It’s true, you are.
I’ve tried. Believe me, I’ve tried. I tried reading the books (several years before the movies came out, mind you). After approximately 70 pages of some repressed homosexual, tree-hugging, jobless hack describing a firecracker I gave up.
I tried sitting through the movies as well. The first one, I saw a downloaded copy of. It was so captivating a movie that I checked my email and talked to friends online during it.
The second one I saw in the theatres. Most of the movie was spent talking to my friend (who’d already seen it) about how the whole movie should’ve been about Gimli kicking a*s and taking names.
The third one I saw part of when my brother was watching it from a (burned) dvd. Some metrosexual and his army (which included Orlando Bloom, the prettiest woman I’ve ever seen) demanded the lord of the black gates (or something along those lines. I’m not too familiar with Robert Smith’s writing) to come out. I blurted out the first thing that came to mind: “Well, I’ll ask ‘eem but I don’t think ‘e’ll be very keen. You see, we already got one!”
You know what my biggest problem with “Lord of the Rings” is? Everything takes too f*****g long.
They have a party at the beginning of the first movie. It takes forever.
They talk about a lot of things nobody cares about for hours.
There’s a lot of hugging and talking about feelings. That also takes forever.
That isn’t character development or setting the mood. It’s boring. It’s very, very boring.
Combined, the movies take about 15 hours (that is, the super duper special edition dvds). 15 hours of a bunch of wussies walking around to drop a ring in a volcano.
However, in the first movie Gandalf (played by Erik Magnus) flies around on a gigantic bird. Why didn’t he just simply have the bird carry Frodo with the ring to the volcano so he could drop it in? That way, Middle-Earth would’ve been saved within an hour.
The massive battles everyone raves about did not impress me at all. You know why? It’s CGI, which means it’s just a cartoon except that less effort goes into it. This wouldn’t even be that big of an issue except that the fight scenes in the Devilman OVAs (which are short animated movies) whooped the camel’s a*s with a belt when compared to LOTR. What makes these fight scenes good compared to the ones in LOTR is the explicit violence and gore.
In movies where thousands of bloodthirsty orcs fight thousands of humans you’d expect to see tons of blood and guts. We don’t get to see any blood from the man who gave us “Braindead,” we don’t even see anything of the fight scenes because the camera swirls around like it’s manned by a Dance Dance Revolution champion with epilepsy.
So what do we have so far? A 15 hour movie about shoeless midgets who walk around a forest and talk about their feelings.
Great.
You’re probably thinking about how wrong I am for not liking these books and movies and you’re getting ready to email me the reasons, or at least saying them out loud. Don’t bother; I’ve heard it all before. Here is what my conversations with Tolkien fans usually look like:
“It’s not a movie about violence, but a story about innocence and friendship.”
“So you’re a p***y?”
“Tolkien created a whole world for his books!”
“That takes about 10 minutes. Besides, Robert E. Howard did that well over a decade before Tolkien.”
”Well, Tolkien created several languages just for these books!”
”Then he had too much free time on his hands. He should’ve gotten a job instead.”
“He was a linguist.”
“Well, he obviously wasn’t a writer.”
If you like “Lord of the Rings,” you’re a p***y. There’s no excuse. I keep hearing how important “Lord of the Rings” was to the fantasy genre, but they’re just very gay and so are the stories inspired by Tolkien’s work. Let’s be honest: elves and wizards aren’t cool.
However, there’s a solution for people who like fantasy but don’t want to read about or watch vertically challenged people walking around hugging trees.
That solution is called Conan.
Conan the Cimmerian was created by Robert E. Howard in the 1930s. His stories were edited all to hell over the years and several writers ruined the character after Howard committed suicide in the late ‘30s. However, his original stories were wonderfully brutal.
In the 1970s there was a successful comic run and a number of Conan paintings, most notably the ones by Frank Frazetta.
Taking place after the oceans drank Atlantis and before the cataclysms shaped the continents the way they are now, Conan is what every man should be and what most of us want to be.
He was brought up on the brutal plains of Cimmeria where he learned to fend for himself. Crom, the Cimmerians’ God, gives man courage and the will to kill his fellow man at birth, and nothing else. When you die, you wander the cold plains of the afterlife for all eternity.
Having known nothing during his childhood except for the brutality of the Cimmerian plains and knowing that there will be nothing after death he does as he pleases.
Conan plunders as he sees fit, kills anyone who stands in his way. He can have pretty much any woman he wants and the women that don’t want him can get bent.
That’s called being a man.
In the late 1970s, Oliver Stone wrote a movie adaptation of Conan. John Milius was hired to re-write it (changing it from a post-apocalyptical movie where Conan fights mutants to one more true to the books).
The movie, titled “Conan the Barbarian,” is still very different from Howard’s stories. Luckily, that doesn’t mean it’s not a great movie.
The most significant changes are a more religious element to steel (as in, swords), Conan’s origin changed to being captured as a child and being trained as a gladiator, and the races of the Hyborian age being different (though the names remain the same). Lastly, there’s very little sorcery in the movie.
So what’s the movie about? The movie opens with the (for the sake of the movie) peaceful Cimmerians being slaughtered by riders. The children are sold as slaves where they’re trained as gladiators. Conan, being the strongest, is the only survivor after 20 years. He proves to be a very good fighter. So good, in fact, he gets to be trained in sword fighting in the East.
Arnold’s first line in the movie is a response to the question – “What’s best in life?”
“To crush your enemy, see them driven before you and hear the lamentation of their women.”
Hell yeah!
Years later his owner sets him free. He finds a sword when he stumbles upon the tomb of one of the kings of Atlantis. He decides to get revenge on the people who murdered his people and all he has to go by is their symbol.
A witch tells him to go to Samora. While he’s doing her (that’s the price he had to pay) she grows fangs and tries to kill him. Not taking crap from some broad on the rag, he throws her into the fireplace and she explodes. Booyah!
Outside, he finds Subotai. “Give me food so I have strength when the wolves come. Let me not go down in hunger, but in combat.” Liking his style, Conan sets him free and they head to Samora. There, he punches a camel in the face before joining forces with Valeria to steal a jewel from a snake cult. In the snake cult tower, Conan sees the symbol of the people who killed his tribe. He decides to find the leader of the cult (played by James Earl Jones) and kill him.
Long story short: Conan kicks a*s the whole movie long (even when he’s crucified). At the end of the movie, when the cult’s followers offer their allegiance to him, he decides – “Screw this, I’m becoming king by my own hand, not by having some teenagers who hate their parents follow me around.”
So from all this I (and so should you) draw two conclusions:
Conclusion #1: If you like fantasy but are not a p***y, you’ll watch and read Conan. Avoid the terrible sequel with Grace Jones and any books not written by Robert E. Howard.
Conclusion #2: Hobbits are jerks and should all go get jobs.
Let him have it at Back Talk>>>
Speaking of p*****s, you know that Conan creator/alleged toughguy Robert E Howard was bigger p***y than Tolkein fans? Poor momma’s boy Robert was so distraught over his mum’s recent fall into a coma, he decided to be an warrior and shoot himself in the head. With no mommy around life was too tough for him! HAHAHAHAHAHA!