board77

Sorry I'm a little late (only on the East Coast -- I'm still on time for you on the West Coast):

Fellowship of the Ring
1. Prologue – 9.5
2. Concerning Hobbits – 6.5
3. The Shire – 8.5
4. Very Old Friends – 9.5
5. A Long-expected Party – 9.0
6. Farewell Dear Bilbo – 9.0
7. Keep It Secret, Keep It Safe – 9.0
8. The Account of Isildur – 7.5
9. At the Green Dragon – 7.5
10. The Shadow of the Past – 9.0
11. The Passing of the Elves – 6.5
12. Saruman the White – 7.0
13. A Short Cut to Mushrooms – 9.0
14. Bucklebury Ferry – 7.5
15. At the Sign of the Prancing Pony – 6.5
16. The Nazgûl – 7.5
17. The Midgewater Marshes – 6.0
18. The Spoiling of Isengard – 6.5
19. A Knife in the Dark – 7.5
20. The Caverns of Isengard -- 8.0
21. Flight to the Ford – 8.0
22. Rivendell – 7.5
23. Many Meetings – 9.5
24. The Fate of the Ring – 7.5
25. The Sword That Was Broken – 8.0
26. The Evenstar – 6.5
27. The Council of Elrond – 8.5
28. Gilraen's Memorial – 6.0
29. Bilbo's Gifts – 10.0
30. The Departure of the Fellowship – 9.0
31. The Ring Goes South – 7.5
32. The Pass of Caradhras – 4.5
33. Moria – 7.5
34. A Journey in the Dark – 10.0
35. Balin's Tomb – 6.5
36. The Bridge of Khazad-dûm – 8.5
37. Lothlórien – 5.5
38. Caras Galadhon – 6.0
39. The Mirror of Galadriel – 5.5
40. The Fighting Uruk-hai – 4.0
41. Farewell to Lórien – 7.5
42. The Great River – 7.5
43. Parth Galen – 10.0
44. The Breaking of the Fellowship – 10.0
45. The Departure of Boromir – 10.0
46. The Road Goes Ever On... – 10.0


And now back to the hotel and bed!!!

Finished RotK...ended up watching quite a bit of the movie. It's just so darn good.

When I was entering in my scores, even just a little while later I was wondering why I ranked some scenes like I did. Gotta trust what I was thinking while watching the scene though.

I noticed that the numeric scores don't match up from film to film. An 8 in one film might not be the same in another. I guess I was comparing within the film for the most part...that's the best that I could do. Too hard to compare withing all the movies.

Thanks, Eru, you're a trooper!

You even got Iavas to change some of his scores.

Did you log my FotR scores right after I posted them, because I did change one of them?

Iavas had some of the scenes wrong...he was going by memory.

When someone edits, I redo their entire score, just in case they've changed some rather then just added. So I redid your entire ballot after your last edit adding the ROTK scores.

About 21 pages back, TheCluelessMind wrote:

How appropriate that the only 69 is named as such.

In spite of the interceding 20 pages or so, I think this post deserves a response ---

Thanks to everyone who participated. We ended up with 39 ballots, 32 of which ranked all (or virtually all) of the scenes.

Results later. You have to come to the party for that.

I think 39 is a really good sample size for this group. Lidless will know better but I remember there being some thing in statistics where sometimes your results are pretty much set after around 30 votes and any votes afterwards won't significantly alter your ultimate results.

As I was telling Voronwe by PM, my attempts to participate in a timely manner were thwarted by a 4-day power outage which began Saturday, the day after I started watching the movies in order to rank scenes, and ended yesterday afternoon.

However, I don't care, I'm still going to watch the EEs and rank scenes; it just won't be in time for the festivities or official results.


Sass, I never could really figure out why I reacted to the second movie so differently than the other two. I don't think there's a logical explanation.

I like to think it was a special dispensation of grace so that I could experience what so many Tolkien lovers were experiencing. I've never hit upon another satisfactory explanation. All I know is, the changes rolled off me like water off a duck, and I sat there happily through the entire movie in spite of the diverse outrages perpetrated upon the Professor's work.



