Star Wars Trilogy(nos4 5 & 6)
Casablanca
Gone With the Wind
The Good the bad and the ugly
Lord of the rings, all three films

.............

Film canons eh? I'm just gonna walk away right now, too prickly an issue But for a more balanced global perspective every 10 years the august organ Sight and Sound publishes a critics and directors poll.

Certainly more global but even then I'd say there is bias against shorts, animation, and er female directors (or are all Americans male Don?)

Try telling Douglas Adams that 

Well, go back in time and try... 

Is it just me, or is it really the case that as an adaptation of Tolkein (rather than as pure cinema) these films actually fell desperately short of the mark?  I'm no expert, but I read a lot of Tolkein when younger and it seemed to me that Peter Jackson simply failed to get under the skin of the books (especially in the third film).  Leaving aside the fact that Jackson plays fast and loose with elements of the story (which is to be expected in a cinematic interpretation), such things as the fake Celticism of the Shire (Tolkein loathed the Celtic Twilight movement), the total absence of the poems and songs with which the Lord of the Rings is crammed, the sub-Laura Ashley prettiness of the Elvish realms, the general lack of any sense of the heiratic - for all the astonishing visuals there seemed to me to be something fundamental missing, and I've heard the same from a number of people who are much more dyed-in-the-wool Tolkein enthusiasts than I.

There are good points and bad points.

• There are a fair few lines in Sindarin / Quenya (especially in the extended editions), although these suffer from numerous discrepancies in pronunciation between actors.
• There are odd references to Númenor which come out of nowhere, aren't developed, and which only those who have read the book would understand.
• Shadowfax (Gandalf's horse) is disappointing - in the books he assumes an almost human role.
• I thought Aragorn was very well portrayed overall, the transformation from the mysterious cloaked figure in the corner of a pub to the King of Gondor comes over well.
• Saruman is portrayed almost throughout as a straight-forward villain, whereas in the books he is in fact a double traitor, working solely for his own ends: there is a passage in Unfinished Tales stating that Saruman concealed his knowledge of where The Shire was from the searching Nazgûl, to give himself a chance of getting the Ring for himself, even though he knew by that particular point that all such chance was gone from him.
  • This also takes away from the strength of the book; in the first film Saruman is shown ordering the mountain (Caradhras) to cover the Fellowship in snow. In the book the mountain has a will entirely of its own.
• The omission of Tom Bombadil is much to be lamented - not only does it mean that the four Hobbits travel 60-odd miles in a split-second, it also removes the largest source of poems in the whole book. Which leads onto your other points.
• The portrayal of Gimli as very little but a source for laughs I find very annoying.
  

I'm not sure what you mean by this


With all respect, that is not the case. In The Fellowship of the Ring alone:

• The first four lines of 'The Road goes ever on and on' are sung twice, once by Gandalf when he arrives on the cart, and again by Bilbo when he leaves Hobbiton.
• There is a scene in The Green Dragon, where Merry and Pippin are dancing on the tables. They sing a varied version of a song which, in the book, Sam and Pippin sing in the woods. (Ho, ho, ho, to the bottle I go...)
• Strider sings a few lines from 'The Tale of Tinúviel'.
• At the Council, Gandalf speaks the last two lines of the Ring-verse (in Black Speech), which are later repeated by the voice of the Ring itself.
• Sam's short verse in Lothlórien about Gandalf's fireworks is repeated word for word.

I've always felt very strongly that the book has a Medieval aspect to it that provides a distance from the world of the Hobbits I find hard to describe, but it's similar to the fact that we can never really know how the Celtic peoples lived because there is no written evidence. The hobbit-holes were very well portrayed - they brought the impression that the hobbits were rustic, yet cultured at the same time; they knew what comfort was.



Elvish realms by this point in the mythos are at the end of their time (particularly Lothlórien) and whatever the outcome of Frodo's journey, when that finished they would have ceased to be. I thought this was done subliminally - I see all the lights in the trees as a sort of mockery, both of the time when the realm was 'in its summer' (as the analogy goes) and of the lights of Valinor (Substantial Wiki article, I haven't read it).

To conclude, I doubt that Tolkien [sic] would have liked the Jackson films at all, he certainly despised the efforts made during his lifetime. The result of the films is that Tolkien is being treated as an enterprise: the musical ; the money-grabbing court cases against New Line by Jackson and, more recently, Christopher Tolkien; forthcoming The Hobbit films [sic], etc. etc.

Personally, I thought that Peter jackson did a marvellous job, perhpas, the end of Return of the King was a bit much, but apart from that with all the various scenes etc, did a fntastic job of the book. Not often I say that about films of the books, so cant be bad.

Thanks for this, Eru.  A couple of immediate thoughts:


I'm thinking here about a failure to reflect the solemnity and status of what is happening; a scene that comes to mind is Aragorn and Arwen's coronation and wedding, conflated in the film, where in particular the steamy Hollywood clinch on Arwen's arrival seems totally out of place at what (if I have understood the books correctly - and I've never read beyond the Lord of the Rings itself) must have been one of the turning points in the history of Middle Earth, a moment of great ritual and solemnity.

Elsewhere, negatively:

I felt that Aragorn was probably too young - I had a recollection that there is a reference in the book to his resembling Gandalf, and another to the fact that it was several decades since he had last visited Lorien and the years lay heavily on him;

The omission of Tom Bombadil was a serious problem, as was the omission of the scouring of the Shire (I've only seen the cinema versions, so I guess this may turn up in some of the additional footage) which seems to me to be a vital part of the narrative.  I felt that a few minutes less of the battle scenes - or of the nugatory Osgiliath episode - might have allowed this to be included;

And the issue of the poems and songs remains problematic for me.  One of the things I took away from the books when I first read them as a teenager was the way in which the culture of Middle Earth was expressed in poem and song; this could easily have been problematic for a film without turning it into a rather embarrassing musical, but the BBC radio adaptation did this rather well, I thought.

I agree about Saruman and Gimli.

More positively:

Jackson seemed most at home with darkness, evil and battles.  Moria was very well done; I had always imagined the Balrog as an invisible evil, but this seemed to me the most effective part of Jackson's adaptation. 

And the Two Towers generally seemed to me the best part of the trilogy; especially the scenes at Edoras and Helm's Deep.

I suppose in the end one concludes that the essence of Tolkien's work is unfilmable - it's difficult to imagine a better stab, but there is so much more to it than this.

For what the current technology is involved in film making, the general overall standard of LOTR, was quite outstanding. Perhaps, for the time being at least,
the attempt that Peter Jackson made with these three films, is quite outstanding.

Also, maybe, JRR Tolkein's fantastic(I put this word in for its purest meaning), world is not achieveable by film makers at this time, but in the next generation maybe. I still think though, that the making of this trilogy, was by far the best.