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Ep 36- Sights and Sounds of Middle Earth
23 Plays2 months ago
We finally dive into the movies with an emphasis on our special interests of soundtrack, costume design, and Aragorn! Join us as we ask the big questions: what's a leitmotif? How many hugs are in the movie? And why is Aragorn so hot?
Covers The Lord of The Rings: Fellowship of the Ring (Extended Edition) (2001)
Recommended
Transcript
Experience of Watching 'Hadestown' in New York
00:00:00
Speaker
We also haven't recorded since I saw Hadestown. Oh my god, yes. I have heard that many tears were shed and that it was beautiful. Oh, absolutely. It was it was absolutely gorgeous.
00:00:12
Speaker
I had a wonderful time. I went with my roommate and um their partner, who is one of my other friends. We took a weekend trip to New York to see Hadestown.
00:00:25
Speaker
It was incredible. We got to see Alison Russell playing Persephone, and she's just an incredible incredible musician. And we saw a couple of understudies and swings.
00:00:37
Speaker
So we saw, we didn't see Lilius White as Hermes. We saw Malcolm Armwood, who was one of the understudies, and he was phenomenal. He has this gorgeous, rich, like Motown-style voice.
00:00:50
Speaker
Ooh. And because he's he's younger, he was sort of playing Hermes as kind of like that elder brother, like mentor type figure to Orpheus rather than as like a grandparent type figure in the way that like Lilius White or André de Shields would play Hermes.
00:01:08
Speaker
We saw the understudy for Orpheus, Brandon Cameron, who was solid, I think was probably the least impressive part of the main cast.
00:01:19
Speaker
but was still a Broadway actor. So. Yeah. So the bar is pretty high for talent. Yeah, exactly. Eurydice switched to the understudy halfway through.
00:01:31
Speaker
We saw a, so we started with ah Haley Kilgore, who's like the principal for Eurydice right now. um And either she was sick or she got injured because in the second act, ah we got Casey De La Cruz, who was one of the understudies.
00:01:45
Speaker
And they were, it was very interesting. They're very different physically and also have very different voices, but it created kind of unintentional storytelling. Like, it like unintentional physical storytelling because Casey De La Cruz is like physically a lot smaller than Haley Kilgore.
00:02:06
Speaker
And so... it almost created a sense of Eurydice physically losing pieces of herself as she's in Hadestown. Oof.
00:02:19
Speaker
And like like physically shrinking in on herself, not simply emotionally. Mm-hmm. Which was kind of really cool. Yeah.
00:02:31
Speaker
Alison Russell was fucking phenomenal. And the chorus was just made up of like... Incredibly fucking ripped people. Oh, not the adjective I was expecting, but all right, I'm not complaining.
00:02:46
Speaker
Well, I mean, they're in the second act when they're dressed all as as workers in Hadestown. They're all wearing the same outfit, which is like a cap, brown overalls, and then like a band around the center of their chest.
00:03:03
Speaker
And... I'm bi. I'm an equal opportunity ogler. That's a good line. I like that. It was a good look for everyone.
00:03:17
Speaker
I feel like that's slutty in the same way that fingerless gloves on a man are slutty. like You didn't need to do that, but you did, and I like it. Please continue.
00:03:29
Speaker
We saw Tom Hewitt is currently playing Hades. He also has just a gorgeous, gorgeous bass voice. It doesn't have like the sheer sort of like growling power that Patrick Page does on the cast album.
00:03:43
Speaker
But Patrick Page's voice is so low that at times there isn't really melody to his parts. Whereas Hewitt can deliver of like moving, moving lines that occasionally then drop down for growls or pedal tones to enhance particular phrases.
00:03:59
Speaker
I am also bisexual and a growling voice in music. It's, it does things to my brain that make it not work.
00:04:09
Speaker
Yeah.
00:04:12
Speaker
I have not listened to the entire cast album. I know the plot because it's a, it's Orpheus and Eurydice and B
Greek Mythology and Family Ties
00:04:20
Speaker
I've read the Wikipedia summary of the show, but have I told you my very wholesome secondhand family story about Hadestown?
00:04:29
Speaker
No. So I have family in Brooklyn. um One of my aunts is a costume designer and she does a lot of smaller shows, like nothing on Broadway that people would have heard of, but she's a working designer.
00:04:41
Speaker
she So she obviously is very tapped into the theater scene in New York. And somehow she had never heard of Hadestown until my cousin, who was probably eight at the time, who was just the littlest Hellenistic pagan, got so fucking into Percy Jackson that she just earnestly believed in Greek gods, went to a camp half-flood themed summer camp fully 1000% all in on Greek gods maybe still is I haven't asked her about it in a while but she went up to my aunt oh and went mom do you know about Orpheus and Eurydice do you know about Hadestown and she was like what and so my little baby cousin just gave her the most impassioned heartbreaking beat for beat retelling of the story because she had listened to the cast album and presumably also read up on the original myth
00:05:33
Speaker
that literally brought my aunt to tears by the end of it. And she went, well, fuck, I have to take this kid to see Hadestown. And so they did, obviously. It was amazing and magical. But just to have a little child out of the blue just deliver the most beautiful, sad tragedy you've ever heard.
00:05:51
Speaker
I love that for her. I'm glad she achieved her dream. I fucking love oral tradition. It's it's so good. Good shit. Also, it was... we We went into the theater and there was like snowflakes just starting to fall. And we come out of the theater like three hours later and there's like four inches of snow on the ground.
00:06:09
Speaker
Oh my god. That may be a little bit of an exaggeration, but there was a lot of snow on the ground. There was a lot. It was magical. It was very, very cool. It was... You you entered another...
00:06:21
Speaker
world and then come out into an entirely different one than the one you left and the one that you had just spent a few hours in. So you've had this transformative magical experience and now you have this transformative
Storytelling Techniques in 'Hadestown'
00:06:34
Speaker
magical weather.
00:06:34
Speaker
I love it. you Yeah, I would absolutely, absolutely sing ah see that song again. ah i i sort of just diverted to calling it a song because the whole the whole piece starts off by saying it's an old song, it's a tragedy.
00:06:53
Speaker
isn Which I love because it's it's a callback to Greek plays in general where the chorus tells you exactly what's going to happen.
00:07:05
Speaker
in the first few lines of the play.
00:07:10
Speaker
And then they do that exact same thing in Hadestown. You know, almost beat for beat, how it's going to go. And yet at the end, you're so still rooting for Orpheus to, maybe this time he'll come out on top.
00:07:24
Speaker
ah Maybe this time they'll make it.
00:07:30
Speaker
And it's like, we we, we know what happens. Yeah. Mm-hmm. We know there is no space for Orpheus and Eurydice to succeed. We know there's no space for Hades and Persephone to succeed in repairing their love either.
00:07:42
Speaker
It simply is a song that we sing again and again and again and again over time 5,000 fucking years. Oof. fucking years I love old stories, as may say have been spoken about on this podcast. And I also love storytelling through music, which we're going talk about a lot today.
00:08:12
Speaker
Shall we pivot to a much more recent story?
Introduction to 'The Fandom Apprentice' Podcast
00:08:16
Speaker
Let's pivot to music.
00:08:36
Speaker
everyone And welcome back to another episode of The Fandom Apprentice. My name is Rin. I grew up with Tolkien other fantasy series, read to me by my dad, fell in love with fantasy, and decided to share that with my very good friend, Sam.
00:08:55
Speaker
Hello, I'm Sam. I'm the other one. We have now completed all of the books and the first movie, the extended edition, of course. And this has been very exciting for me. Also wild to just experience the whole story of Fellowship in the span of a couple hours as opposed to months and months and months. It's to You know that it says something about my experience of the story when the extended edition is
Transition from 'The Fellowship of the Ring' Book to Movie
00:09:22
Speaker
comparatively quick.
00:09:24
Speaker
Like, oh, this is nothing. I mean, if you listen to like the audio books, they're about 60 hours long, like all three of them together is about 60 hours worth of audio.
00:09:36
Speaker
And, you know, these pages long descriptions of the environment are replaced in the movies with these sweeping, sweeping shots. We'll get there. Yes.
00:09:49
Speaker
So yeah, we watched the movie on our little trip to New Hampshire that we took last week. And most of us there had seen it before.
00:10:03
Speaker
Yeah, I think maybe Miles and I were the only ones who hadn't. Right. I don't think, yeah, I think both of you were the ones who were new. And just for our our listeners, we're not going to go into trivia and like the, oh, how did they do this?
00:10:22
Speaker
Like one little piece. That shit has saturated the internet for 20 years. Yeah, there is nothing new that we can say about trivia.
00:10:34
Speaker
But what we can do is we can analyze it through the lens of the other analysis that we've done on this show and our particular interests, the things that we want to deep dive into.
00:10:46
Speaker
So we're going for depth rather than breadth here. And I think that everyone can agree that's the best choice. Yeah, we're we're we're also sort of not going to be talking about the story because, as we've mentioned, we've spent...
