by klonk on Sat Mar 20, 2010 9:06 pm
It was, I thought, the desire to make it look like the movie paradigm that caused Jackson to leave out essential backstory and simplify, rearrange and change what was left. The Helm's Deep scenes, for example, cannot be warranted by anything in Tolkien. Another example: Saruman's death was left out of the theatrical release and misrepresented in the extended.
Why does every movie have to look like every other in its genre? Safety consciousness? If it worked once we'll put it over again?
There is this continual tendency to force original fiction into the moviedom paradigm, hammer square peg into round hole. The only movie adaptation I ever much liked, of a book I liked, was The Maltese Falcon. And thereon hangs a tale. It's nearly scene-for-scene, word-for word. How did this slip past the rewrite boys?
I define internal martial art as unusual muscle recruitment and leave it at that. If my definition is incomplete, at least it is correct so far as it goes.