I still can’t stop but think how stretched out the Hobbit films were, for an otherwise short book. That’s a sin that stains forever with me. The Lord of the Rings films, do have their own flaws, but they’re fairly contained and can be debated as to whether they were good or not. I have so much trouble excusing anything with the Hobbit though.
And I hope we never, ever see anyone tackle The Silmarillion. Simply because, there will be so much improvised fluff in that would-be film, that it’d make the Hobbit films blush.
The prequel trilogy is like the original sin of 21st century cinema, spawning not only the era of online criticism as we took solace in our disappointment with each other, but also in how it really heralded the era of franchise film making where all decisions would be made by producers and no more offbeat creative choices by weirdy beardy directors (for better or for worse).
The Plinkett reviews of Star Wars…they’re so long ago the first one or two were split into ten minute videos because Youtube had a 10 minute time limit for videos back then. The gag about “Leave me a message on this web zone and I will send you [a pizza roll] in the mail” made me think there was such a thing as a “web zone.” Back then, so many different platforms were popping up that I invented a service halfway between Myspace and Geocities that called user created pages “web zones.”