00:11:02
Speaker
I think literally hundreds of hours on the story Lord of florida the Rings. Yeah, I think that's pretty solid at this point. So we've we've sort of beat that one to death.
00:11:13
Speaker
So instead, we're just going to talk about fun, like things that we noticed that we really enjoyed, things that interest us specifically about the series.
00:11:25
Speaker
And really, we're going to we're going to hone in on visuals and sound, the things that the movie brings to the viewer that the book can't.
Cast and Crew Insights of 'The Lord of the Rings'
00:11:36
Speaker
Mm-hmm. Real quick, just for some minor notes of Fellowship. Fellowship of the Ring came out in 2001. It was filmed alongside the other two movies. So they filmed all of these at the same time, which means so they filmed some scenes from later movies earlier.
00:11:58
Speaker
um Some scenes later, it was directed by Peter Jackson, screenplay written by Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens, and Peter Jackson, and features such actors as Elijah Wood as Frodo Baggins, Ian McKellen as Gandalf, Viggo Mortensen as Aragorn, Sean Astman as Sam, Sean Bean as Boromir, Dominic Monaghan as Mary, Billy Boyd as Pippin, John Rhys-Davies as Gimli, Orlando Bloom as Legolas, Liv Tyler as Aragorn, Cate Blanchett as Galadriel,
00:12:28
Speaker
Ian Holm as Bilbo, Andy Serkis as Gollum, Sir Christopher Lee as Saruman, and Hugh Weaving as Elrond, among other various actors. Not to super interrupt your flow, but it was very funny. You did say Liv Tyler as Aragorn instead of Arwen, which is hilarious to imagine in my mind. And I just want everyone listening to all to envision that because, again, we're bisexual.
00:12:52
Speaker
We're down for that. So you're welcome. Please continue. genderbend Aragorn today. Listen, Ben Aragorn anyway, he'll let me. Collectively, the films had 30 Academy Award nominations and 17 wins.
00:13:09
Speaker
w I have my criticisms of the films, but I still really, really enjoy them. They're super fun. They have a super tight visual style.
00:13:22
Speaker
The sound, the effects, everything is just fucking excellent. And we'll we'll dive deeper into that. But I want to touch on a couple of actors' backgrounds really quick. A lot of these actors were pretty young when they started, but I want to touch on Ian McKellen, Viggo Mortensen, Cate Blanchett, and Sir Christopher Lee.
00:13:40
Speaker
Which is good, especially for me, because I do not know celebrities. I do not know movies. This is a fun fact about me that many of my friends know. I just haven't seen most movies. It's not my go-to form of media.
00:13:55
Speaker
So I don't know anything about actors or celebrities in general. So you could tell me literally anything about these people, and I'll believe that it's true, but I trust you to be a diligent researcher.
00:14:06
Speaker
Yeah, I'm not going to talk too much about their resumes, um their filmography in particular, because that's all freely available on their Wikipedia pages. But a lot of these actors were super young.
00:14:18
Speaker
When they came into this movie, they had, you know, some resumes. Some of them were fans of the of the books. Some of them were not. Sir Ian McKellen, who played Gandalf, came out as gay in 1988 when And is a co-founder of the Stonewall LGBT rights lobby group in the UK, which is one of the largest ah queer rights organizations in the UK.
00:14:45
Speaker
Holy shit, that's awesome. His background is in theater. He's been acting professionally since 1961. Oh my god. And has consistently since then been on stage and screen.
00:15:01
Speaker
he He has hundreds of acting credits. across stage, big screen, small screen. He, at the same time as these movies coming out, was also playing Magneto in the X-Men movies.
00:15:17
Speaker
All right, awesome. So he was already a pretty big name at the time. Viggo Mortensen as Aragorn was Wasn't quite as big a name, um but he's got a very impressive background.
00:15:36
Speaker
He's... Dana... I'd say his background is impressive.
00:15:43
Speaker
Sorry, just every time we mention Aragorn, you can just imagine that I've edited out a dreamy sigh. Yeah. ah Just continue. He's fucking gorgeous, for starters. Yeah.
00:15:56
Speaker
Yeah, and I just can't not talk about it, but we have a show to make, so I will attempt to restrain myself. ah He can restrain me if he likes. ah but Or vice versa.
00:16:11
Speaker
Viggo Mortensen is a published author. He has poetry multiple published poetry books in three languages. He writes poems. He's sensitive. He's an artist. He's lived in Venezuela, Denmark, Argentina, and the U.S.
00:16:26
Speaker
so yeah He speaks at least three languages fluently. The only big name film that I really recognized on his resume from prior to Lord of the Rings was Psycho.
00:16:39
Speaker
He also has been super outspoken politically for the last 25 years um since doing press tours for these movies, including after the US invasion of Iraq, doing press tours for these movies, wearing a shirt that says no more blood for oil.
00:16:58
Speaker
Oh, holy shit. Okay. rules. He's been outspoken politically against Israeli occupation in Palestine since 2002. Amazing.
00:17:10
Speaker
He also has been outspoken for Catalan independence. Oh my god. in Spain. He has donated money to various left-wing political parties, ah Sinn Féin in Ireland.
00:17:24
Speaker
home He spoke out against the Israeli invasion of Gaza in the last few years. So he's just kind of a fucking gem.
00:17:35
Speaker
Was he grown in a lab? there There are multiple people in real life who I've described as sapphic catnip. He's just human catnip. He's just, that's an A plus guy.
00:17:48
Speaker
but yeah That's phenomenal. I didn't know any of that. Amazing. Well, and that's not even getting into his acting skills. He read Fellowship of the Ring on the plane to New Zealand.
00:18:00
Speaker
He had never read Fellowship before. Oh my god. Before getting this role. He did not know about Aragorn prior to getting this role. He convinced Peter Jackson to allow Aragorn to say more of his lines in Elvish because he, as a bilingual as ah as a multilingual person, was like, Aragorn's also multilingual. let's Let's have him speak in the languages he speaks.
00:18:25
Speaker
Amazing. He also convinced the costume designers to let him carry a bow. because he was like, I'm a ranger. I'm out in the wild alone.
00:18:37
Speaker
i would have a bow. He had so much input on his costume. I didn't really have many more specific trivia bits about it, but yeah, he was involved. I did a lot of costume research. He also composed the music for the Lay of Beren and Luthien that he sings at one point.
00:18:54
Speaker
Stop. Oh my god. but Yeah, the little acapella rendition there that he sings is his composition. Perfect man. Yeah, I have nothing more to say on him. He's perfect. And every time he shows up on screen, I die a little inside. Mm-hmm.
00:19:14
Speaker
Cate Blanchett. I don't have too much to say about her. She plays Galadriel. She's fucking gorgeous. She's a classically trained Shakespearean actress. She also has been and outspoken activist for environmental rights, women's rights, immigrant rights, and has been involved with artists for Ceasefire the few years.
00:19:38
Speaker
And then finally, Sir Christopher Lee as Sauriman. Sir Christopher Lee is one of the oldest actors on the set. He passed away in 2015 at the age of 93. Oh, shit.
00:19:51
Speaker
so shit He is also very impressive. He is step cousins with Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond.
00:20:02
Speaker
Okay. He met Rasputin's assassins and later played Rasputin. That is dedication to research.
00:20:14
Speaker
I don't think it was as as research, but he met them, I think, when he was young and then later played Rasputin. That's wild. When he was attached to the ah RAF during the Second World War, he was in Naples and went and hiked to Vesuvius three days before it erupted.
00:20:33
Speaker
wow. He spoke at least four languages fluently. He was a talented fencer. He's the son of an Italian noblewoman and a British army officer. After the war, he helped hunt down Nazi war criminals.
00:20:49
Speaker
Amazing. He claimed to have been attached to special forces during World War II. Some people have said that he embellished his service record or allowed people to spread rumors about what he did that weren't fully true.
00:21:03
Speaker
but Peter Jackson does say at one point there's a direction in, I believe, Two Towers where someone gets stabbed in the back and Peter Jackson was giving direction and Christopher Lee goes, that's not what a man who's stabbed in the back sounds like.
00:21:20
Speaker
And Peter Jackson in the interview goes... so I suddenly remembered that he'd done some slightly clandestine things during the Second World War and probably knew a little bit more about me than this.
00:21:32
Speaker
Yeah. Or a little bit more than me about this. Jeez. His first acting credit is in 1947 and he continued through his death. He is also a heavy metal and opera singer.
00:21:45
Speaker
I did not expect either of those things. He's got, you know, that gorgeous bass voice. Yeah. He's also super fucking tall. He played Count Dracula for years in various films.
00:22:00
Speaker
He's just phenomenally fucking impressive. Yeah, God. And plays the best goddamn villain. Mm-hmm.
