Quoted:
In major cinema (independent films and films pretty much no one has even heard of don't count) this century can y'all recall ANY significant black characters in the source material that were race swapped for whites or a significant female character in the source material that was gender swapped for a male?

Any at all?

Quoted:


Monica Rambeau, black woman, was the second iteration of Captain Marvel.
They swapped her for Carroll Danvers when they rebooted the character.
In fact, Monica Rambeau.has been screed out of several rolls in the marvel universe.
I hate Wikipedia

Quoted:
In major cinema (independent films and films pretty much no one has even heard of don't count) this century can y'all recall ANY significant black characters in the source material that were race swapped for whites or a significant female character in the source material that was gender swapped for a male?

Any at all?

Quoted:

You'd think anyone in a moneymaking business would get a clue.

Are they really that naive/stupid? Or have they simply decided that the cost is worth it, to push their agenda?

Quoted:

Get woke...

Quoted:


After reading the Hollywood Accounting link, I'm pretty sure Al Capone is spinning in his grave. How those       in Hollywood are not in prison is beyond me.

Quoted:
I’ve got better things to be outraged about then a fictional world being portrayed wrong on TV.

Quoted:
I’ve got better things to be outraged about then a fictional world being portrayed wrong on TV.

Quoted:
Lawd of da Rangz !!

The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power review: Amazon's prequel is kind of a catastrophe
Give this appendix an appendectomy.
Darren Franich
By Darren Franich August 31, 2022 at 10:00 AM EDT

There are ways to do a prequel, and The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power does them all wrong. It takes six or seven things everyone remembers from the famous movie trilogy, adds a water tank, makes nobody fun, teases mysteries that aren't mysteries, and sends the best character on a pointless detour. The latter is uber-elf Galadriel (Morfydd Clark) who spends the premiere telling people to worry about Sauron. In response, people tell her not to worry about Sauron. That's one hour down, seven to go this season. Sound like a billion dollars yet?

J.R.R. Tolkien imagined Galadriel as an immortal who leaves a sunswept garden paradise because she yearns "to see the wide unguarded lands" of Middle-Earth and "to rule there a realm at her own will." Cate Blanchett played her in Peter Jackson's movies as a Vulcan Witch for Justice. The new Prime Video series (debuting with two episodes on Friday) soldiers her up on a vengeance kick. Millennia before Gollum, Galadriel is "Commander of the Northern Armies" and "the Warrior of the Wastelands." She free-solos up a frozen mountain alongside an ultra-mega waterfall. War claimed her brother and drenched the world in blood. She suspects vanquished Sauron still lingers and has hunted him for ageless decades. Most other elves think Sauron's gone forever. A lieutenant begs her to end the quest and go home, because their search party is approaching a land "where even sunlight fears to tread." This is not the only accidentally funny line, but it is the most brazenly dumb. Um, Mr. Elf Lieutenant, isn't the sun-scaring shadow country exactly where you should look for the wicked godmonster?

Galadriel narrates a history-lesson prologue. There is a battle montage, Mordor weirdness, then a hard cut to halfling antics. This is the precise structure that began 2001's The Fellowship of the Ring feature. Nori Brandyfoot (Markella Kavenagh) even looks like Elijah Wood's Frodo, all wide eyes and bushy hair — and the little Harfoot's journey begins with the arrival of a bearded outsider (Daniel Weyman). Obvious reference points do this show no justice. In Fellowship, Jackson cranked a trip to underground Moria into a cinematic horror-action-comedy rock opera. When an equivalent setting appears here, it's big, bright, and bland. It is where a dwarf complains to an elf: "You missed my wedding!" The mood is stilted, dull. They ride an elevator.

Despite all the streaming-war headlines, this series is nothing like HBO's concurrent Game of Thrones spinoff. House of the Dragon is a family drama plus dragons. The two Rings of Power episodes I've seen feel more like an eight-hour Infinity War, with disparate goods coalescing toward a big bad. The one thread that feels new concerns Arondir (Ismael Cruz Córdova) and Bronwyn (Nazanin Boniadi), star-crossed in a disputed land. He's an elf patrolling unruly humans who call him nasty names like "Knife Ears." She's a single mom whose sweet chats with Arondir cause social ruckus. Tensions are generational. Arondir remembers when the locals fought for evil. Bronwyn's fellow villagers despise the occupying force leftover from a conflict no human remembers.

