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Long movies
Dec. 29th, 2003 10:29 pmThe Christmas haul included the massive-overkill extended versions of both Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers. ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
samantha2074 and I watched Fellowship tonight (I had only seen it once previously, in the theater shortly after its original release). The extra business and dialogue were nice; my memories of the movie were fuzzy enough that I couldn't always tell what had been added, which I suppose is a testament to the seamlessness of the re-edit. The extended version seems cut more like a TV miniseries than a movie, which is probably appropriate for this kind of epic material.
The movie itself took up two DVDs, with the break near the end of the Rivendell sequence after the Council of Elrond. It had me wondering why the practice of putting intermissions in theatrical movies is essentially extinct, especially considering that people are making lots of hellaciously long movies these days and my bladder is often screaming by the end. It used to be that the big roadshow event-pictures (especially the ones adapted from stage musicals) typically had an intermission in the middle, like a stage play. But the last major movie I remember having one was Gandhi, though undoubtedly some of those multi-hour monstrosities they show at little art houses have them too. An intermission would surely be well within the capabilities of those big automated platter assemblies at the megaplexes. It would undoubtedly complicate crowd control, though; these days they typically want to suck the audience through in one direction and funnel people directly out into the parking lot at the end if possible, and they don't want to have to re-check ticket stubs for a whole theater full of people who went out simultaneously for a potty break and some popcorn.
It was also interesting to see that a few of the effects look less good than I remembered from initial viewing, certainly less refined than what was in The Two Towers. The animated Legolas looks kind of like a game character when he's jumping around on top of the cave troll, and I'd completely forgotten that there was a really cheesy-looking special effect overlaid on Galadriel when she gave her scary "not a Dark Lord but a Queen" speech. (It probably would have worked better had they left it off; Cate Blanchett is quite capable of being that frightening by herself.)
samantha2074 and I watched Fellowship tonight (I had only seen it once previously, in the theater shortly after its original release). The extra business and dialogue were nice; my memories of the movie were fuzzy enough that I couldn't always tell what had been added, which I suppose is a testament to the seamlessness of the re-edit. The extended version seems cut more like a TV miniseries than a movie, which is probably appropriate for this kind of epic material.The movie itself took up two DVDs, with the break near the end of the Rivendell sequence after the Council of Elrond. It had me wondering why the practice of putting intermissions in theatrical movies is essentially extinct, especially considering that people are making lots of hellaciously long movies these days and my bladder is often screaming by the end. It used to be that the big roadshow event-pictures (especially the ones adapted from stage musicals) typically had an intermission in the middle, like a stage play. But the last major movie I remember having one was Gandhi, though undoubtedly some of those multi-hour monstrosities they show at little art houses have them too. An intermission would surely be well within the capabilities of those big automated platter assemblies at the megaplexes. It would undoubtedly complicate crowd control, though; these days they typically want to suck the audience through in one direction and funnel people directly out into the parking lot at the end if possible, and they don't want to have to re-check ticket stubs for a whole theater full of people who went out simultaneously for a potty break and some popcorn.
It was also interesting to see that a few of the effects look less good than I remembered from initial viewing, certainly less refined than what was in The Two Towers. The animated Legolas looks kind of like a game character when he's jumping around on top of the cave troll, and I'd completely forgotten that there was a really cheesy-looking special effect overlaid on Galadriel when she gave her scary "not a Dark Lord but a Queen" speech. (It probably would have worked better had they left it off; Cate Blanchett is quite capable of being that frightening by herself.)