Re: Most disappointing films.

On Tue, 4 Mar 2025 10:23:19 -0500, Cryptoengineer
<petertrei@gmail.com> wrote:

On 3/4/2025 12:30 AM, Mike Van Pelt wrote:

In article <vovrtm$18b9h$1@dont-email.me>,
William Hyde  <wthyde1953@gmail.com> wrote:

In a conversation the other day I came up with a list of these, and to
my surprise they were all SF/F.

 
Jackson's Hobbit movies.
 
After the marvel that was his Lord of the Rings trilogy, I hardly
expected the Hobbit movies to be so very bad. (Maybe they were
OK-ish judged in isolation, but in comparison to his Lord of
the Rings movies, they suffered badly.)

>
Lindsey Ellis did a really excellent analysis as to why the Hobbit
films failed where the LotR films succeeded.
>
The Hobbit: A long awaited autopsy.
Part 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uTRUQ-RKfUs
>
The Hobbit: Battle of Five Studios
Part 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElPJr_tKkO4
>
Part 1 is mostly about the difficulties of adapting
The Hobbit to a film, including the critical error of
expanding from 2 to 3 films at the last moment,

In addition to the even more critical error of thinking it needed 2
films to begin with.

Rankin-Bass did it in 80 minutes. Adding Beorn back would have
stretched to ... maybe 90 minutes.

Part 2 is more about the tortured production process,
with the switch of director from del Toro to Jackson,
and the ultra-rushed schedule.

I wasn't aware that PJ was their second choice. Not that I think a del
Toro version would have been any better.

Its worth watching.

I only watch this sort of thing when one is on a DVD/BD I have
purchased, and that is only to make sure the disk -- the whole disk,
or at least as much of it as I can stand, as those extras sometimes
get awfully hard to watch [1]  -- plays without defect.

[1] I skipped /The Terror/ when I got it because it was packaged with
and purchased for the original /The Little Shop of Horrors/. I watched
the "features" for /The Terror/, recognized it from when I streamed
it, remembered how awful I had found it then, and skipped it. It was
hard enough to sit through the first time. I should note that /The
Little Shop of Horrors/ was everything you could ask for. It is as if
you were watching a new print for the first time.
--
"Here lies the Tuscan poet Aretino,
Who evil spoke of everyone but God,
Giving as his excuse, 'I never knew him.'"