I don't think Tolkien intended his elves to seem a tad fascist. And Jackson didn't worry about casting an ensemble of white British guys and white Americans talking British. Rings of Power casually diversifies its fictional races, a casting decision that's thankfully normal in contemporary fantasy. But unlike, say, House of the Dragon, this series also briefly takes fantasy-world racism seriously. The humans don't like Arondir. The Harfoots fear everyone else. "What have elves ever done to you?" Galadriel asks jerky Halbrand (Charlie Vickers), a human running from a brutal past.

Foregrounding inter-species anxiety is certainly a new Middle-Earth take. I worry it won't last. Violent forces converge quickly around Arondir and Bronwyn, which means those actors get one flirty scene before the action ramps up. A dwarf-elf alliance looms. There may be bigger things to worry about than, like, interpersonal relations. People keep finding a strange scary sigil, so congratulations, Rings of Power writers, you brought Sauron to television and made him a TV serial killer.
The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power Credit: Matt Grace/Prime Video Copyright: Amazon Studios Description: Orcs, as depicted in The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power
'Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power'
| Credit: Matt Grace/Prime Video

What do we want from The Lord of the Rings now? Tolkien tapped a well of myth at once elemental and post-modern, dragooning ancient moods of dark wizard fairy lore toward brave new worlds of super-powered planetary terror. He produced four proper novels, followed by The Silmarillion (posthumously collated, totally awesome) and then a half-century of the dead-writer version of lost Tupac tapes. (Rings of Power is officially "based on The Lord of the Rings and Appendices.") Age only enriches his vast imagination; somehow Sauron's All-Seeing Eye now perfectly summarizes the digital surveillance state. And Middle-Earth is still full of tantalizing mysteries along the margins, with subcontinental centuries of eldritch history broom-swept under phrases like "the South" and "the East."

You'd think a new tale would want to explore less-traveled corners of Tolkien's wide unguarded lands. And Rings of Power does conjure the elves' previously unseen homeland, Valinor, in two embarrassing ways. First, it's a babbling brook where cute kids frolic. Then, it's a heavenly light ray pouring out of parting clouds. The latter is almost a Monty Python special effect — and that's before one person decides, against the furthest stretch of fantasy logic, to swim across an ocean. Otherwise, the first two hours stick to seen-it-before places and boring situations. Officious cliff-adjacent elves proffer blank wisdom: "The same wind that seeks to blow out a fire may also cause its spread." Nori says Chosen One things: "It's like there's a reason this happened! Like I was supposed to find him!" Rising politician Elrond (Robert Aramayo) starts prepping a long-winded industrial project which will require "a work force greater than any ever assembled."

Tolkien's saga was anti-industrialization, which makes it hilarious that Rings of Power is an Amazon product. (Imagine Saruman throwing an Arbor Day party.) Much press has swirled around the production cost, but if a huge budget made great TV, we'd be on Terra Nova season 12. Showrunners J. D. Payne and Patrick McKay show no instinct for pacing. Some characters seem to teleport far distances, while others walk slowly between villages (despite horses, like, existing). A big sea attack looks unfinished, introducing a massive threat that's quickly forgotten. Director J. A. Bayona finds isolated moments of grandeur, but the helicopter shots get repetitive fast. The fights aren't quite up to the Walking Dead level, and the battles won't make any Crab Feeders nervous. Frequent cuts to an explanatory map are more funny than informative.

Amazon only made the two episodes available to critics. Maybe things pick up. New locations could feel less like Now That's What I Call Middle-Earth! karaoke. Owain Arthur and Sophia Nomvete have a sitcom-couple spark as Moria marrieds, while Peter Mullan is recognizably eerie under layers of dwarf makeup. Clark's a rising star who was unfathomably freaky in Saint Maud. She imports that film's obsessive mania to a role that (so far) mainly constitutes of the kind of random-encounter duels that torment Final Fantasy players. The other characters are so lame I was rooting for the orcs.

