Phantasy Star: Fringes of Algo

Bragatyr wrote:I mean, I have to physically restrain myself when people think the Lord of the Rings movies were better than the books, I think that should be a capital crime! (I'm joking, mostly).

I love both the books and the movies, is that okay? I mean, any book-to-movie adaptation has to cut corners somewhere along the lines, and IMO, Jackson and his crew did it pretty well.

Plus, those Oliphaunts at Pellenor Fields. But I digress.

The Tool elitist. Oh boy. I've dealt with those people. I mean, I like Tool every now and then, but the idea of basically listening to only one band and never anything else, even if it Tool, would get really old and boring eventually. Also, Tool, underground band? I laughed out loud at that.

I definitely enjoyed the movies myself, but I hold the books in much higher esteem. I think the casting and costuming and just the sheer visuals were perfect in the films, I mean, it doesn't get any better than Christopher Lee as Saruman, but I felt like at times the writers didn't really understand Tolkien as well as they could have. Faramir's character was just totally decimated, for one thing, and the elves randomly showing up at Helm's Deep when they would never do that was just random and head shaking. And then Haldir dying, for some random reason, ha ha.

And yes, Aeroprism, Bernard Hill's speech to the Riders of Rohan was freaking epic, that guy was awesome as Theoden! Tolkien was getting very Anglo-Saxon when he wrote all that stuff, the alliteration is just through the roof in that part of the book, I love it, very Old English.

Ah ! About the LOTR ! I've read the books, Bilbo first, then the LOTR thanks to my brother who was playing Role Playing Games and that was so great ! For me one of the best "books" (even if there is bilbo plus 3 tomes ^^) and I think that the movies are great, even if I know that they'll never totally catch the message from Tolkien ! It's impossible

I have never read the LOTR books but I totally love the movies. I thought about reading the books after watching the movies but a friend who had previously read the books warned me that they would be somewhat different than the movies. I wasn't sure how I would feel about that. I have seen it happen with other book/movies and was very disappointed, so I decided to save myself some pain and anguish and not read them, atleast for the time being.

I know what you mean, Silver Surfer, I usually prefer the books, when it comes to movies versus books, but I've had the opposite happen, because I liked the film versions of No Country for Old Men and Blade Runner better. Which is weird, because I love Cormac McCarthy and Philip K. Dick, but I thought these were some of their weakest books, despite their popularity. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep just wasn't as powerful as Blade Runner, I thought.

Admittedly, I watched the films first in these cases, so it could just be a case of familiarity bias!

Funny that. I also broke the sacred book/movie rule by deeming the original Dune movie ten times better than the book. It's actually my favorite movie, ever.

I haven't actually seen the Dune movie in its entirety, oddly enough. I just thought it was awesome that Sting was in it. I did like the first book, but I heard the series gets into kind of weird territory, and Dune itself was kind of rambling, so. Very interesting ideas in it, though.

I'm going to get massacred here, but I'm not a fan of Tolkein's writing style. It's incredibly dry.

However, it's technically sound so I'm not going to call it bad, but I've never been able to really enjoy the LOTR books that much.

It's fine. Whenever I tell someone I think G.R.R Martin's books are highly overrated and the only reason his stuff is so popular is because HBO made a naked people adaptation, I get yelled at.

We can't all like the same stuff.

Yeah, that's a pretty common criticism of Tolkien's style. He was an academic, and a fan of a bunch of dead languages with incredibly dry source material, so yeah. I haven't actually read George R.R. Martin yet, I'm hesitant to get into a series when it isn't completed and the installments take so long to be completed. I've just gotten lately where a fantasy book has to be really interesting for me to get into it, I don't get into the generic fantasy at all.