The Rise of the Fellowship?

So, given that the campus library and gym is closed for winter break, *M and I have been rather desperate for entertainment lately. As a result, we have been plumming the depths of Netflix and Amazon Prime to an extent never before seen. One result of this boredom-spelunking is that we found a small indie film called The Rise of the Fellowship, which is pretty clearly a Tolkien knock-off --er, I mean, "tribute." The basic premise is that gamer geeks are pitted against gamer jocks (yes, gamer jocks) in an on-line LOTR gaming competition.

 I won't keep you in suspense -- it was bad. The production value was decent, actually, and the acting wasn't awful, especially for a low-budget indie film, but I'm pretty sure the whole "geeks vs. jocks" stereotype died in the 1990s. (And the fact that the film's relying on stereoptypes thirty years out of date also gives you a hint at the level of characterization.) *M and I only made it about a quarter of the way through the film, actually. Perhaps it picked up. Some of the reviews indicated that "Melvin," the Gandalf-Aragorn hybrid who operates as a hippie-ish commune leader, is pretty good. Still, we just weren't able to make it that far.

 Still, one can't be too harsh with fan productions. Kudos for them for trying and having fun doing it.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Genre Fantasy Bestsellers through 1990

Image
I've been studying Keith Justice's Bestseller Index , which compiles information from two separate bestseller lists -- New York Times Book Review and Publishers Weekly -- up through 1990, and the results are ridiculously fascinating. For instance, you wanna take a stab at which SFF author has the most individual books appear on a bestseller list? No, it ain't Heinlein, Clark, Herbert, or Asimov. It's not even Terry Brooks or David Eddings. No, the answer is Piers Anthony ... and even if you somehow pulled that name out of thin air, you'll still never guess how truly dominate Anthony was. Up through 1990, Anthony had more than double than number of distinct bestsellers than the next most frequent bestseller, Anne McCaffrey. Whereas Anthony had an astounding  22 different books appear on a bestseller list, McCaffrey had "only" 9.** Now, caveats. These numbers need to be taken with one (or two) grains of salt. For instance, although Anthony had 22 two distin...
Read more

A Look at Charles R. Saunders and "Sword & Soul"

Image
So, I've been reading lately about Charles R. Saunders, the black author of sword-and-sorcery fiction, and man .... poor guy. If there's been ever a case of someone being born about 30 years too soon, it's Saunders. Usually, when people mention about black S&S authors, they mean Samuel R. Delany. This makes sense. As a queer, Marxist deconstructionist, Delany established his street cred first by writing SF before wading into the "gutters" (ahem) of S&S fantasy. (Sidenote: are there any black fantasy writers except maybe Jemisin who didn't first establish their street cred by writing SF?). Although I personally never much cared for Delany's  writing style or Nevèrÿon books , which are basically what happens when someone who holds a subgenre in contempt decides to write in that subgenre, it is true that academic critics love Delany .... especially critics who hate S&S themselves. So if they mention Saunders at all, which is rare, it's usuall...
Read more

NEW POETS OF RUM-RAM-RUF: Zach Weinersmith & Boulet

Image
In the opening paragraph of my metrical appendix to Speculative Poetry and the Modern Alliterative Revival , I raised a conundrum: how do revivalists today officially arrive at an alliterative meter? The question’s a good one. In every case known to me, at least in English, revivalists never “grow up” with alliterative poetics. They don’t – they cannot – know the meter on an intuitive cultural knowledge, not as medieval skalds or scopas did. In other words, the meter has been moribund for centuries, and if young poets today – those crazy kids – experiment with alliteration at all, it is only of the ornamental variety. That’s what tongue twisters teach you: the rum-ram-ruf of sounds jingle-jangling together. Accordingly, if revivalists know what they are doing at all, they deploy a poetic form learned only as an adult. Someday, though, I hope to eat those words – or at least chew them slowly. The parties responsible are author Zach Weinersmith and the artist Boulet, the creators of a w...
Read more