Viewers hungry for Middle-Earth Anything could be satisfied, and I guess you could argue Rings of Power is no worse than all the other expensively empty genre adventures (Altered Carbon, anyone?) that have proliferated through the streaming era. But this series is a special catastrophe of ruined potential, sacrificing a glorious universe's limitless possibilities at the altar of tried-and-true blockbuster desperation. Grade: C-

Quoted:
Bezzos  is going to lose his ass on this.

CHRISTOPHER STEVENS reviews The Lord Of The Rings: The Rings Of Power:
No turkey, however bloated and stupid, could ever be big enough to convey the mesmerising awfulness of Amazon's billion dollar Tolkien epic

   The budget for the project was a massive 'future-gambling' $1billion
   It cost Amazon $250 million alone just to secure the rights  to the prequel
   Aside from Sir Lenny Henry, the only well-known star cast is Peter Mullan
   Stevens says the script is cliche-laden, the acting is dire and the pace is laden

By Christopher Stevens For The Daily Mail

Published: 10:00 EDT, 31 August 2022 | Updated: 12:47 EDT, 31 August 2022
Rating:

Turkey is not the word. No turkey, however bloated and stupid, could ever be big enough to convey the mesmerising awfulness of Amazon's billion dollar Tolkien epic.

This is a disaster dragon – plucked, spatchcocked, with a tankerload of Paxo stuffed up its fundament, roasted and served with soggy sprouts.

The Lord Of The Rings: The Rings Of Power (Amazon Prime) is so staggeringly bad, it's hilarious. Everything about it is ill-judged to a spectacular extreme.

The cliche-laden script, the dire acting, the leaden pace, the sheer inconsistency and confusion as it lurches between styles – where do we start?

Let's start with the budget: a billion dollars. Let that sink in. One thousand million bucks, about £860,000,000, such a colossal investment even for Amazon that industry rumour says the brand is gambling its entire future as a film production company.

If this show fails, say insiders, executives could be forced to shut down Amazon Studios.

The book rights alone cost $250 million. And what did Amazon get for that? This is not a remake of Lord Of The Rings or The Hobbit. This is a prequel, based on the appendixes – the reams of footnotes dumped by J.R.R. Tolkien at the end of his Rings trilogy, chronicling millennia of turgid historical fantasy. That's right... the unreadable bits.

Whoever thought that was a wise buy must have been smashed out of their minds on miruvor, the elvish liquor.

There's no doubt we can see the budget. It casts a throbbing glow over the screen like a chestful of gold. Ultra-high definition computer graphics paint ivory cities in mountain passes and conjure gigantic monsters in palaces of dark magic.

But magnificent visuals are meaningless if nobody knows who the audience is meant to be. And it's impossible to guess whether The Rings Of Power is meant for children, for hardcore fans or for general viewers – because it fails them all.

One fight sequence features elf princess Galadriel in acrobatic action against an angry troll, who pops up from off-stage like an adversary in a Dungeons & Dragons boardgame.

Galadriel (Morfydd Clark) cartwheels and whirls her enchanted sword before despatching the giant fiend with a bloodless blow. It's highly stylised, like a Japanese manga cartoon.

An episode later, the healer Bronwyn (Nazanin Boniadi) and her son fight an orc, and this time the violence is as brutal as anything in Game Of Thrones.

They stab it, spear it, run it through, hang it and finally saw through its neck with a knife – before Bronwyn, soaked in blood, displays the head as a trophy. Small children and persons of a nervous disposition should not watch.

Then the tale flies back to the Harfoots, prehistoric hobbits that wear garlands of acorns and dress in rags, as though they've escaped from the set of Worzel Gummidge.

Led by Lenny Henry as Sadoc, the Harfoots talk in a garble of Jamaican, Irish and Zummerset accents. They're loveable and funny, in a slapstick way. Poppy Proudfellow (Megan Richards) trips on an expedition to scrump blackberries, and falls flat in a puddle.

When she lifts her muddy face to the camera, like Oliver Hardy, she sighs, 'Enchanting.'

Harfoot-land is cute... until old Mr Brandyfoot slips and snaps his leg, with a crack that would make the cast of Casualty wince.

One disconnected style follows wildly after another. A static scene in which elves journey by ship is conceived as a PreRaphaelite painting – each actor stock still in silver armour, swords clasped to their chests, long hair rippling, eyes fixed on the horizon in pious awe. Inspired by a flock of birds, they lift their voices in a heavenly choir.

