2005 Weblog Awards Spotlight: Best Australia or New Zealand Blog
NOTE: I’m keeping this or some other Weblog Awards-related post up top through December 15th, because I’m shameless about begging for your vote (and people, I can’t stress this enough: you can vote every 24 hours!). I’ve just received word from Santa that anyone who doesn’t vote for me gets thrown in the ‘naughty’ category.
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I’ve got a real soft spot for the folks down under. The Australians have been the best of allies in the War on Terror, and the New Zealanders have given us Peter Jackson, the maker of the impossibly good Lord of the Rings trilogy. With the blogging retirement of Arthur Chrenkoff, however, this category is a runaway. Vote for the great Tim Blair – truly one of the blogosphere’s most consistently interesting voices…
Oh for Chrissake, Lord of the Rings was unwatchable garbage.
Wow, Amos – I guess that’s why it was the most successful franchise in film history and won, what, 13 Academy Awards for the final installment? Not to mention universal critical acclaim, and kudos from fans everywhere – but stand back, folks, Amos has spoken!…
I could fill a book on why the Jackson conversion was bad. It was one of the most sucessful LITERARY franchises in history, people were desperate to see it on film and would have flocked to the cinema to see it enacted by hamsters on a cardboard backdrop. That’s to Tolkein’s credit, not that third-rate splatter movie hack Jackson. The whole tedious thing looked like a slightly more expensive episode of Xena Warrior Princess, he screwed the pooch on LOTR.
As for the Academy, it’s awards are worthless. LOTR beat Pearl harbour for best effects which is an utter joke (and I’m not saying PH wasn’t infantile garbage, I’m talking purely effects here). These are the morons who gave Moore best documentary, remember?
Amos, look, personal taste is personal taste, but frankly, you’re so completely far afield here that I wonder at the source of your sour grapes.
Let’s look at the closest thing to an objective survey we can: Rotten Tomatoes:
FOTR: 93% fresh (average rating 8.2 of 10)
Two Towers: 98% fresh (average rating 8.5 of 10)
Return of the King: 95% fresh (average rating 8.7 of 10)
This is not me talking, but the collective wisdom of hundreds of film critics.
Your idea that millions of people the world over would have gone to FOTR, millions who had never heard of Tolkein, then gone to the second and the third one, even though they thought the first one sucked, is, frankly, laughable…
Peter Jackson did Lord of the Rings as well as anyone could have dreamed…
That’s my opinion, and the opinion of literally tens of millions of others…
But I guess we’re all wrong, and just because YOU didn’t like it, you’re right…
And of course, your theory that people would have gone to see hamsters perform it just shows why the animated disaster was such a huge hit, doesn’t it?…
So essentialy your argument boils down to an appeal to Popularity? I actually work in the film industry but that dosn’t mean I’m going to base my assertions on some lame appeal to authority. (Though you have a good point with the animated disaster, there are some things not even an all-hamster cast could save).
Jackson’s crappy films were a tired, trite and awkward translation to film. We’ll chalk it up as a difference in subjective taste, because I can’t be bothered bogging down in a six-page write up of where I felt the material was misunderstood and not properly translated to take advantage of the 120 minute screen run, that **it is just too fan-boy lame and I actually have a job, which I should be doing instead of reading blogs.
Fine, a difference in taste – but my appeal to authority was to hundreds of authorities, not one…