No Peter Jackson?
So this might be good then
Sexagenarian Brit thespo Sir Ian McKellen has expressed hopes that he will reprise his role of Gandalf in Lord of the Rings prequel The Hobbit, saying he'd be "very pleased" to get the hat and beard out of mothballs. McKellen, 68, told Reuters: "If I am still functioning and working well, it is very likely I would be asked to …
Is there anything to prevent him from being Gandalf in his own time? Does he sometimes don the costume when he goes out to the shops, or if he feels the need to perform acts of goodness? We should be told.
I'm going to have a little picture of Mark Mothersbaugh from Devo. There should be a dedicated Devo icon, with the funny hats they word; the energy accumulators.
... where's the "Arwen in panties" angle?
The IT angle is obvious: only geeks, nerds and sysadmins can bear to read or watch Tolkien's risible faux-saga.
Any literate adult should regard LOTR - book and film both - as ludicrous, overblown and boring (even though many of us have sat through it for our kids' entertainment).
Who gives a flying fuck whether it's McKellen or Roy 'Chubby' Brown playing Gandalf? The news that we are to be fed yet more of this interminable meretricious tosh on celluloid should fill every right-thinking person with despair.
Tolkien should've stuck to what he was being paid for instead of wasting Oxford university's money scribbling puerile drivel about furry-footed ingenues and eldritch villains. (And bloody CS Lewis was little better IMO.)
Bah! Humbug!
Aside from boringness (which is a matter of taste in any genre) your main objection to the Rings books/movies seems to be... that they're fantasy. Overblown? Of course! Ridiculous? Well, yeah... there's dragons and orcs and stuff.
Yes. It's fan-ta-sy. If you think it's boring, fine, but... ah, whatever. Just go back to watching some 'independent' movie about a drug dealer who accidentally rapes his daughter, tries to kill himself in despair, misses and shoots his boss in the stomach as he walks in, and then fails systematically to prevent the extermination of his family by the outraged kingpin.
That's much more realistic and oh-so-edgy in its legitimacy for people who've never suffered and think themselves enlightened for understanding how bad it must be.
It wouldn't necessarily ruin the film if Sir Ian wasn't cast as Gandalf, whatever the reason, What;s important is that he set a high standard, and Peter Jackson, while his film is flawed, also set a high standard for the quality of the design.
In some ways, >i?Fellowship of the Ring</i> is both the best-adapted part of the book, and the closest to <i>The Hobbit</i>. Match that, and IO think we'll be alright.
I read the book of the movie last year, and it wasn't a bad adaptation. Quite a lot of words, and there was a hell of a lot of extra stuff that the writer made up that wasn't even in the movie, but not a bad effort. I notice that they've released the book of the prequel (The Hobbit Movie or something) before the film's even been released! I'm almost tempted to read it, but I wouldn't want to spoil the ending of the movie when it comes out.
Seriously, though... More important that whether Ian McKellen plays Gandalf: Who'se going to be the young Bilbo Baggins? Several people are almost certain to be vaguely interested...
Excuse me. Would you write tresagenarian, or quatrogenarian? OK, to be a nonogenarian is a feat, and some octogenarians merit praise for doing something that normally only younger men do, but to draw attention to a 60+ actor playing a character from the First Age (i.e. at least 3000 years old) seems bizarre