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AinurOlorin
Valinor
Jan 12 2008, 10:44am
Views: 288
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Gandalf's Beard !
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All right, some of you may tell me I am being petty. Yet I have an abiding bond to Gandalf. When production starts, you may rest assured I will bring my concerns about aspects of his magic having been wrongly diminished or deleted from LOTR to the fore, in desprate hopes that is magic in The Hobbit will be exaclty as Tolkien described it, fearsome blue explosions et al.
Next to the magic, what bugged me most. You guessed it. The BEARD. I loved Mckellen in the role, and look forward to his return, but I post this just in case the cosmotologists (Peter King and Peter Weiss, I believe) get any ideas about having him show up with that goatee lengthed travesty from ROTK.
It needs to be at least as long and full as its FULLEST and LONGEST shots in Fellowship (namely, when he is standing beside Saruman over the Palantir, and when he first comes back through the door of Bag End and spies the ring, after seeing Bilbo out and onto the road. Really I'd like to see it a few inches longer. I don't expect the three foot beard, I know thats alot to work with, considering all his action. Yet a few inches (say just past the navel at least) won't make a big difference in hamering his movements, but can have a HUGE visual impact.
It nagged me no end in scens where his beard looked shoddy. When he read the rings inscription to Frodo, and it was all parted and straggly, I thought,  "Dear God! Thorin's curse has come to pass! Gandalf's beard has withered!"
The other night I was re-reading through one of the making of books, and hit this point where the above mentioned hair-artists were yakking about how they wanted a shorter beard to avoid caricature ( I came away with the feeling that they just had something against massive beards!). " We didn't want Father Christmas in The Movie"  . . . . . . . . . . . . .BUT GANDALF IS PARTLY CHARACTERIZED BY HIS GREAT, SWEEPING BEARD! I was aghast. I tossed in turned all night, in what can best be described in the dialect of rural southerners ( no offense ) as a  "Lawd have mercy child!" moment. I Fumed, Fumed, FUUUMED.
It was endemic of my key problem with the films. I loved them, but the place in them that most bothered me, as with the beard and Gandalf's fire spells, were not the major omissions like Bombadil, which I understood, nor the appendix additions like Arwen's scene with Elrond, which I loved. Rather it was needless omissions, like that of Galadriels words explaining why Frodos coming was a footstep of doom to the Elves. . . and those places where it seemed Peter Jackson, or other members of his team, seem to have blatantly decided " We don't give a rat's arse what Tolkien said, we want it this way, which is better, and we are going to change it.". . . I.E. Jackson dislikes ostentatious magic, so out with the fire wizardry Gandalf is famed for, or the film stylists disdain lengthy beards, so lets ignore the fact that Tolkien clearly states that Gandalf's beard hung below his waist. ARRRRRRRRRRR!
I don't expect them to make Gandalf's beard (and certainly not his hair) as long as Richard Harris's Dumbledore beard in the first pair of potter movies. But it should at least be long enough that if he pulled his hat completely over his face, the beard would still hang well below the hat's broad brim. AND IT SHOULD NEVER LOOK STRAGGLEY.
"Hear me, hounds of Sauron, Gandalf is here! Fly if you value your foul skins, I will shrivel you from tail to snout if you step within this circle!"
"Do not be to eager to deal out death in judgement. Even the very wise cannot see all ends."
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Gandalf's Beard !
