Re: TRotK (spoilers)

["Peter T. Chattaway" <petert@interchange.ubc.ca>]

On Fri, 19 Dec 2003, Kristen Bailey wrote:
> By the way, Peter, awesome review of the Trilogy.

Thanks.

> One thing I was thinking about was when you were talking about the
> mithril and the stinger.  I am wondering now that you have posed that
> question is how exactly all that worked?  Do you think it is possible
> that he didn't have it on at the time and maybe it was in his pack?

Hmmm, possibly.  One other person has suggested that the stinger might
have had a narrow point that could poke through the chain mail.

> Maybe the answer is in the scene where the orcs raid through his pack
> and clothes.

You know, the second time I saw the film, when it got to the scene of
Frodo shirtless on the floor, I began looking at his belly to see if there
was any sign of a scar there from the stinger ... and there wasn't!  At
least not that I could see.  This is significant, because they *did* put a
major scar on his shoulder, where the Witch-King stabbed him.

I also found myself noticing stuff like the continuity error in the
extended version of TFotR, where Boromir and Aragorn are talking late at
night, and you can see Aragorn's hair hang over his ear in one shot and
then appear tucked behind his ear in the next shot and then back again, or
something like that.  And in the shot where we see, from Aragorn's point
of view, the canyon leading to the place where the dead warriors live, it
was verrrry obvious to me that they had done a zoom on three separate
layers of images there, cuz they didn't all sync up properly.

And as much as I love, love, love Rohan and Edoras, I can never see the
daylight footage of those places in TTT without thinking that it is not
only way too obvious that the footage has been digitally processed, but
also that the footage looks kind of flat in tone and colour.

And can you believe they actually put cap codes (or what Ebert calls "crap
codes") in the extended versions of the first two films?  Cap codes are
those annoying brown-black spots that the studios now throw into the
centre of the screen every now and then, so that if bootleg copies of the
film appear anywhere, they can track where the bootleg came from.  They
did this, like, five times during the scene by Galadriel's Mirror alone!  
I think cap codes are stupid to begin with, but I thought putting them in
*these* particular films was the dumbest thing I had ever seen -- like,
dudes, these films are already on DVD! nobody's gonna bother smuggling a
camcorder into the theatre when they can just pirate the existing discs!

--- Peter T. Chattaway --------------------------- peter@chattaway.com ---
Nothing tells memories from ordinary moments; only afterwards do they
   claim remembrance, on account of their scars. -- Chris Marker, La Jetee

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