Financial Success of 'The Fellowship of the Ring'
00:22:10
Speaker
Later, i need to Google how much all these actors got paid for this movie, because what kind of fucking budget do you have to shell out to A, just make such a good movie, but B, to get all of these incredibly impressive people?
00:22:25
Speaker
The movie itself had a pretty high budget. the This movie alone had a budget of 93 million. What's that in today money? Well, let's find out. I mean, still an incomprehensibly big number.
00:22:38
Speaker
I can't imagine 93 million of anything. So in 1999, when this movie was made, Damn. Okay. ah hundred and seventy five million in twenty twenty four money damn okay so that's almost twice it brought in eight hundred and eighty seven million dollars at the box office in two thousand one money which in twenty twenty four was over a billion dollars. one point five over one point like Nearly billion dollars at the box office money.
00:23:13
Speaker
yeah so shows the scope that we're working with here Yes, these were very, very high budget films, and they remain some of the highest grossing films ever. So that's just a few little pieces on some of the actors that we see on screen.
00:23:30
Speaker
Do we want to get into sort of preliminary thoughts, observations before we dive into our special interests? Yes. So i did not take notes while I was watching the movie because I had just wanted to enjoy the movie.
00:23:44
Speaker
And so just thinking about it afterward, the things that stuck out to me, I had a couple of random little bits and bobs of thoughts. The first one is that the movie opens with Isildur and Sauron fighting, which first of all, establishes a generally chronological order that makes the movie a fucking breeze compared to the books because it's just all laid out nice and neat in order and comprehensible and there's not really a lot of flashbacks a plus but b seeing Sauron as a guy is weird I knew that he had on some level a physical body because he had a hand
00:24:20
Speaker
that could be cut off but it was still really jarring and strange i felt like i couldn't even be that scared of him because i wasn't used to associating all of his evil with a humanoid shape so i was just kind of going oh that's a guy in stupid looking armor but scary guy seeing hobbiton populated with so many hobbits was i was charmed instantly because we know again like we know on some level that there's a whole population besides our hobbits but to see it so full and thriving and there's so many little hobbit children and hobbits just doing their things were so cute imagine how fun it must have been to be a hobbit kid actor to just run around in
Character Dynamics and Relationships
00:25:03
Speaker
a field in a silly outfit
00:25:05
Speaker
And I think Peter Jackson's kid was one of one of the Hobbit actors. Oh, that's so cute. I mean, if I had a kid, I'd make them Hobbit movie, no question. I really love when when Bilbo is sitting telling the story of like pieces of the Hobbit to the Hobbit kids about the trolls.
00:25:23
Speaker
And you can tell that like these little kids are not you know professional actors, but it it flashes to one of the kids' faces as he's telling the story and the kid just goes, ah! And you can tell it was like somebody told this kid, okay, now gasp and look surprised.
00:25:38
Speaker
And they did their best and it's so cute. And also what a good way to just slip in a little bit of exposition about the story of The Hobbit by having it be a story told to children.
00:25:52
Speaker
oh Perfect. i I loved it. I loved it so much. Well, and the section about the trolls, later we see the trolls. Yeah. Which was very, very fun.
00:26:03
Speaker
And there's also so much hugging. I know that these movies are known for their depictions of affection, but I still was not prepared for all the hugging and I was delighted every time. Frodo launches himself at Gandalf when he sees his little cart rolling by and Gandalf just gives him a big hug. It's amazing. It made me so happy.
00:26:24
Speaker
and Another Hobbit thing that I enjoyed was that they introduced Rosie at the beginning of the fucking story, like they should have done in the books. If they had done in the books what they did in the movie, I never would have had a problem. Just that she's there. And Frodo goes, oh, go ask Rosie a dance and pushes Sam out into the party. That's literally all we needed. Just confirmation that this woman exists and that Sam has glapped eyes on her at least once.
00:26:48
Speaker
That's it. And so we got that. So Rosie gets a pass from me. I also love that she's taller than he is. oh, I didn't notice that. That's cute. think he'd like a strong woman.
00:27:00
Speaker
Yeah, I think to the way it was presented, it it does feel more in the movie as if Frodo and Sam are friends and not boyfriends as we were constantly reading them in the book.
00:27:14
Speaker
They're played a little more platonically, but it's not a bad interpretation No, not at all. And they do still obviously, and again, I've only seen the first movie so far, but they do still obviously have a very intense closeness. They put their faces much closer together than necessary, and that makes me happy. They're obviously comfortable with each other, and that was delightful.
00:27:37
Speaker
And also... Speaking of hobbits on the other end of comfort and happiness, Bilbo and Gandalf too, but mostly Bilbo is just a hair's breadth away from fucking losing it at any given moment.
00:27:50
Speaker
We see how unhinged and corrupted he is immediately. Whereas in the books, I feel like that's a little bit of a slower reveal. We have to put it together more.
00:28:01
Speaker
But I really, really enjoyed that but that. We see, oh no, something is wrong with this hobbit. And Gandalf is just
Setting and Mood Differences from Book to Movie
00:28:10
Speaker
exhausted. Gandalf is exhausted, but he is also himself kind of exhausting, which is just very fun.
00:28:19
Speaker
I felt like the role of Merry and Pippin was, it was reduced. It was kind of just converted to comic relief. Yeah, they don't really do a whole lot. They're just fucking around, setting off fireworks.
00:28:30
Speaker
They're fine. They're there, but they, in this movie, don't do much. Yeah, and we'll and we'll get more of them, and and it does, you know, mirror their growth over the book series.
00:28:46
Speaker
But for the first movie, they really just are kind of bumbling comedy. And we do still, though, see Gandalf's differing tolerances for them.
00:28:58
Speaker
For Merry, he's dispensing wizardly, grandfatherly advice, saying always follow your nose down in the cave. Whereas Pippin, he goes, I will fucking slam your head into this rock if you make one more sound.
00:29:12
Speaker
What did Pippin do to you? He did nothing. But it is very funny to see the difference in how he treats them. Other little... Bits the Council of Elrond is short.
00:29:23
Speaker
Thank God. Appreciated that. You had a thing. I was going to go back briefly to Bree. Yes. Yes. Just for roughly chronological order. The Prancing Pony is much shadier than in the books.
00:29:39
Speaker
yeah Whereas I felt like i felt like it's ah it's a nice meeting place. And yeah, there's kind of some shady people in the corner, but that's weird. That stands out as strange. Whereas here it feels like like this is a shady place.
00:29:54
Speaker
Yeah. And I always sort of imagined Bree to be kind of like a pastoral town rather than sort of a denser medieval city as it's presented in the movies. But design choices, that's fine.
00:30:06
Speaker
Also... When we get our first shot of Strider... In here, you laughed out loud. did. You fucking lost it.
00:30:20
Speaker
It's just, it's so comical. The dark, broody stranger in the corner. You can feel the DM coaxing their party to talk to this character they've created.
00:30:31
Speaker
And the party's just going, oh, but I want to talk to Boblin the Goblin over there. What's his deal? What's his mom's favorite color? Let's go see if he has a dog. Does he need anything? Whereas Strider is just sitting brooding and he's fucking cloak all by himself and like you said because the rest of the inn is presented as being kind of seedy it loses some of its impact whereas because like you I was imagining it being kind of pastoral it being a really nice pleasant place where everyone's having a good time and drinking and hanging out and singing songs And then spooky guy in the corner.
00:31:04
Speaker
But here he's just sitting by himself for no reason. And he's just a little bit comical instead of impressive. That said... When his hand pops out of nowhere, grabs Frodo and goes, you know, calls him Mr. Underhill and shoves him up the stairs, gets to the top and throws back his hair, throws back his hood.
00:31:28
Speaker
And he's greasy and also hot. um And I'm like, fuck, sir, do you want to manhandle me up the stairs and shove me into a side room? Because we can do that.
00:31:40
Speaker
ah There were multiple points where Aragorn would do something just completely normal and we would go, this is pornographic. This is indecent. I can't believe that this is in this movie.
00:31:53
Speaker
And maybe it's because our D&D group is six bisexual disasters, more or less. Yeah.
00:32:05
Speaker
Not to assign identities to everyone in our D&D group, but where are you on the, there's there' is only one ah identity gradient and it's from bisexual to disaster.
00:32:19
Speaker
Now, I can be corrected if I'm wrong, but I don't think Tolkien fully named the Hobbit meals in the book. Besides supper and elevensies.
00:32:31
Speaker
I think he might have, but I have a way to find that out through my very legitimate sources. Let's see. Control F. He does say that hobbits like six meals a day when they can get them.
00:32:45
Speaker
I searched for the word luncheon and didn't find anything. What's second breakfast? There's one mention of elevensies. Let's see, Second Breakfast. And nothing about Second Breakfast, although is possible they might have been named in The Hobbit.