There's a lot of this quasi-religious imagery. The first episode begins with a cod Bible reading: 'There was a time when the world was so young, there had not been a sunrise, but even then there was light.'

Popular culture invents blether like this to replace real religion. It's scientology for the superhero movie era.

'Year gave way to year, century gave way to century,' the narrator continues, and already this reviewer was giving way to laughter. Soon, every fresh clunker provoked such hoots that I had to keep pausing to gather my composure.

'It is said that the wine of victory is sweetest for those in whose bitter trials it is fermented,' says the elf Elrond (Robert Aramayo) to Galadriel. And I'm off again.

'If but a whisper of a rumour of the threat you perceive proves true...' he goes on, until I'm weeping with laughter.

Bronwyn and her boyfriend Arondir the elf share some marvellous exchanges: 'I must follow the passage,' he tells her, pointing to an underground cavern.

'You don't know what's down there!' she cries.

'That,' he replies portentously, 'is the reason I must go.'

Without a shred of irony, Galadriel declares to her elf platoon, 'The order is given! We march at first light!'

She can't have seen the wonderful skit by Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon in The Trip, where they spend a car journey wondering why warriors in terrible historical dramas always 'leave at first light' ('They never leave at 9.30-ish.')

Bronwyn hasn't watched it either. She urges villagers to flee: 'If there are any of you here who want to live, we make for the elven tower at first light.'

Even when there's no dialogue, some of the acting is abysmal. Galadriel's elf patrol, caught in a snowstorm, battle their way across the screen with their arms outstretched like a troupe of mimes.

At least they're not talking. Most of the elf scenes are rigid, as two characters in robes take it in turns to dump mounds of exposition over each other's heads.

'An alliance with the dwarves would be the diplomatic achievement of the age,' Celebrimbor (Charles Edwards from Downton Abbey) tells Elrond.

Cue a visit to dwarf-world, where Elrond challenges the prince (Owain Arthur) to a rock-breaking competition. One of them hits a rock with a hammer! Then the other one hits a rock with a hammer! This goes on for some time.

If the cast list seems a little obscure, that's intentional. Aside from Sir Lenny, the only well-known star is Peter Mullan, who plays the king of a dwarfs.

Hiring an experienced and subtle actor, even if he is in a massive prosthetic nose and filmed to appear four feet tall, might seem canny decision.

It isn't. Mullan's talent simply highlights how woeful everything and everyone else is. The effect is like sticking Richard Burton in an am-dram pantomime.

Burton was famously expensive, of course. Cleopatra, in which he starred with future wife Elizabeth Taylor, cost $31m... the most expensive film ever, in 1963.

Think of it – a mere $31m! That would barely buy you a pair of Lenny Henry's hairy fake feet.

The Lord of The Rings: The King of Power: What did the critics say?

The Guardian

Rating:

The visual splendour of this rich, gorgeous Tolkien drama will make you gawp throughout it makes House of Dragon look amateur.

I love Galadriel (Morfydd Clark) the fighter. She is valiant, flawed and haughty, as bloody-minded as she is brilliant, scarred by the horrors of war.

This is enormously enjoyable TV, a cinematic feast.

Entertainment Weekly

Amazon's prequel is kind of a catastrophe.

It takes six or seven things everyone remembers from the famous movie trilogy, adds a water tank, makes nobody fun, teases mysteries that aren't mysteries, and sends the best character on a pointless detour.

The Independant

Rating:

The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power sets out its sprawling epic fantasy credentials right from the off: even its title seems like it could be split into multiple instalments.

While The King Of Power might be a brand new story, it still has plenty of authentic Tolkienesque charm to go along with the best production value money can buy.

Variety

From this prelude onward, The Rings of Power narrative adopts a solemn and awestruck approach.

The first two episodes are admirably concise and compelling in their introductions.

Empire

Rating:

Lavish and sweeping, The Rings Of Power puts its money where its mouth is.

The immensely fun Dwarves are Scottish-tinged and larger than life, canny and caring all at once.

It might take a second to get accustomed to these new characters, but the signs are that it will be worthwhile.

