Читать книгу An A-Z of JRR Tolkien's The Hobbit - Sarah Oliver - Страница 35
ОглавлениеChief of the Guards
Name: Chief of the Guards
Alias: The guard, Turnkey
Race: Elf of the Woodland Realm
Played by: Not yet cast
Character description: Mirkwood elves are usually golden haired with bright eyes. They are 6’ tall or more and wear green and brown clothing. The Chief of the Guards is a friend of the King’s Butler. He works in the dungeons and is fond of wine.
Chief Wolf
Name: Chief Wolf
Alias: Hound of Sauron
Race: Wolves of the North, Wargs of Wilderland
Played by: N/A
Character description: A big, grey wolf, he communicates with his fellow Wargs using their own language. The Wargs and the goblins often worked together on raids and shared the treasure. They enjoy doing evil and wicked things. Although pretty unbeatable, the Wargs do hate fire.
Long before Guillermo del Toro stepped down as director, he told the New Yorker in an interview: ‘There will be different sensibilities involved in this movie than there were in the original trilogy. First of all, because we have the travelogues in The Hobbit, which goes to places and variations on races that were not addressed in the trilogy. My belief on the “Wargs” issue is that the classical incarnation of the demonic wolf in Nordic mythology is not a hyena-shaped creature: it is a wolf. The archetype is a wolf, so we’re going to go back to the slender, archetypical wolf that is, I think, the inspiration for Tolkien.’
In a webchat with fans he stated that the Wargs: ‘…will be different from the Hyena ones established in the Trilogy; they will be faithful to the creatures in the book and will be redesigned accordingly.’
CinemaCon
The Official Convention of The National Association of Theatre Owners, CinemaCon, takes place at Caesars Palace, Las Vegas in March/April time. For Hobbit fans, the 2012 event was extra-special as an exclusive preview of the movie was to be given.
The audience were told by an onscreen Peter Jackson to put on their 3D glasses and following this, he briefly talked about the history of movies and how different frame rates were introduced when the move away from silent films was made. He explained that for the past 70 years moviegoers had been seeing films with a standard 24 frames-per-second, but that The Hobbit would be showing at 48 frames-per-second. The preview of 10 minutes then started.
Quickbeam from TheOneRing.net wrote in his review: ‘For a breathless moment I felt rather like someone in an audience seeing their first color film after endless years of only Black & White photography. Someone had lifted the glass off the windshield and you were looking at something *real* and in three dimensions.’
Some audience members were less than complimentary about the new 48-frames-per-second style, though. Peter Sciretta from Slashfilm thought it ‘looked like a made-for-television BBC movie. The movement of the actors looked strange, almost as if the performances had been partly sped up. But the dialogue matched the movement of the lips, so it wasn’t an effect of speed-ramping. It didn’t look cinematic.’
Quickbeam didn’t hate it, but described it as ‘just a matter of taste.’ He continued: ‘My gut reaction to what I saw was: “Wow, that sure does look different,” because like everyone, I’ve been used to the film-like quality of projected images used throughout my lifetime of going to the theatre.
‘Does it look like High-Def video? Yeah, sort of. The image is actually so pristine, crystal clear, and brightly contrasted that I did have a moment of thinking it was like live broadcast HDTV. But it hasn’t been colour-corrected yet, and many nuances of shade and light will be adjusted before 14 December 2012.’
After negative reviews were published both online and offline, Peter Jackson decided to speak out and respond to the complaints as best he could. He told Entertainment Weekly: ‘Nobody is going to stop. This technology is going to keep evolving. At first it’s unusual because you’ve never seen a movie like this before. It’s literally a new experience, but you know, that doesn’t last the entire experience of the film – not by any stretch, (just) 10 minutes or so.
‘That’s a different experience than if you see a fast-cutting montage at a technical presentation.’
He was hoping that fans would wait and see what the finished movie was like before judging it for themselves – and if people really didn’t like the new format then they could always see it in the usual format, as not every cinema would be showing the 48-frames-per-second version.