00:33:03
Speaker
I don't know off the top of my noggin, but at least in the Lord of the Rings books as such, I do not believe they're named. Yeah, so i I couldn't remember whether it's the movies that have given rise to the popular names of for the Hobbit meals.
00:33:23
Speaker
Merry and Pippin discuss seven meals rather than the six that Tolkien mentions. Breakfast, second breakfast, elevensies, luncheon, afternoon tea, dinner, and supper. Mm-hmm. Anyway, just an observation.
00:33:37
Speaker
And then my one other piece before we get to the Council of Elrond is the way that Aragorn enters the scene in the fight at Weathertop. Mm-hmm. Where in Frodo's vision, he's highlighted in black while the wraiths are glowing in white.
00:33:53
Speaker
Whereas in the non-Ring world, the Mordor characters are frequently highlighted in dark colors. They they wear...
00:34:04
Speaker
you know You have the Black Riders, you have the grayness and darkness of Mordor and all the orcs, and then the elves and goodness is is much more and light colors.
00:34:18
Speaker
And so it's just kind of a cool shot, a cool juxtaposition there of things being flipped in like the in the upside down. Yeah, and we can talk about this more too when we talk about special effects in later movie episodes.
00:34:31
Speaker
But the whole vibe of the ring world and the way that that's shown is really good. It's really disorienting and upsetting. Putting on the ring is not pleasant to do and it's not pleasant to watch and it works really well.
00:34:48
Speaker
My only piece from the Council of Elrond is that the shots of the reflections of everybody arguing in the ring. Yes.
00:35:00
Speaker
Like Frodo's sheer focus on the ring and showing us the reflections of everybody arguing as sort of a representation of how much Frodo's focusing on that.
00:35:13
Speaker
Whereas where the ring is in the center of his thoughts, not the conflict around him. There's also a lot of, and this is throughout the whole movie, not just in the Council of Elrond, long lingering shots of people's faces when they're talking and of the ring itself.
00:35:36
Speaker
So yeah, very frequently we're very tight in on somebody's face. Which is kind of, it's an interesting direction choice. I don't know enough about moviemaking to comment more on it.
00:35:49
Speaker
There's also just a lot of weird, funky camera angles. We get a Gandalf POV inside Bag End at one point. And it's just, it's fun. do You never know what the camera's going to do at any given moment. It's very lively.
00:36:03
Speaker
But all I had to say about The Council of Elrond was that it was short. It was over quickly. And I appreciated that. And Boromir is a thousand percent more likable
Boromir and Aragorn: Character Costumes and Portrayals
00:36:13
Speaker
in the movies. Now we know that I've gone on a journey and I appreciate and i respect Boromir more.
00:36:17
Speaker
But we remember at the beginning of that journey when I hated his guts. And in the movie, he's just he's a little bit forceful in his opinions.
00:36:28
Speaker
But I don't have him written off as a total douchebag right from the jump. I was sort of viewing him as like, he's a, well, he's a foil to Aragorn, but he's playing the arrogant warrior prince super well, while still managing to be this charismatic leader.
00:36:49
Speaker
You can see how, were he not as charismatic, were he not as forceful, you wouldn't want to follow him. Mm-hmm.
00:37:00
Speaker
But he has that force of personality that draws you to him. Yeah. And we also see him having some lighthearted moments with the Fellowship. We see him literally playing with Merry and Pippin, which is so cute and melted my heart.
00:37:14
Speaker
But all of... I think that represents all of the little moments of group bonding that they had in the story, but that we didn't get to see on the page that were why everyone loved him so much. And so just by getting a little bit of that, that helps make him so much more charming and so much more sympathetic. So I really appreciated that.
00:37:34
Speaker
Right after in the Council of Aron, right after Aragorn says that you have my sword line, before it goes to Legolas so he can have that you have my bow,
00:37:47
Speaker
There's a shot of Gandalf who fucking winks at Elrond. Oh my God. I missed that. Which is just a Gandalf going, I told you it would work out.
00:38:01
Speaker
I told you this was what was going to happen. We could have spared so much time. we're going to dive more into costumes in a few minutes.
00:38:13
Speaker
I know, because that's something you wanted to talk about. But when they're passing over Cahadras, I really took notice of the differences between Boromir and Aragorn's costumes.
00:38:30
Speaker
Because Aragorn, despite being Isildur's heir, is dressed very simply and his clothing is largely unadorned. Whereas Boromir's cloak is patterned with swirls and he's got embroidery on his tunic and his goatee is very neatly trimmed his sword is super fine his cloak is like velvet his shield is polished and Aragorn and his gear don't look dirty or mistreated but all of it is well used mm-hmm
00:39:04
Speaker
Nothing looks new. It looks like he has been in the wild, like he has been a warrior for many years. One of the lines from one of the costume designers that I read when I was researching my section was that Viggo Mortensen, again, A-plus guy, said that he really wanted to feel like Aragorn's costumes were lived in and that he hadn't just put them on for the movie.
00:39:27
Speaker
So, I mean, in addition to the storytelling element, that was also Viggo being like, no, no, no, you don't understand. he needs to He needs to be a grimy man. He needs to have the well-worn clothes for it to work.
00:39:40
Speaker
I had another observation later. The scene in the tower where Saruman is talking to Lurtz, the Uruk-hai captain, felt very Rocky Horror, Frankenfurter, and Rocky moment.
00:39:52
Speaker
Because Lurtz is just standing there like in a loincloth while Saruman walks around him and like gets up super close in his face. It's like, at any moment I expected him to break out into...
00:40:09
Speaker
You know, I've been making a man
00:40:15
Speaker
with long hair and a tan. mean, does have long hair, so there's that. I think the line is technically blonde hair and a tan, but long hair for the orc.
Memorable Scenes and Errors in 'The Fellowship of the Ring'
00:40:29
Speaker
Before we get to set pieces, I noticed one major costume goof. Which was during Boromir's death scene.
00:40:40
Speaker
His skin looked like it was rising up into his hairline. Oh. Because it was apparently nearly 100 degrees Fahrenheit when they were filming. And so, you know, sweat fucking up the makeup.
00:40:54
Speaker
Oh, no. Fucking up where they blended into the wig was a little bit off. um Whoops. I also love the parallels at the very end between Aragorn's pledge to Frodo.
00:41:10
Speaker
I would have gone with you to the end.
00:41:14
Speaker
Into the very fires of Mordor.
00:41:18
Speaker
with Boromir's last words.
00:41:23
Speaker
would have followed you, my brother.
00:41:27
Speaker
My captain.
00:41:32
Speaker
My king.
00:41:40
Speaker
So fucking good. Yeah. this This whole movie is just... super, super tight and both both visually, storyline-wise.
00:41:53
Speaker
And it's been it's been criticized for sort of taking the sweeping adventure and the subtleties of Tolkien's world and collapsing them down into like generic sword and sorcery fantasy.
00:42:08
Speaker
But I still think it tells the story well. If it's designed to be faster moving, if it's designed to be a little more aggressive, it does that for the format and for the audience.
00:42:26
Speaker
i I sort of see... this movie as kind of a separate piece of media. They're, they're incredible. There's some of the best adaptations of a book to, to screen that I've ever seen, but it's a different way of telling the story. It's, it's, it's, it's a retelling. It's, it's kind of like, it's a little like the mere wife is for Beowulf.
00:42:55
Speaker
Yeah. You've, you've made some changes to the overall story. to effectively tell the same story arc, if not an identical tale.
00:43:08
Speaker
Anyway, that's that's my sort of like general thoughts on the movie. but Yeah, my last sort of general thoughts were the sense of scale was really good, whether it was giant spaces or big crowds of enemies or really tight claustrophobic spaces it all worked amazingly textures the tactile-ness of it all I'll talk about more in my deep dive section and then I also had a question from ah one of my friends who knew that I was watching the movie but wasn't there with us and they wanted to know what I thought about Frodo as a protagonist so far and I know that there's been
00:43:46
Speaker
mixed reviews and some changes to the overall framing of the story because so much of Frodo's
Portrayal of Key Characters
00:43:52
Speaker
struggle is internal. I don't know about the other two movies, but at least in this one, he was super charming and really earnest and innocent. And I was just looking at him going, oh boy, he is going to break everything.
00:44:04
Speaker
All of the shining light will be gone from his eyes by the end of this story. He's just going to get progressively grimier. And unfortunately not in a hot way.
00:44:16
Speaker
There's not so much internal struggle in this one. It's a pretty straightforward movie protagonist. So in this one, he works. In future movies, I will probably be revisiting that idea.
00:44:28
Speaker
And we had also talked about that too at the end of the books of like, whose story is it? And who are we following? So that's a theme that's in my mind. But in terms of overall big thoughts, those are my overall big thoughts.