NME

Rating:

'Don't the great tales never end?' asks hobbit Samwise Gamgee during a slower moment in The Lord Of The Rings. He's talking about his own journey through J. R. R. Tolkien's epic fantasy world – but he might as well be referring to the franchise itself.

As a start, this is an excellent one.

The Times

Rating:

Despite the inventiveness that the creators have had to deploy to populate Tolkien’s world with fresh, non-canonical characters, the whole thing has the vibe of terrified executives carrying an exceedingly expensive vase across a slippery floor.

Perhaps two episodes aren’t enough to judge, and we are indeed gearing up for the greatest and most gripping fantasy TV series ever made. But I’m certainly not there yet.


CHRISTOPHER STEVENS reviews The Lord Of The Rings: The Rings Of Power

Quoted:
Put a fork in it, Grace fucking Randolph said the lead actress can’t act and is a Mary Sue + Karen after her viewing with other film critics. Grace Randolph https://www.ar15.com/media/mediaFiles/459941/2CC503BD-8E55-406A-93A4-36227D4DDC4A_jpe-2509884.JPG

Quoted:
Put a fork in it, Grace ducking Randolph said the lead actress can’t act and is a Mary Sue + Karen after her viewing. Grace Randolph

Quoted:

What she is actually saying aside, the way she she talks is so annoying I have no idea how anyone could listen to her for more than 30 seconds and actually want to hear more.

Quoted:

Heard that a little bit ago on Gary's Nooner.

'The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power' is beautiful, banal boredom
J.R.R. Tolkien's Elves and orcs return in Amazon Prime Video's prequel series, estimated to be the most expensive show ever made
Review by Inkoo Kang
August 31, 2022 at 10:00 a.m. EDT
Morfydd Clark, center left, as Galadriel, and Benjamin Walker as High King Gil-galad in "The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power." (Prime Video)
Comment

Can you spend your way to the next "Game of Thrones?" Jeff Bezos   the world's second-richest man and, incidentally, the owner of The Washington Post   certainly appears to have tried.

According to news reports, the Amazon founder and J.R.R. Tolkien fan had his company plunk down an estimated $250 million just for the rights to make a TV show based on "The Lord of the Rings." The resulting series, debuting Thursday, will be the most expensive ever made.

But you already know what I do: If money were all it took to make the next fantasy monoculture phenomenon, it would've happened by now.

Amazon Prime Video's "The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power" arrives 21 years after the first film in Peter Jackson's theatrical trilogy   and less than two weeks after HBO's own attempt to milk whatever goodwill "Game of Thrones" has left through its prequel series, "House of the Dragon." Whereas the Westeros drama plays up its parent show's penchant for shock, pulp and gore, the Middle-earth saga, in line with Jackson's adaptations, is far more family-friendly. Though the eight-part debut season portends an imminent war between Elves and orcs   with Dwarves, humans and a precursor to the Hobbit race called the Harfoots in the mix   the copious and choppily edited action in the first two episodes (those screened for critics) is bloodless and computer-effects-driven. Its defining influence isn't "Game of Thrones's" epic scale but Marvel's neuteredness. If the production design weren't so spectacular (and the characters and settings bought up by Amazon), "The Rings of Power" wouldn't be all that out of place on Disney Plus.

'House of the Dragon' is 'Game of Thrones' with more wigs, less grandeur

To be fair, the Lord of the Rings franchise was meant for all ages. But it's not clear who "The Rings of Power" is for. Based largely on the appendixes   the appendixes!   to "The Lord of the Rings" novel, it takes place some 3,000 years before the events of that book. Already given the green light for five seasons (with a possible spinoff in the works), inexperienced showrunners J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay, who have only uncredited writing work on "Star Trek Beyond" to their name on IMDb, have said their goal is to make "a 50-hour show" from material covered in just a few minutes in Jackson's movies. In total, the series' budget is expected to top $1 billion. That should be fairly easy to surpass: The first season alone cost $465 million, according to the Hollywood Reporter, and that's without factoring in the initial money to secure the IP.
Amazon's television series "The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power" had its premiere at London's Leicester Square on Aug. 30. (Video: Reuters)

Opinion: Our new fantasy show is definitely a prequel to something you love

I've spent this review thus far focusing more on "The Rings of Power's" development than its contents because there's so little of note in the actual show. The characters   including Elves Galadriel and Elrond, played by Cate Blanchett and Hugo Weaving in the films   are phyllo-dough thin, and the plots not much more substantial. Exiled from her childhood home of Valinor by a centuries-long war that claimed her older brother, this younger Galadriel (Morfydd Clark) won't give up the fight despite the lack of orc sightings in years. (Outside of combat, Elves tend to live forever.)

