金融時報:中土世界的主宰

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2022年03月23日

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中土世界的主宰

影片《霍比特人I》中，馬丁·弗里曼出演的畢爾博充滿喜劇輕松氣息，全明星陣容的瑞文戴爾（林谷）展現(xiàn)了前拉斐爾風格。作者Nigel Andrews本不打算看這部片的，當看到瓦格納式的結尾時，他已經(jīng)迫不及待第二部了。

測試中可能遇到的詞匯和知識：

ineluctable [,?n?'l?kt?b(?)l]| adj.不可避免的；無法逃避的

elvedom n.精靈王國

fast-frame 一般電影標準制式是每秒24幀，而該片是每秒48幀。彼得·杰克遜和詹姆斯·卡梅隆等導演都認為3D電影需要后者

tremolo['trem(?)l??] n.顫音

pièce de résistance n.（法語）一餐中的主菜

scintillating['sintileiti?] adj.閃爍的；才氣橫溢的

spooky['spu:ki] adj.幽靈般的

montage [m?n'tɑ??] n.蒙太奇，將一系列在不同地點，從不同角度拍攝的鏡頭排列組合的手法

Wagnerian[vɑ:ɡ'ni?ri?n] adj.（德國浪漫主義作曲家）瓦格納風格的，這是歌劇或一般藝術中“先進”及非傳統(tǒng)的代義詞

scaly tail 有鱗的尾巴，這是影片結尾的鏡頭

A juggernaut in Middle-earth (419 words)

“The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey”, announces the poster. Unexpected? By whom? Among the great certainties of earthly existence, death and taxes were long ago overtaken by the ineluctable box office march and stamina of Peter Jackson’s Tolkien film saga. Halt its progress? Curtail its hobbit-forming momentum? You could as easily flag down a juggernaut with a paper hankie.

Professor Tolkien’s slim preludial volume to The Lord of the Rings now stands release-ready as an equal-length trilogy of movies slated to march on into earths and elvedoms infinite. Don’t expect me to cast the first slate. The Hobbit may be long and certifiably whimsical. But it is dashingly spectacular and, in its headlong, obsessive-compulsive way – you have to like looking at folkloric weirdos in beards, hats and bulbous noses – a sort of masterwork.

Don’t be deterred by the slow start or already controversial fast-frame screen process. Somewhere in the Shire, Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman) leaps from the flashbacking imagination of his older self (Ian Holm) to begin a trek through Middle Earth with an army of Dwarves wanting to reclaim a dragon-seized kingdom. Played by Freeman with a lightness of comic touch for which Jackson’s sometimes unwieldy franchise should weep with gratitude, this Bilbo makes a good contrasty double act with Ian McKellen’s Gandalf. Supposedly younger, the latter is as plummy and quavering as ever. Clearly youth cannot stale nor flashbacks wither that pop-eyed, purse-mouthed yet vocally empurpled, theatrical tremolo.

For a while little happens except walkies and fighties. The landscapes are lovely; the music soars; the dialogue is built around exclamatory one-worders cuing the next battle. “Orcs!” “Elves!” “Trolls!” An all-star interlude in Rivendell, with Cate Blanchett, Christopher Lee and Hugo Weaving, threatens to freeze the movie into a permanent pre-Raphaelite stasis. Then comes the first true pièce de résistance and all resistance ends.

Gollum and Bilbo meet in a cave and for half an hour the riddling cut-and-thrust of their dialogue is scintillating. Voiced and motion-capture-performed again by Andy Serkis, this film’s Gollum is better even than in TLOTR. His eyes are huge and spooky pools; his naked body scrambles arachno-humanly; his husking, wheedling baby talk (“precious”, “hobbitses”) is at times scary, at others funny.

The film rolls away like departing thunder with another massed battle, the best. The final sequence is an inspired little montage, with a Wagnerian flick in its scaly tail, setting up Hobbit 2. I can’t wait. And I’m the one who didn’t even want to go into Hobbit 1.

請根據(jù)你所讀到的文章內(nèi)容，完成以下自測題目：

1."You could as easily flag down a juggernaut with a paper hankie."

What does this mean?

A. Juggernauts are imaginary figures after all.

B. Jackson's film sagas and its box office performance are unstoppable.

C. Tolkien's stories were originally written down on a paper handkerchief.

D. Only the heroes can flag down a juggernaut, not everyone.

答案(1)

2.What can we learn about The Hobbit?

A. It is the finale of The Lord of The Rings stories.

B. It is scheduled to be realized into a series of 3 movies.

C. It is Tolkien's first fantasy story.