00:44:40
Speaker
Also, before we move on to our deep dive sections, obviously this is telling the same story that we have used to cite our rules of fantasy before. But just to show that they do in fact travel over to the visual media, Gandalf and Sauron are the most dramatic mother, sorry, Gandalf and Sauruman also sauron with that fucking armor in the beginning but they're the most dramatic motherfuckers oh my god their interactions together are so much magic makes you dramatic and interacting with another wizard makes you even more fucking dramatic we get rule two if there is a tavern there will be plot and usually that plot gets delivered by a broody man in the corner
00:45:26
Speaker
I don't remember what rule number three is. It's not in our notes. and think that might be the time one and it's not in our notes because we couldn't think of a good way to phrase it. It was the story. but Time responds to the story.
00:45:36
Speaker
The story does not respond to time, I believe is our new phrasing of it. Yeah, I think so. And that is the case that this movie is like compressed from the 17 year gap in chapter two in ah chapter two of of Fellowship.
00:45:55
Speaker
Rule number four, it all comes back to Beowulf. We'll get into design choices, honestly, more with this rule in Two Towers especially.
00:46:07
Speaker
And rule number five, friendship is magic. Yeah, it is. It's just a magical little story. Frodo and Sam, when they're going off in the boat together at the end, or when Frodo pulls Sam from the water, that's just a magical little moment.
00:46:23
Speaker
Yeah. Also with Friendship is Magic, when Galadriel shows Frodo the visions of the Shire burning, the thing that really seems to harm Frodo the most is the image of Sam in chains.
00:46:46
Speaker
Oh, I missed that. I mean, I saw the image, but I didn't pick up on Frodo's reaction to that specifically. I feel like it's, you don't see Frodo's face right there, but very shortly afterwards, he's pulled out of the vision.
00:47:01
Speaker
So it's it's kind of like that was that's the climax of that little mini segment. Yeah. And so that's what is going to eventually pull him out of it.
00:47:12
Speaker
So we have a couple of things we wanted to deep dive in on. Did you want to start... Sure. Yeah, I think I have a feeling mine might be shorter, but I always curse things by saying they'll be short and then we talk for a very long time. So we'll see how it goes.
00:47:28
Speaker
But like I said before, the thing that struck me visually with this movie was how tactile it was. The cluttered spaces. Everyone shout out to Bilbo and...
00:47:42
Speaker
Saruman specifically for just having messy fucking offices. They've got papers. It's scrolls everywhere. This is not neat. These people don't have secretaries and I respect that. They live in fucking dumps and sometimes that's just the way it is.
00:47:58
Speaker
Piles of books around my room, including on my desk right now. It's real. It's lived in.
Design and Craftsmanship in Middle-earth
00:48:06
Speaker
And most of my observation of that gravitated towards the textiles.
00:48:11
Speaker
But I know that there's a lot of cool ceramics in these movies. And I had seen... some little snippet somewhere about how all the ceramics in the movies were handmade. And so I was curious about that because there was also so much there, just in all the objects they were interacting with had this awesome weight and presence to them.
00:48:28
Speaker
So the little bit about ceramics before we get into costumes, Mirik Smishik was the lead ceramicist artist who did all of the like plates and cups and things for the movies.
00:48:41
Speaker
And he was basically the coolest guy ever. Like everyone involved in this movie is so amazingly cool. I was not expecting his kick-ass Wikipedia page.
00:48:53
Speaker
He was born in 1925. He fleed the Czech coup during whenever that happened. And he spent most of World War II in labor camps because he was involved in anti-Nazi resistance.
00:49:09
Speaker
And then he moved to Australia and then to New Zealand and just became an amazing ceramic artist. And his kilns are now registered historic sites in New Zealand.
00:49:22
Speaker
And he made over 700 pieces of pottery for these movies, including Including and maybe this is a well known piece of trivia that was just news to me because everything about these movies is news to me but a lot of them he made identical pieces in three different sizes so they would be the appropriate scale for whatever size character was holding them and I thought that was really fun.
00:49:45
Speaker
So yeah, just cool guy making beautiful objects for this film. Another funny little use of prop scale was when they're in the Prancing Pony, Merry and Pippin are getting their mugs of beer. And I don't remember which one of them sets it down, but there's this huge fucking tankard. And one of them goes, what is that?
00:50:05
Speaker
The other one goes, it's a pint. And the first one goes, it comes in pints. Yeah. And that the brilliant innovation going, oh, holy shit, we can put this in bigger cups.
00:50:18
Speaker
Delightful. 10 out of 10. Fucking loved it. Well, and Sam calling out after him going, you've had a whole half already. Mm-hmm. So good. Ugh. It's phenomenal. Did you have anything on plates and cups specifically?
00:50:36
Speaker
Chip the glasses, crack the plates. That's what Merex Meshik hates. Yeah. Wrong movie, but I'm sure he would he would hate it very much if they were chipped and cracked. But also, maybe them being chipped and cracked would give them life in the appropriate setting.
00:50:52
Speaker
Who's to say? It would be done artfully. but Also, isn't if I had a nickel for every artist involved with this movie who was involved in anti-Nazi resistance...
00:51:05
Speaker
I have two nickels. Two nickels at least. Those were just the ones we researched. Which is not a lot. Yeah. So who's to say? but More than expected.
00:51:16
Speaker
But it's weird that it happened twice. But it's fucking phenomenal that it happened twice. Mm-hmm. Chuck a piece of ceramic at a Nazi today. this is an anti-Nazi podcast, if you haven't already picked up on that.
00:51:32
Speaker
But moving on to costumes. So much has been said about the costumes in these movies, but the things that stood out to me, like I said, were the textures.
00:51:43
Speaker
And Gandalf's robe was the first thing that struck me because it's so nubbly, I think is the best word. It's not ah smooth. It has this roughness to it, this lived in, worn,
00:51:59
Speaker
texture that I guess was just not what I had envisioned. I knew that he was wearing traveling clothes, but I imagine they'd be kind of nice traveling clothes because he's a wizard and he can be fancy. No, he is <unk>s grimy in his own special way. And Ian McKellen apparently did insist on adding more mud to Gandalf's cloak.
00:52:17
Speaker
But the fabric choices were really interesting to me. And i was doing whole bunch of research on that. There was A thing on a costume forum from 2017 that I was unable to fact check, but there was a guy who claimed that there were still active and NDAs about some specific details of the costumes.
00:52:39
Speaker
And so it was hard to confirm if people who were doing cosplay could find screen accurate fabrics because what fabric they used was very hush hush. But there were a lot of interviews with the two lead designers.
00:52:55
Speaker
And so the main one was N'gila Dickinson. And she had talked about these very specific looks that she came up with for elves, dwarves, humans, hobbits, wizards as like her main categories. I didn't really hear anything about orcs in the bits that I researched, but their costumes were also very good.
00:53:15
Speaker
So I thought I would just go over briefly how their visual style was established to indicate things about them through their clothing, just as a general framework. And then if there are specific costumes that are interesting in later movies, we can look at them more closely. But the approach that was taken to design their vibe.
00:53:37
Speaker
So for the elves, Dickinson had said, they invoke their environment and they're very light on the earth. So we searched for very, very fine layers of fabrics for them.
00:53:48
Speaker
And they have this sort of diaphanous, otherworldly look. The Rivendell elves have a little more color and texture than other elves And especially, this comes up in Frodo's costumes a little bit too, but especially if we're thinking about this fantasy pre-industrial society, it's hard to overstate in real human history how very, very, very expensive all fabric was before mechanized weaving.
00:54:19
Speaker
That's why looms and mills were such huge deals in the Industrial Revolution, because All fabric, even basic shitty fabric, was just impossibly precious.
00:54:31
Speaker
So for the elves to have all of these incredible silk brocades and these fine linens and all of these decorative, superfluous, finely embroidered and embellished things is just the unimaginable wealth and infinite time that immortals have to create this clothing for themselves. So it works.
00:54:53
Speaker
Chef's kiss perfectly. And... In the cut of the fabrics, they have a lot of long lines to give the actors like a taller, more otherworldly, ethereal look that really works. It's why they have all those long sleeves and high neck lines to sort of elongate their bodies, which I thought was very cool.
00:55:13
Speaker
Did you have any takes on elves? I don't just want to talk straight on through this whole section if you have things, but i I trust you to pipe up. I could just keep going, and I will.
00:55:25
Speaker
I had one sort of elf costume thought, which was the shift in Galadriel's costume when she becomes the Dark Queen. and Yes, that was so good.
00:55:37
Speaker
She goes from her like... white almost like wedding gown like dress to wearing armored breastplate like she's a Valkyrie in a Wagnerian opera she goes from being a like spiritual character to being a warrior queen yeah And that was just a really cool visual moment.
00:56:13
Speaker
For the dwarves, there was not so many details and also not many dwarves in Fellowship, but at least for Gimli, has a very boxy, utilitarian structure to his clothing and his armor, but it's still very heavily ornamented. It's still a lot worked in metal and leather and things where you can display that kind of dwarven craftsmanship.