There's also a boisterous young Harfoot seeking adventure named Nori (Markella Kavenagh)   an anomaly among her insular, nomadic community   so archetypal her refrain might as well be "I want to be where the people are, there must be more than this provincial life!" She soon gets her wish when an ailing stranger (Daniel Weyman)   tall and angular of face   is found nearby spent, amnesiac and strongly implied to be the story's antagonist.

Many miles away, a human healer, Bronwyn (Nazanin Boniadi), and an Elven sentry, Arondir (Ismael Cruz C rdova), entertain a probably doomed cross-species flirtation. Elrond (Robert Aramayo), a member of the Elf king's court, has his own challenges maintaining a friendship with the Dwarven Prince Durin (Owain Arthur), who could prove a crucial ally in the battle against the orcs. Despite Jackson's claim that the "Rings of Power" creative team ghosted him, they borrow from and build on the character designs, fairyland aesthetics and musical landscape he created for the films. (Expect singing   a lot of it.)

"The Rings of Power" seems to be banking on dazzling Tolkien fans with soaring sights of exotic lands they may not have seen before: Middle-earth, of course, but also Valinor, a holy land where the immortals reside, and the island kingdom of N menor, whose fall is written in the books. (Like Jackson's films, the series was shot in New Zealand.) But for audiences not already invested in the comings and goings of the pointy-eared folk, the series doesn't provide much reason to care.

The performances are serviceable but unremarkable, while the dialogue is particularly corny and inartful, with too many intoned monologues about the search for "the light" or the ever-vague nature of evil. The fate of many worlds hangs in the balance, but the uninspired opulence on screen spark in the imagination only visions of bills going up in smoke. Rarely has danger felt so dull.

The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power debuts with two episodes Thursday at 9 p.m. Eastern time on Amazon Prime Video. New episodes stream weekly on Fridays.

Rings Of Power Review: A Storytelling Atrocity With Bush-League Production And Acting So Bad, It's Offensive. But, There's A Black Dwarf 5/5 Stars.
Entertainment · Aug 31, 2022 · BabylonBee.com
Article Image

Go back, in your mind, to the worst date you have ever had. There you are, using a napkin to tie a tourniquet around your leg under the table, trying desperately to take your mind anywhere but the inescapable train wreck unfolding in front of you. That's the closest you can come to understanding what it's like watching Amazon's billion-dollar project The Rings of Power.

I would say the script sounded like it was written by a drunk middle-schooler, but that would be an insult to both alcohol and middle-schoolers. Every line is a tired-out cliché, stolen from a bad movie and mashed together with all the verbal dexterity of a crack-addled ferret. I cannot in good conscience describe the plot, because the word "plot" has nothing to do with this fulminant disaster. I've had nightmares that made more sense than whatever abomination of the English language this is.

As for the production, one strongly suspects that five years ago, people were sitting around doing mushrooms when they said, "Hey! What if we took the worst parts of Glee, added SimCity, and then threw in SOME ELVES?" Thus, Rings of Power was born. Not more than twelve minutes was spent over the past five years thinking about anything beyond that mushroom-fueled vision.

The acting makes you feel like the people on screen have something very personal against you. Like, they want to harm you by how uncomfortably bad it is. After two minutes watching, you'll lose your faith in humanity. After three, you'll want to remove your eyes with a melon baller.

There is a black dwarf though, which is great. Five out of five stars.

Quoted:
Just for posterity, the babylon bee's satire review:

https://babylonbee.com/news/rings-of-power-review-game-of-thrones-meets-simcity-meets-glee-and-i-am-here-for-it

Quoted:
Pretty dumb to spend that much on Tolkien IP and then write your own content. They should have just made their own big budget original woke fantasy series.  Oh, no one would watch it? I'll have a coke.