Here’s the news from Weta HQ this week. Hercules [Link II] Medieval [Link II] Further details of Weta’s…
Continue Reading
Here’s the news from Weta HQ this week.
Hercules [Link II]
Medieval [Link II]
Further details of Weta’s work on Prince Caspian revealed
The Halo Warthog gets a test drive
Champ The Chopper launch a success
New Rayguns inspired fan art
Moon suit wearing character in Dr Grordbort’s world introduced
NZ Event: Body Art Rocks Preview
ManMelter Raygun named ‘Most Stunning Raygun’ in fan poll
Director Jay Russell sent this along: Sony just posted the first of what will be 18 video blogs which will premiere on our official website very week. The first features LOTR mega-producer Barrie Osborne.
Jamey DuVall from Movie Geeks United! writes: Just wanted to let you know that my podcast show MOVIE GEEKS UNITED!, available to a global audience throught he internet or iTunes, interviewed composer Howard Shore this past Sunday, September 23. You can access the show anytime on replay by visiting our page.
Author Kristin Thompson writes: The recent announcement that a judge has fined New Line Cinema $125,000 is a major step forward in Peter Jackson’s lawsuit. On my blog, I’ve taken a stab at explaining some of the background of that suit and what this new development might mean for the Hobbit film.
It’s hard to remember now, when every respectable household contains the Special Extended DVD Edition of Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings, but the celebrated trilogy was once considered a somewhat iffy proposition. That’s part of the explanation for how Jackson, a rather obscure director from Kiwiland, was able to gain artistic control over what Newsweek once called “the most expensive and ambitious movie project in history.” And by filming in New Zealand, where he had built his very own world-class production facility, Jackson was able to use the Pacific Ocean as a moat, protecting him from Hollywood interference. The result was that rare thing, a global film franchise that bears a personal stamp — an intimate epic.
There is magic in the last line of The Lord of the Rings. To recap: the stolidly courageous Sam Gamgee, having watched his best friend, Frodo Baggins, sail towards the Grey Havens and into a kind of death, is left to walk back to the Shire where he finds his wife and children waiting with the promise of a quiet life far from the slaughter of the War of the Ring. J. R. R. Tolkien finishes with the sentence: “‘Well, I’m back,’ he said”. It is a touchingly understated conclusion which returns the prose to the homely simplicity of the inaugural chapters after the archaic epic mode of The Return of the King. However, as Diana Pavlac Glyer tells us in her scholarly and perceptive study The Company They Keep, this is not how Tolkien originally intended to finish his trilogy. He had in mind a further epilogue, set sixteen years after the events of the rest of the book, which would have provided another, superfluous glimpse into Gamgee’s domesticity. In this ultimately excised version, a grey-haired Sam reads stories of his adventures to his children, spinning them tales of wizards and orcs and walking trees. There is even the faint suggestion that Sam has been narrating the story of The Lord of the Rings itself, before, at last, we depart the Shire for good, leaving Sam and Rose in a state of connubial bliss, tale-telling by the fireside.