I have sometimes thought it might have been because early on in the film (when the three hunters segment began) something happened that didn't happen at any other time during the movies, that is, I felt a sense of recognition, I identified the story as being the one I had read and loved, and that feeling was strong enough to withstand all that came after. ??

Or it could be that you, being one of the board's few mostly sane people, recognized that TTT was just a plain better film than the other two.

yovargas wrote:

Or it could be that you, being one of the board's few mostly sane people, recognized that TTT was just a plain better film than the other two.

Ummmmmmmmm.......

No!

Definately my least favorite of the three.

yovargas wrote:

Or it could be that you, being one of the board's few mostly sane people, recognized that TTT was just a plain better film than the other two.

There is simply no way to justify that statement. Anyone may LIKE it better than the other two, but compared to the other two it is just not as good in any objective way. It's jumbled, it's not concluded (and not even in a "middle movie" kind of way), and there are so many cliched or rehashed points it defies logic.

Of course I might not be able to see it objectively so I don't know...

halplm wrote:

yovargas wrote:

Or it could be that you, being one of the board's few mostly sane people, recognized that TTT was just a plain better film than the other two.

There is simply no way to justify that statement. Anyone may LIKE it better than the other two, but compared to the other two it is just not as good in any objective way. It's jumbled, it's not concluded (and not even in a "middle movie" kind of way), and there are so many cliched or rehashed points it defies logic.

yov, two days ago, wrote:

Warning: most will likely think them unnaturally high! But I assure you I was being pretty objective about it. I've said for a while that TTT was my favorite and there's a reason. IMO, not only is nearly every single scene superbly shot, acted, written, directed, scored, and visualized, they also flow into one another very well, building from what came before and building what is coming next. Both FOTR and ROTK (specially FOTR) feel VERY episodic to me, where it's just a series of events often having little relation to one another. While I can entertain the argument that ROTK is the best of the trilogy, I find TTT vastly superior to FOTR artistically. I really have a hard time looking through all those chapters and understanding how TTT came out to be the least liked. I really don't...

FOTR is far less concluded than TTT or ROTK (since FOTR doesn't really have a plot, per se, there really isn't anything to conclude. FOTR is also the most cliched of the three. And I find ROTK the most "jumbled" by a good margin. Objectively, FOTR's episodic nature makes it a far less cinematically meaningful experience. Too many scenes that have nothing to do with anything else in the movie (particularly post-Rivendell). As a whole, FOTR isn't really "about" anything...it's just, hey, here's a bunch of cool stuff that happened. That's exaggerating a bit (I do love all 3 films after all) but it's essentially true.

yovargas wrote:

halplm wrote:

yovargas wrote:

Or it could be that you, being one of the board's few mostly sane people, recognized that TTT was just a plain better film than the other two.

There is simply no way to justify that statement. Anyone may LIKE it better than the other two, but compared to the other two it is just not as good in any objective way. It's jumbled, it's not concluded (and not even in a "middle movie" kind of way), and there are so many cliched or rehashed points it defies logic.

yov, two days ago, wrote:

Warning: most will likely think them unnaturally high! But I assure you I was being pretty objective about it. I've said for a while that TTT was my favorite and there's a reason. IMO, not only is nearly every single scene superbly shot, acted, written, directed, scored, and visualized, they also flow into one another very well, building from what came before and building what is coming next. Both FOTR and ROTK (specially FOTR) feel VERY episodic to me, where it's just a series of events often having little relation to one another. While I can entertain the argument that ROTK is the best of the trilogy, I find TTT vastly superior to FOTR artistically. I really have a hard time looking through all those chapters and understanding how TTT came out to be the least liked. I really don't...

FOTR is far less concluded than TTT or ROTK (since FOTR doesn't really have a plot, per se, there really isn't anything to conclude. FOTR is also the most cliched of the three. And I find ROTK the most "jumbled" by a good margin. Objectively, FOTR's episodic nature makes it a far less cinematically meaningful experience. Too many scenes that have nothing to do with anything else in the movie (particularly post-Rivendell). As a whole, FOTR isn't really "about" anything...it's just, hey, here's a bunch of cool stuff that happened. That's exaggerating a bit (I do love all 3 films after all) but it's essentially true.

