It is raining endlessly and the films one could see include this and some others. This seems almost required — have you seen it and if so, do you recommend it?
Axé.
-
Follow
Following
Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
You’d like it if you saw the other LOTR movies. Same kind of treatment here. I like the score and had a good time watching it with 17-year old daughter.
How come all the men and only one woman, who appears to be the romantic interest of the old guy with the beard?
How true. It is really a male-dominated world.
That was what struck me about the trailer. This was the second paragraph of the post, originally, that I took out because it seemed to make the post too long and to guide the reader too much:
“It seems to correspond to an incredibly masculinist world and the treatment of the characters reminds me of Goth rockers or metal types. Having just looked up some material on the sagas I had to wade through quite a bit of this already — although actually, having looked up the saga material so recently is an argument for seeing The Hobbit.”
Tolkien’s Middle-Earth is seriously lacking in female characters, and even more lacking in convincing female characters. The LOTR movies altered the original by increasing Arwen’s role significantly. I first read all those books when I was too young to be bothered by things like that, and I’m glad I did, because I did enjoy them immensely—and to a large extent still do—but now I am bothered by the lack of women in a way that would really hamper my enjoyment if I came to Middle-Earth fresh, as a grown feminist woman, rather than with my huge dose of nostalgia for my first contact with the books.
The homosocial male bonding is also quite intense at the end of the 3rd LOTR movie.
I read and re-read the novels between the ages of 12 and 15 or so, then let them be until I re-read them again after the first movie came out. I found them too Victorian / Tennysonian as an adult reader, and I was less satisfied by the depiction of evil. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could destroy evil by burning up one particular evil object? A ring, say? I also wasn’t crazy about the assumption that darker-skinned peoples from the South would automatically be on the side of the Dark Lord Sauron. I missed that as a child-reader.
On that score, I think I missed that particular element as a child, and yet, in the Narnia books (which I found much less appealing), I was completely fascinated by the Calormenes (supposed-to-be-evil dark-skinned southern/eastern types) and preferred them to the Narnians (the good northerners).
As a child I missed the racial element in both LOTR and the Narnia books, and did not realize the Narnia books were Christian, but decided they had a phallic obsession. There is all this discussion of sword size and shape and these are connected to degrees of virtue!
I think I only saw the second LOTR movie. When I read the books so many of the men seemed so feminized that seeing the stories on screen, with so few women, surprises me — I thought there were more somehow, but I guess I must have reinterpreted people like Gandalf and Elrond as women.
But I probably have to see it because of the saga material. I will try.
I do actually like the idea of burning up evil with a ring. Handcuffs and collars are rings and those are what the prisoners wear, so it’s a great symbol.