00:56:38
Speaker
Yeah, his his helmet, I noticed, specifically, with... You still had, like, knot work, almost, or, like... Mm-hmm. It looked like some of the lines were woven together, similar to some of the elves, the lines on some of the elves' clothing, and also the props and things, particularly in Lothlorien, the set pieces.
00:57:03
Speaker
But where all of the elven lines are curved... All of the dwarf lines are straight with hard angles.
00:57:13
Speaker
Which makes sense if you're working in stone and metal. Easier to do. Exactly. as opposed to growing it out of pieces of wood or fabric or whatever. And I liked that sort of similarity and yet juxtaposition of these two ancient races that kind of hate each other. And yet have so much more in common.
00:57:39
Speaker
than different. Yeah. And I just love Gimli. I was happy to see him. That's my boy. ah love him so much. He's so good. The Hobbits from another Dickinson interview were really heavily based on 18th century sort of pastoral country clothing.
00:57:59
Speaker
And that's a style that's very recognizable to us just from real history. I did learn a in-universe lore fact about why hobbits wear short pants. Is this a well-known thing to people that I will be happy to tell you about the short pants? So assumed, and I think that this is also true, that this was another silhouette thing that giving them the short pants sort of makes their feet proportionally bigger in addition to the silly feet shoes, helps make them look shorter.
00:58:31
Speaker
And that also then reminded me of a Tumblr post I saw about Joey Beatty and what's his face? The other one. The Witcher. What's his name?
00:58:42
Speaker
Henry Cavill. Henry Cavill. How in The Witcher, they're... the same height roughly and they have very similar builds but the way that their costuming is done makes Joey Beatty's character whose name I don't know how to pronounce seem Yaskier okay I'm never sure I haven't watched the show or played the games but makes Yaskier seem sort of smaller and more boyish and sillier even though he's just this giant jacked man you can really do a lot with cut and silhouette and especially in these movies where
00:59:15
Speaker
height and scale are so important. That's important. But the in-universe lore fact that the costume designer came up with, which I thought was so funny, was they have short pants because they don't wear shoes.
00:59:29
Speaker
So it's not important to them to really cover and protect their lower leg and ankle and feet they're not really worried about getting the bottom of their pants dirty you know it's just it's not important if you don't have that hard line of this is where shoe starts and pants begins just culturally it doesn't matter so they just wear short pants they're stomping around and fucking love that Yeah, it it makes perfect sense.
00:59:57
Speaker
And I just went, yeah, of course, of course there would be an in-universe reason for why hobbits wear short pants. Why wouldn't there be? And also that's just sort of a historical style. Another thing tying back to the value of textiles and class signifiers is so Frodo's clothes are very, very similar to the other hobbits in cut, but different in fabric. So he has a tweed frock coat and he has a different style of button. He has these more ornamental rounded buttons as opposed to
01:00:32
Speaker
Sam having very basic clothing and these little flat buttons. And that's also true of historical clothing in England in general. You think about fancy court ladies having these big elaborate dresses and normal working lower class women wore the pretty similar styles and cuts, but it was all down to what fabrics and what materials were used to signify class and to signify the occasion that different clothes would be worn. So I like that, that there was just little different subtle signals through the costuming that Frodo is just a little better off than everybody else.
01:01:11
Speaker
And as for humans, like we talked about Viggo Mortensen had a lot of input on his costume. And you had talked about contrasting him to Boromir, his sort of more subdued look.
01:01:24
Speaker
He does have A couple of fancier outfits, like we see him in Rivendell, a little more dressed up. Apparently, according to the costume designer, he also has on some of his inner layers, like his shirt and stuff that we don't see as much, some more embroidery, some more finer materials that...
01:01:44
Speaker
indicate literally that there is more underneath his rough exterior and there are these finer items that he has been given or has obtained that are in alignment with his status that are under all of his griminess there's this more expensive shining embellished also in sort of like the more elven style which is fun so there's there's literal layers and i love it so much I also really like thinking about that because even his fancier clothes in Rivendell are more understated than Boromir's clothing. And even at that point, Boromir is wearing just his cleaned up like tunic and gambeson.
01:02:31
Speaker
So it's the same thing that he wears on the road. Boromir is not making a distinction between who he is out in the wild and who he is in this formal space.
Arwen and Aragorn's Relationship
01:02:44
Speaker
Whereas Aragorn is like, yeah, I'm working out here as opposed to here. Like I'm in a meeting. yeah I'm home. I've got a beautiful elf girlfriend to s seduce. I got to look nice.
01:02:59
Speaker
I fucking love how they did, uh, Arwen and Aragorn in this. I was disappointed when I first watched these movies that like Glorfindel wasn't there. Because I, you know, as a child was a textual purist in the most annoying way.
01:03:21
Speaker
But I like, you know, like with Rosie, Arwen being more of an important part of the films allows us to get to know her more and feel like their relationship is more real.
01:03:38
Speaker
And then there's elements of the appendix of the story of Arwen and Aragorn appendix scattered in throughout the movie itself. So we see that build of their relationship. We see Aragorn at his mother's grave before he goes off. We see him with the shards of Narsil.
01:04:00
Speaker
And i just I just thought that was really, really well done. Also, mean, two things about their relationship. One, there's a lot of soft focus in this movie, and it's really nice. It gives it this sort of dreamy fairy tale effect. And there's this one perfect shot of Arwen and Aragorn kissing in the forest, and they're just surrounded by all of this beautiful nature. And it's sort of hazy and lovely and perfect and just chef's kiss everywhere. loved it, loved it.
01:04:28
Speaker
But also, speaking of their relationship, the first shot where Arwen is introduced, another one, borderline pornographic. is Is the sword under Aragorn's chin?
01:04:41
Speaker
i believe it is. Yeah, so Aragorn's just chilling, and then you just see a sword enter from the side of the screen, lift up his chin, then it's fucking Arwen. To have the lady be the one with the sword, that's... It's...
01:04:58
Speaker
They gave a gift to bisexuals. They gave many gifts to bisexuals in these movies, but that specifically. So good. So good. Love her when she rolls. Well, and her little in-elvish little, you know, what do we have here type thing, which is a... She fully meant to fuck that man into the ground in that moment.
01:05:23
Speaker
Yeah. That was... That was meant to be a seduction until she realized there was a problem. That was pre-negotiated. This is an established dynamic.
Costume Analysis and Cultural Influences
01:05:40
Speaker
That was phenomenal. was so good. It was so good. Anyway, reigning it in costumes, Boromir, literally the only thing I wrote for him was very straightforward night shit.
01:05:54
Speaker
He is what it says on the tin. He's got a cool outfit. It's great. It's embroidered. Moving on. Wizards. Gandalf and Saruman obviously have a lot of contrast between them and their outfits. Gandalf has this rougher textured fabric.
01:06:10
Speaker
There's a lot of debate about what color his costume actually was in person if it was more because it looks very gray on film. But because of movie magic, if his actual costume is more brown or more gray, who cares? But it's this very cool, unique color. He's got lots of layers and tatters.
01:06:29
Speaker
ah like said ian mckellen suggested adding the mud to the hem of his cloak and then you flip that and contrast that with saruman who has much more grandeur and his clothes are very very elf-like in their structure but with much heavier fabrics and if we're thinking about the philosophy behind the elf costuming that they're tread upon the earth is light. They're not really of this material plane.
01:06:57
Speaker
Whereas Saruman has this solidness and this desire to impose his will on the world, but still kind of chasing that similar elven aesthetic and mastery of many things.
01:07:12
Speaker
He's like that, but the more I don't know He's, i guess imposing is the word that I'm looking for. More imposing, solid, dense, heavy fabric.
01:07:24
Speaker
It's all the same color. It's all white. So he's got lots of different cool textures going on there. And it works. It works so well. But that was basically the overview of the fabric choices and things that I had noticed in the costumes just overall as a vibe.
Musical Storytelling in 'The Lord of the Rings'
01:07:43
Speaker
And then with those things in mind, it'll be interesting to see later on in the movie how now that we have those rules established, how they'll change. And those will contribute to the storytelling as we go.
01:07:56
Speaker
That is my deep dive. That is my special interest fabric time. I now turn it over Rin's special interest time. So, my special interest.
01:08:07
Speaker
I want to talk about the music. Yes. Yes. I've mentioned before on this podcast, I'm a musician. I play several instruments to varying degrees of proficiency.
01:08:20
Speaker
I am not super well versed in music theory. but hey have taken many, many, many music theory classes in my life and retained so much less of it than I would like.
01:08:34
Speaker
You know infinitely more than me, so you're starting from a stronger place. So, well, all that to say, ah other musically inclined listeners, forgive me.
01:08:47
Speaker
But anyway, i'm I'm just going to talk about the soundtrack, the sound design of this movie. Again, we've also mentioned on this podcast that I'm synesthetic. So I see sound and also feel sound.