I disagree with nearly everything you just said. I just flat out have the opposite opinion on it all.

Do you even disagree that FOTR is the most "episodic" of the three? I find that pretty hard to argue, objectively.

I STILL think after all this time that it's so very interesting that we're all great Tolkien fans yet have opinions that differ so greatly! Well, at least there's something for everyone to like somewhere! I can't wait to see the results of the voting.

My 2 cents: I can't even watch all of TTT anymore -- only parts of Helms Deep, the Three Hunters and the Ents have appeal to me. I'm not even exactly sure why this is (perhaps because parts of it -- the mother & her kids leaving the burning village, overacted scenes in the Glittering Caves of mothers hugging children...I suppose others (gasp) -- irritate me too much now ), but it did rate the lowest of the three for me and I never choose IT to rewatch unless I fast forward to Helms Deep or force myself to watch the entire 3 parts all in a row. Although by no means would I say it's a bad film, I was even disappointed with it in the theater and leaving the theater, which I didn't feel with the other 2. Glad to hear others did enjoy it thoroughly though.....to each his own.

Interesting to my own mind though, TTT is my favorite part of the BOOK -- perhaps this explains it in a nutshell -- I'm more of a purist than I've admitted to.....

yovargas wrote:

Do you even disagree that FOTR is the most "episodic" of the three? I find that pretty hard to argue, objectively.

I don't know, I don't think of it that way. The whole thing is told episodically, so I don't think of one being so any more than the others.

I think it works better in FOTR, as the other films have you jumping around in the middle of everything...

yovargas wrote:

Do you even disagree that FOTR is the most "episodic" of the three? I find that pretty hard to argue, objectively.

Actually, I think it's the LEAST episodic. There's a bit of intercutting with Orthanc stuff, but for the most part the story sticks with Frodo, and the time jumps at least look logical for the most part if you don't know what you are missing.

In TTT, PJ begins the rapid intercutting of the diverging storylines, and in fact splits them even more than Tolkien does with his cuts to Orthanc and Aragorn's off-the-cliff detour. ROTK is even worse, with the frantic jumps within what should've been a single sequence, such as Eowyn defeating WiKi.

Multiple story lines are a totally different thing then the episodic-ness I'm talking about. Will try to elaborate more later.

Cerin wrote:

Quote:

I have sometimes thought it might have been because early on in the film (when the three hunters segment began) something happened that didn't happen at any other time during the movies, that is, I felt a sense of recognition, I identified the story as being the one I had read and loved, and that feeling was strong enough to withstand all that came after. ??

Yes! That's it exactly! That sense of recognition, the sense, almost, of comming home.

yov wrote:

Quote:

FOTR is far less concluded than TTT or ROTK (since FOTR doesn't really have a plot, per se, there really isn't anything to conclude. FOTR is also the most cliched of the three. And I find ROTK the most "jumbled" by a good margin. Objectively, FOTR's episodic nature makes it a far less cinematically meaningful experience. Too many scenes that have nothing to do with anything else in the movie (particularly post-Rivendell). As a whole, FOTR isn't really "about" anything...it's just, hey, here's a bunch of cool stuff that happened.

And the plot of TTT is ....?

Answer: Episodic. Comprised of three main episodes which are linear in the book and intercut in the film. While watching TTT again for the poll I was struck fairly frequently by how awkward some of the interweaving of the Ents with Helm's Deep was. Too abrupt; it threw me out of the battle into the Old Forest for a few minutes and then threw me back again. No wonder Tolkien was so against interweaving the three stories.

FOTR is the most single-minded of the three. I don't know what you mean by a far less meaningful cinematic experience and too many scenes that have nothing to do with anything else in the movie ... Off the top of my head, other than Lurtz, I can't think of a single gratuitious instant that is unrelated to the story of LOTR.

Care to enlighten me?
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ETA: Rats! Frelga beat me to it again!