To date, I have read twenty-one film critics' reviews of
The Two Towers -- seven of these reviews having been run off in print form and filed in a Cardinal Prestige® Slant-D Ring binder. Last December, I preserved 20 of the most positive reviews of
Fellowship -- the reasoning (to paraphrase Carlyle) being that if something is not worth being read more than once, then it probably wasn't worth being written in the first place. Moreover, since I am so impassioned about these motion pictures, I want to have a fair volume of literature at hand which buttresses my enthusiasm and builds up my understanding (through others' views) of the tremendous degree of creative effort that is ongoing in producing the films. In the current issue of
American Cinematographer, the films' Director of Photography, Andrew Lesnie, reports that the specialty cameraman in charge of producing shots of the fantastically detailed set miniatures (the "bigatures"), Alex Funke, recently "passed day 600" in his work. That aspect of the films being "in itself...an epic work-in-progress." Over the weekend,
I read Stephen Schaefer's piece in the Boston Herald in which Peter Jackson is quoted: "By their nature, second films are darker. The vise tightens on the characters and you want it to get tough.'' The reviewers who have written the most perceptive & exhilirating responses to the second film work for British publications: Johnny Vaughan/
The Sun; Christopher Tookey/
Daily Mail; Alexander Walker/
Evening Standard; Matthew Turner/
ViewLondon. Walker, in particular, really demonstrates a
bona fide ability to grasp the significance of the these masterworks in terms of their fully justified part in the lineage of great filmmaking -- and also in art history, as he mentions imagery in
Two Towers reminds one of Frenchman Gustave Dore's "engravings of
Paradise Lost," adding that Jackson's art-house crew have given those engravings the "gift of life." I own a copy of Dore-illustrated
Inferno, and it requires only a modicum of imaginative effort to see how those 19th-century drawings could inspire PJ's darker vision. In sum, an intense obsession with mortality. Further, Walker was highly impressed by the various styles of historical architecture employed in the set designs -- notably, Graeco-Roman, Gothic, Pre-Raphaelite, and Hollywood Medieval. Conceptual artist Alan Lee has made a magisterial contribution! Good lord, the countdown clock now reads less than
48 hours before we see this movie....