01:09:06
Speaker
to a lesser extent. This soundtrack is phenomenal. It is easily one of the greatest soundtracks ever.
01:09:18
Speaker
um And that in part is because of the way that Harrod Shore, the composer, approached it. He composed it all at once, much like it was like it was being filmed all at once. He was composing ah the whole time.
01:09:35
Speaker
He started composing before it was filmed, before filming began. um So he had already been given pieces of the script, descriptions, set pieces to start with. He was approaching it not as movie composers frequently do as like a finished work that they're now going to put sound over and they'll have a couple of months to do that.
01:10:02
Speaker
He had multiple years and has stated that he approached this as if it was an opera. Ooh, I don't know anything about opera, but that makes sense to me.
01:10:13
Speaker
Yeah. So he's approaching this as if it is as if the music itself is part of the story. And for every great film score, the music is a part of the story, but I feel like this is...
01:10:30
Speaker
almost to a greater extent than some of the others out there. Rather than have specific themes, he has what's referred to as leitmotifs, which are little musical phrases that refer to a specific character, group of characters, or place, culture.
01:10:53
Speaker
And he frequently doesn't have like single character leitmotifs. He has like group leitmotifs. is it And these will get woven together throughout the movie or orchestrated in different ways to demonstrate different things.
01:11:12
Speaker
The best way to sort of describe this is looking at the music of the intro. We hear music before anything else in this film. The music starts over a blank screen before the title, before Galadriel begins her narration, before there's any imagery whatsoever, there's music.
01:11:46
Speaker
Oh, it's so eerie. It's almost like sort of Gregorian chanting. I know it's probably not. People who know about chanting would maybe say, oh, that's not Gregorian. It's a different kind of chanting.
01:11:57
Speaker
I don't fucking know the kind of chanting that they do in church. It sounds like church music, but like cool, ethereal, mysterious church music. Well, and that's actually ah vibe that they were going for with the elves.
01:12:11
Speaker
When we hear elves later on walking or when we're in Lothlorien, that sort of vocal heavy, vocal forward, chanting sound, in addition to the scale that he's using, gives a sense of timelessness, gives a sense of otherworldliness.
01:12:32
Speaker
He's using a Phrygian dominant scale here, or also the the Arabic Hijaz scale, which kind of gives a sense of, it has sort of quarter tones in there, and it gives a sense of this this being very different.
01:12:53
Speaker
Right? So we start with that theme. The next theme that comes in is ah the ring one of the ring's themes,
01:13:13
Speaker
It sounds very, God, see, i'm i'm not a I'm not trained in music appreciation, but it has kind of an ominous vibe. It sounds like a little old fashioned, a little formal, a little like important, but also ah just a little bit off, like something's like a little wrong with it.
01:13:33
Speaker
Right. So that's the next thing that comes in. We then get, as we get the full history, we get pieces of Mordor's theme.
01:13:46
Speaker
We get, again, the pieces of the ring. And then it shifts from minor into major. When Galadriel stops and we start hearing Bilbo's voice.
01:13:59
Speaker
Aww. And that is the first time that we hear the fellowship theme.
01:14:16
Speaker
I remember you and also our friend Pat got very excited when the Fellowship theme came on. and Right. And it's when we first hear it it's it's still in a very stripped down form.
01:14:30
Speaker
But we hear that Fellowship theme as we see the title of the Fellowship of the Ring. Mm-hmm. And that is right after we have heard the Shire theme. too. As it shifts from minor into major, that's when we hear the Shire theme for the first time, which is your classic concerning hobbits vibe that everyone knows.
01:14:53
Speaker
buta-oooooooooooo And that gets played with different orchestrations, different instrumentations. All of these leitmotifs will throughout the story. And when they're inserted, they're showing you know the entrance of different characters, the entrance of different themes. Another great way to hear this one is during the ah flight to the Ford scene, when win the ah Black Riders are pursuing Frodo and Arwen, you can hear um the fellowship theme in a not fully orchestrated
01:15:37
Speaker
format almost being overrun by the Nazgul theme. Oh, shit.
01:15:55
Speaker
And the Nazgul theme um and many of Mordor's leitmotifs usually have two parts to them. They have that really strong bass note.
01:16:09
Speaker
bump on up That really, really heavy beat.
01:16:14
Speaker
With the higher moving melody that sits pretty typically on one or two notes. And they're usually discordant with each other.
01:16:27
Speaker
And it's also got some of that chanting vibe that the elf theme has, but in a spookier, darker, more fucked up way. Well, and the chanting vibe, they're both in Tolkien languages.
01:16:42
Speaker
The Nazgul theme is in Adanaic. And the elven theme is in Sindarin. Do you have translations for what they say?
01:16:54
Speaker
um It's okay if you don't. I'm just very curious. That's all right. I don't. That will be thing for listeners to Google later. But that is awesome. I love that. The choirs over over the Mordor music are are more in the style of like the Dies Irae or the Duel of the Fates type stuff.
01:17:11
Speaker
It feels angrier, right? Mm-hmm. The other piece that really struck me about that flight to the Ford scene was the bass drum and timpani are almost mimicking a heartbeat for a moment.
01:17:28
Speaker
There's when you're getting like the fellowship theme pieces of Arwen's leitmotif. flowing before the Nazgul theme comes in, you still have that strong bass hit, but it's it's done in a heartbeat pattern until the Nazgul theme comes in, sort of representing the fact that Frodo's life is about to be snuffed out.
01:17:52
Speaker
The Fellowship is dying and before it even has a chance to get off the ground. The fellowship theme is also heard in a few other places when Frodo and Sam are leaving the Shire, when Sam says that ah this is the furthest from home he's ever been, um when they're joined by Merry and Pippin, when they're joined by Aragorn, when they're fleeing the Nazgul with Arwen.
01:18:19
Speaker
And then in Rivendell. But up until Rivendell, we don't actually hear it in its full orchestration. You get either like just strings or you get a couple of strings and some woodwinds or you get a couple of strings and woodwinds and like a French horn.
01:18:34
Speaker
And then when Aragorn joins, there's three French horns. and then there's some And then it doesn't come in with like full brass, full strings, full woodwinds until the fellowship is fully assembled in Rivendell.
01:18:48
Speaker
I love that. That's awesome. And we will only hear it one more time with full orchestration in Moria. Oh, shit. And after that, the orchestration fades off again as the fellowship breaks up.
01:19:03
Speaker
So the the complexity of each leitmotif, of the repeat of each leitmotif, is sort of one way to show mood. It's one way to...
01:19:15
Speaker
enhance the story. The other thing that he's using is like the type of administrator the type of instrumentation. So for you know the the Hobbit theme, it can be played on woodwind, very slow.
01:19:36
Speaker
It can be played on grouping of strings, sort of quicker. the The fellowship theme sounds very different in it's in a string instrumentation that we see earlier on, um and like the one I've sent you, than it will in breath.
01:19:56
Speaker
brass heavy instrumentation, which we'll see a lot more in Two Towers, specifically with the Three Hunters. He uses frequently low brass as like an authority moment.
01:20:10
Speaker
Howard Shore said that he wasn't thinking so much about the type of instrument as he was thinking about the range of the instrument. He was dividing them more into high, middle, and low ranges.
01:20:22
Speaker
rather than woodwind strings, brasses, percussion. This method of orchestration is very Wagnerian. It's very German opera.
01:20:34
Speaker
isn The soundtrack itself is not super Wagnerian, but because he was treating as a complete opera and because wagner it was one of the first to sort of use this leitmotif method.
01:20:50
Speaker
It's been frequently compared to Wagnerian opera and to to the Ring Cycle. Now you have me wanting to go see an opera. Do you want to go see an opera with Yeah, sure. Let's go see an opera.
01:21:03
Speaker
Yay! Future bestie day. It have to be during an opera. i have not been... I actually don't think I've ever been to an opera. First time for everything. There's all sorts of different opera. I don't know opera super well.
01:21:16
Speaker
Audience, if you want to DM us or email us, what opera should we go to? I'm familiar with like some of the Verdi ones, but not...
01:21:28
Speaker
Many of the others. Another thing about the scale of this composition, there were over 300 individual musicians, vocalists, instrumentalists, that contributed to the score.
01:21:46
Speaker
That's so cool. That must have been so fun to be like, I'm a random, I'm a working French horn player. That's my job as I play French horn. And I got to fucking play French horn for the Lord of the Rings movies.
01:21:58
Speaker
That must have been so cool for those people. The other thing that I really liked was the use of diegetic music. You're going to have to tell me what that is.
01:22:10
Speaker
That is music that exists within the world that the characters can also hear. Ooh, yeah. So, like, the group that's playing at Bilbo's ah party, like, that's part of the soundtrack. We're, that is enhancing the scene, but also all the characters are dancing to it.
01:22:33
Speaker
Mm-hmm. That piece, interestingly, was not a Howard Shore composition. That was a composition by Fran Walsh and performed by the group 9. Very nice. Who is on stage as the musicians.
