*Waggles hand* Meh. About on par with the last one, maybe a shade less good. Charlie Vickers groupies and the idiots who think Middle Earth is all about the fight scenes might grade it more generously than I do. In other news, my cowatchers and I have been rewatching (and for the most part enjoying) the extended editions of the LOTR movies, and I may put up a post about that at some point in the near future. The main relevant points for now are that watching ROP and LOTR side by side a). really underlines how much better Jackson/Walsh/Boyens were at simulating Tolkienesque dialogue than the ROP team, and b). how much ROP unnecessarily remixes bits from the movies, especially bits that were so inane that I recognized them at the time I saw the originals in the LOTR rewatch but they’ve fallen out of my head by now.
Continue reading “Rings of Power: Impressions of Ep 206”State of the Author, Late 2024
The sequel to Wolf’s Trail is in the late stages of drafting – about 48K with maybe a couple thousand more words to go. Just moving very slowly because I’ve been sick with some respiratory thing for over a month and a half at this point. Starting to do better, which means the creative brain(1) is starting to come back online. With some luck, I should be done by the end of September, take some time off to work on other stuff in October, polish it in November, release by the end of December (around the same time the first book did last year).
(1) as opposed to the critical brain, which you’ve seen a lot of lately with the Jane Austen adaptation posts and the Rings of Power posts
Rings of Power: Impressions of Episode 205
The good news is that we may have bottomed out on the u-shaped curve of this season’s quality. Or it’s going to be a very misshapen W. Remains to be seen really. All spoiler alerts apply.
Continue reading “Rings of Power: Impressions of Episode 205”Music By Suno Monday: Beowulf and the Dragon
I used an excerpt from some verse translation on gutenberg as the lyrics.
Rings of Power: Impressions of ep 204
Season one had an almost U-shaped quality graph, with opening and closing episodes that weren’t perfect but were at least trying to do interesting things and a stretch of middle episodes that felt laborious and contrived. Reader, we are once again sliding to the bottom of the U….
Continue reading “Rings of Power: Impressions of ep 204”Adapting Jane Austen: Sense and Sensibility, the Story in Devonshire
We start off with Mrs. Dashwood finishing up a friendly interview with one of the female servants who will come with the ladies to Devonshire.
Continue reading “Adapting Jane Austen: Sense and Sensibility, the Story in Devonshire”Romance in Rings of Power
So, we got (spoiler alert) an unconfirmed but plausible explanation for that rumored late-season 2 kissing scene, and it struck me as a good time to talk quickly about something kind of unconventional about this show…
Continue reading “Romance in Rings of Power”Musical Monday: Harry Potter Redneck Wizard
This seems to be a purely or nearly purely AI construct, with human prompting and editing, but I thought it pretty amusing.
Rings of Power: impressions of Episodes 202-203
Disclaimers: Spoilers below the cut for anything that crosses my mind, from Tolkien arcana to details from later episodes confirmed by reviewers, to the weirdest rumors about the later stages of the show.
Short summary: There’s still clunkers big and small, at a writing level, and there’s at least one major screwup in the choice of music to score a particular scene. But I enjoyed these, felt like these worked well overall, with the “earthier” 203 maybe being somewhat less good than the highly philosophical and mystical 202. I also feel like I’m getting a better sense of which first season choices in story-telling were justifiable, and which weren’t.
Continue reading “Rings of Power: impressions of Episodes 202-203”Rings of Power: episode 201 impressions
The hour was so late and the episode was so long, we’d no rest nor comfort, no comfort but song, not enough rest to tackle 202 and 203. Unlikely to watch them before Saturday, so any posts on them would go up Sunday at the soonest. These are impressions, rather than deep thoughts, and below the cut, they include spoilers for anything that crosses my mind, including rumors about late-season-two plot developments.
The Short Version: so far, I really feel like the events of season one should have been covered in about four or five episodes, and the events of this episode should have been part of the second half. If we get to a moment in a later episode where I can honestly say: “I think season one should have ended here,” I will try to remember to point it out. Maybe the editing geeks who spend their time endlessly recutting the PJ Hobbit movies and the 1980s Dune will take a shot at ROP whenever it ends. ROP’s acting and visuals remain good overall, but dark scenes are barely watchable even in a dark room, and the day for night shooting in the Rhun scenes could have come out of the old spaghetti westerns that the Spanish location used for Rhun undoubtedly hosted at one time or another. Thought the directing was good if self-indulgent. Writing seems somewhat improved, but is a long way from flawless.
Continue reading “Rings of Power: episode 201 impressions”
Jaglion Press 