick that up in snippets of dialog in between the action.
It really does feel like movies are dumbing down.
One thing I've noticed with newer movies is they do a lot more "tell, don't show" than old movies.
Main character seeing old friend: Well if it isn't my old friend Daniel, we used to roam these streets as kids, I used to have dinner at your house every day, you were like my brother, I would have done anything for you, I haven't seen you since our other old friend Jake died mysteriously, remember when we used to play videogames all night and made that life long pact that if "HE" returns we will do what it takes to send him back to the world where he emerged from when we were kids and lived right next door to each other, our mothers were best friends until the incident but they never stopped us from being life long best friends forever, we used to play in the streets all night, me you Daniel and Chris, the rat Pac they called us, best friends for life.
Man there's so many loose ends.
What was the incident?
What did the rat pac play in the street? Music? Baseball?
What video games were you guys playing? Nintendo, Sega, Atari, Sony, SNK, NEC, 3DO?? Whose house?
Were there any leads in Jakes death?
How long has it been since you last saw Daniel?
What was the incident?
The incident is what shaped them into the adults they are now, it's why they ended up in their chosen professions and is what brings them together at the 20 year high school reunion coming up, but they must never speak of it.
What did the rat pac play in the street? Music? Baseball?
They hustled marbles for cash in the street to anyone willing to lose to them, they ran that rural suburban street untill the incident changed everything.
What video games were you guys playing? Nintendo, Sega, Atari, Sony, SNK, NEC, 3DO?? Whose house?
NBA Jam on the Sega Mega drive, because they were the cool kids and that's how you showed it in the early 90s
Were there any leads in Jakes death?
The policed ruled it 'natural causes' but the rat Pac know it was Him that killed Jake after they unintentionally released Him.
Were there any leads in Jakes death?
About 3 hours before that line of text.
I feel like Dune was a good outlier to this. It's the only movie I've seen in theater in the last few years and I really enjoyed not having everything explained to me
That's such a good point. I really appreciated how it wasn't scared to let viewers figure things out.
In comparison, the old Dune film used a lot of voice over
they do a lot more “tell, don’t show” than old movies
Geez the Netflix Avatar adaptation (a show, not movie, but still) was so bad for this. Despite actually having more runtime and fewer distinct plot points (due to the removal of and consolidation of different side-plots) than the cartoon it was based on, it spent less time showing us why characters think and feel how they do, and straight-up told us every single thing.
I love listening to the original intro 3 times in the first episode.
I would have never known that the 4 nations lived in harmony until the fire nation attacked, or that the Avatar, master of all 4 elements was the only one who could stop them.
I also love learning that Aang wants to eat banana cakes and goof off with his friends instead of being the Avatar by him outright saying it instead of us meeting ANY of these friends in the first place.
I feel like they make movies to appease the hot take internet culture. If a few people don't understand how a guy with magic powers in a room full of cloning tanks could be brought back from the dead, you end up with endless "Somehow Palpatine returned" memes and it becomes a whole thing. So they've compensated (maybe over-compensated) and make sure every detail is explained fully to avoid that kind of reaction. They also have to make sure they make jokes about something being corny before people on the internet make the lame jokes.
Rise of Skywalker was probably the last popcorn movie where there was a lot of "show don't tell" going on and pretty much all of the commentary about it on the internet indicates people think it's wrong to do that. To be sure there were other problems with that movie, but people got very fixated on criticizing the decision made to not over-explain.
Somehow... movies have to explain every little detail now.
Howard Shore is the answer
This is an answer I'm not seeing here enough. The score for LotR just FORCES you to feel the feelings. Don't wanna be happy? Too bad, we're in the Shire bitch.
Don't want to experience evil metalworking industry? Welcome to Orthanc, maggot, we makin' swords today.
I think the biggest reason is that the actors were allowed to act together. Modern movies use so many digital effects that actors aren't even on set together sometimes. It's hard to have the same emotions looking at a green screen and a guy in a morph suit.
Just for the first one, right? I remember Ian Mckellen had a breakdown on set because he was sitting in front of the table at Bag End with nothing around him but green screen and was struggling without any other actors.
IIRC that was on the set of one of the Hobbit movies.
The Lord of the Rings was shot mostly using practical effects.
It's worth noting that the Lord of the Rings in book form is very long because it goes into so much depth about each character's history. One of the things that the author intentionally did was world building. If you wanted to get the whole plot line in, you could do so in a third the length.
So then when it was adapted to movie format, you had three things going for it. First, a lot of people read the books and loved them, second, the cast and crew had a lot to work with, and third, there was ample budget.
Idk about "ample budget". I was watching the director's commentary on the Two Towers and he mentions one week where the studio was trying to decide whether to green light money for the film and Peter Jackson knew that he had nothing to say that would convince them, in fact he thought it would dissuade them because they wouldn't see the benefit on the way he was spending the money. So he went out to a remote location to do the filming for several days intentionally to avoid their phone calls lol. I think that was when they were filming the battle for Helm's Deep. Apparently it worked because after he had the footage from that week to show them, they decided it was good enough to justify the price.
But Lord of the rings is a modern movie?
Is a movie that came out 23 years ago still modern?
Hey, fuck you
The perfect comment doesn't exi....
…t a room without shouting "I‘ll remember y‘all in therapy!“
Yes, the word we are searching for is contemporary. Technically all films are modern, but not contemporary. Though modern has expanded definition to include it generally as well but I like to explore language :)
I mean it was filmed 25 years ago, I guess it depends on your definition of 'modern'
Can confirm. I was an extra in these movies and now I'm on first name terms with all the local osteopaths.
Made in the current millennium.
Oh fuck.
good writing. :|
And good acting.
And good direction.
and good screenplay.
You know what pals, I think it might just have been a good movie
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