01:22:47
Speaker
Oh my god, I love that. Yeah, so they are actively playing in the scene, <unk> which is very fun. Let's see. i So I didn't have a very like super organized list. I just have like talking points.
01:23:02
Speaker
No, this is really cool. I had seen some random YouTube video that was talking about like music and anime or something that I watched a few seconds of because YouTube does those fucking little previews. If you just hover over something long enough, it'll start playing and sometimes it does get me like that.
01:23:18
Speaker
And something that the guy was talking about was that it's much easier for a random lay person to identify visual storytelling in media than to identify musical storytelling. It's something that once you explain it, you go, oh, of course that makes sense.
01:23:39
Speaker
But if you don't have the specific knowledge and background experience then it's really hard to pick out and identify. So this is super interesting to me, even though it's a very quick overview. I feel like night galaxy brain is expanding. It's all connecting. It's very cool.
01:23:57
Speaker
Well, and I don't think that I really necessarily noticed all of this when I was watching the movie. i've I've seen these movies several times.
01:24:12
Speaker
And so, you know, I'm familiar with when certain themes are coming in, i can identify particular themes, particular leitmotifs. But when watching the movie, I'm i'm there for the visuals a lot of the time. the the music just enhances the scene.
01:24:29
Speaker
Yeah. um So a lot of this was from my external reading and research. There is an annotated score and like liner notes to the full score that were released.
01:24:42
Speaker
So you can read some of that besides Howard Shore, um Fran Walsh, Viggo Mortensen, Plan 9, And Enya all contributed to the score and to the compositions.
01:24:59
Speaker
Enya was not, she she especially, I think, is over the end credits. And we were all going, ah, of course, of course there's Enya in Lord of the Rings. Yes, this makes sense to us.
01:25:12
Speaker
Yeah, i I really love, much like much like the costumes, there are particular differences in instrumentation. And in composition between different cultures.
01:25:29
Speaker
You know, for Mordor and for the orcs of Isengard, the orc themes, we get a lot more in like 5-4 time. We get a lot more percussion. We get a lot more harsh, discordant sounds. Yeah.
01:25:46
Speaker
For the Hobbits, we get a lot of Celtic type sounds, which has been heavily criticized by some critics for because the aesthetics of the Hobbits are based on English villagers rather than true true Celtic styles.
01:26:05
Speaker
You have vocal heavy and harmonic minor Gregorian chant style influences to the elves music.
01:26:16
Speaker
that is similar to some of the things that are coming out of Mordor, but executed in a different method. And then for like the full fellowship altogether, you get the full orchestra.
01:26:30
Speaker
For you know dwarves, you get, again, more percussion, more sort of industrial styles, but it's not as harsh as we hear for the orcs.
01:26:50
Speaker
Mm-hmm. So it's, again, like you get a sense of underground, of hard stone from the Dwarven music, but it's not, but we don't get the sense of like evil that you get from ah discordant sounds and from um minor chords that you hear in um the orcs music.
01:27:13
Speaker
Yeah, that's a really good point. There have been times when I, you know, will come from listening to like a John Williams scored piece and kind of wish that there was like a Lord of the Rings theme in the way that there's a Star Wars theme But the use of leitmotifs kind of creates this effect where you don't go, like oh, there's the theme again.
01:27:40
Speaker
We should be looking. But it still gives you enough of a touchstone to know that you're looking for something specific.
01:27:52
Speaker
Yeah, it's like you were saying, it's a completely different approach to scoring the movie. And i think that if it had a theme TM, it it wouldn't work as well.
01:28:03
Speaker
It's the way that it's made is intentional and it works. it adds It adds just so much. um My last fun fact about the music is ah that the Shire leitmotif is taken from a 1901 hymn, This Is My Father's World.
01:28:25
Speaker
You can just listen to like the first like four seconds of it. Yeah, okay.
01:28:35
Speaker
Oh, okay. I had to listen to it twice, but then I got it.
01:28:40
Speaker
Yeah, that's I mean, that's the Shire theme. And then it diverges both the This Is My Father's World diverges off into its own melody and the Shire theme diverges into its own melody.
01:28:52
Speaker
But it's a fun little piece of going, ah, there's an influence. Yeah. Because Harachur composed the score all at once for all three movies, we're going to see all of these again and get a few more additional leitmotifs as we meet new cultures, as we get to Gondor, as we meet the Rohirrim.
01:29:15
Speaker
as we see more of Gollum, we'll get new motifs, but it's fun to get consistency through the movies.
01:29:26
Speaker
And you always get consistency of style um when you have the same composer
Achievements and Anticipation for Future Films
01:29:31
Speaker
across movies. And even when you have different composers, a good movie composer is going to try and pull from their predecessors to match the style. Yeah.
01:29:42
Speaker
But because this is all one story, I think the use of these like individual themes that will carry through with each character and with each group makes them all feel so much more linked.
01:30:00
Speaker
And also because these movies are fucking long, at least the extended, even the non-extended editions. And there's three of them. We are locking in for a long journey together. So there's time to establish all of these things.
01:30:15
Speaker
It's not like we're squeezing all the musical storytelling into one 90 minute chunk. We're settling in for a long journey. So in the same way that the movies are establishing a baseline for us to start off with in Fellowship and then continue through the next two, we can have a baseline for our analysis of things to look for in Two Towers and Return of the Kings.
01:30:41
Speaker
Mm-hmm. Lastly, just the score for Fellowship specifically won both an Academy Award for Best Original Score and also a Grammy.
01:30:53
Speaker
Damn! As it deserves. And the next two scores will also win multiple awards as well.
01:31:04
Speaker
That rules. I love it.
01:31:07
Speaker
These are absolutely incredible fucking movies. I'm excited to watch the rest of them. I'm excited to get your thoughts. I think one of my favorite leitmotifs the Rohan theme. So I'm excited to get that one into the mix.
01:31:22
Speaker
hmm. I kind of want to get some of the sheet music for some of these because there's a lot of similarity between Rohan and Gondor's leitmotifs, but not... I don't know where I was going to go with that statement.
01:31:37
Speaker
I'm intrigued. I'm intrigued. We can look at them together and you can try to explain the connections and I may or may not get them, but it will be interesting. Yeah. Do we have anything else we would like to discuss for the Fellowship of the Ring movie? Not that...
01:31:52
Speaker
Not that I can think of. It was so fun. I really, really enjoyed it. I'm really excited to watch the next two. And I feel like we have accomplished our goal of, because we weren't sure what new things we could possibly add to discussion of these movies.
01:32:11
Speaker
But I feel like we've got a good groove. We know how we're approaching them. The next two movie episodes will be in a similar format. And I'm excited.
Engagement and Interaction with Listeners
01:32:20
Speaker
Yeah. Well, if you like what you're listening to, you can subscribe to the podcast on whatever podcasting platform you're currently listening on or a different podcasting platform.
01:32:33
Speaker
Or both. I don't know. Have fun. I was ah introduced to a friend's podcast and then I immediately went and gave it five stars on multiple podcasting platforms because I went, ah, I know how this is. I know the small podcast life. Let me give you the numbers.
01:32:49
Speaker
So, you know, go ahead do that if you want. Yeah, you can leave us a five-star review. um Leave us a written review if the podcasting platform you're on allows that sort of thing.
01:33:00
Speaker
Leave us a comment. Again, if the podcast platform you're on allows that. That's like Spotify, YouTube. you know Comment on our episodes, some of your thoughts. Comment on our social media. Drive up that engagement.
01:33:14
Speaker
Talk about the podcast to your friends. Still the best way for a small podcast like us to spread is word of mouth. Mm-hmm. You can always email us at thefandomapprentice at gmail.com or interact with our social media at fanapppod on platforms.
01:33:33
Speaker
Go figure it out. Where? Go for it. If we're on the platform, we're on there as at fanapppod, F-A-N-A-P-P-P-O-D.
01:33:43
Speaker
Mostly Instagram and Tumblr. Those are the big two that we check a lot. Yeah. But if you send me a message on blue sky, I'll, I'll respond. It just might be a minute.
01:33:55
Speaker
That's fair. Yeah. That's,
Credits and Acknowledgments
01:33:58
Speaker
that's everything. I have no more thoughts. um Smooth brain.
01:34:05
Speaker
Then let's make a smooth transition. into the end Thanks for hanging out everybody. We'll see you in two weeks for the two towers.
01:34:17
Speaker
See you next time. Bye. The Phantom Apprentice is produced and edited by Rin and Sam. Our music is written and performed by James. You can hear more of his music on Spotify or on Bandcamp under the group Bayruz, B-A-E-R-U-Z.
01:34:33
Speaker
Our art is by Casey Turgeon. can find more of her work at KCT Designs on Instagram. The content discussed is the property of the Tolkien Estate and of Peter Jackson and New Line Cinemas and is used here under fair use.