Rispon Avenue

I have been looking forward to The Hobbit films since I learned they were being made, but then I learned that Guillermo del Toro was set to direct, and then I wasn’t so thrilled.

At first I was completely and utterly against this, I mean, del Toro has done some good films, Pan’s Labyrinth for instance was great, but movies like Hellboy and Blade 2 were less than great, less than good in the case of Blade 2, so I really felt like the wrong director had been chosen. del Toro is also famous for his off-beat horror/thriller films, all of which I found extremely unappealing after reading the synopsis of each film. He seems to have a bent towards the depressing, too many of his main characters end up dead at the end of the film for my liking. When I wrote my last entry on this, del Tor had been talking about how he intended to bring out the scariness of the Hobbit… I really didn’t like the sound of this… but anyway, that was all covered in that post.

Now, I don’t know how I got onto it today, but I was looking over The Hobbit film wiki page, and was rather pleasantly surprised by what I found there. It seems that the actors for Gandalf, Gollum, and Bilbo (at least in voice) will be appearing in the two films, which have now been altered so that both films will contain the narrative from The Hobbit, rather than one film being The Hobbit, and one film being a bridge between the events in The Hobbit and the events in The Lord of the Rings. I think this is a good thing, as the bridging film sounded rather… odd and unappealing.

On that Wiki page, I read of the work being done by del Toro and Peter Jackson, who have been working together to write the film, apparently reaching twelve-hour work days quite regularly; now that’s dedication! From what was written in that page, my ideas on this film have been turned around, and I am really looking forward to more Hobbits on screen!

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I learned a few days ago that Sam Raimi is set to direct the upcoming World of Warcraft movie, and I have to say, I couldn’t be less interested in seeing that film.

To me, there is little less appealing than a film about a really crappy game by a director who has done films that I have disliked. I haven’t played more than five minutes of WoW, and here’s why. I got into the game, a game which lacked all semblance of a storyline, a game that has graphics woefully inadequate by today’s standards, and a game that has the biggest player-base of morons that I have ever heard of, one of which I ran into in the starting area, by the name of ‘Oldfartdude’. Now, not only did Oldfartdude have a really, really, crap name, he was jumping around repeatedly in the same little area. The stupidity displayed by the name and the action could only remind me one of those mechanical monkeys clapping symbols together, but this was a cheap knock-off version so only one of the arms moved and his symbols never clapped, but that one arm was still clapping away to the silence of his own stupidity.

After seeing that particular little Petri dish of the gaming world, I felt the need to run, run away and delete the trial version of the game off my computer. Now onto the other half of this oh-so-unappealing combination is the directing of Sam Raimi. Now, I’m not here to say that the guy can’t do a good job, I’m just trying to say that the films he has done have been, to me, highly meh. The Spiderman films were so utterly uninteresting, and I felt that they really could have been. Spidey’s not the greatest Super Hero, but nor is he the lamest, but these films… they were just so… uninspiring. Raimi’s other films have largely been in the horror genre, and whilst I like thriller movies, horror is generally very poor viewing for me. I don’t like to see the rampant indulgence in other people’s pain, and the gore associated with said pain, that tends to be in these films. Raimi was one of the directors rumoured to have been considered for the upcoming Hobbit movie, and I am so very, very, glad that it was Guillermo del Toro, but I plan to talk more about the Hobbit movie in my next entry, so I’ll leave that one be.

Back to the topic at hand, the marriage of these two forces leaves me so uninterested… I really can’t see a storyline worthy of film coming out of WoW, but hey, I bet it’s still going to get huge ticket sales, just because it’s WoW.

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