Nerd Cookies has come out with Part 2 of her takedown of "The Rings of Power," and for such a gentle-voiced little pixie (no idea whether she looks like a pixie; she could be 300 pounds for all I know), she's pretty brutal.
Your bonus video comes courtesy of British commentator Disparu, who focuses on the moral repugnance of the Galadriel that's being given to the audience.
I'm not watching the series, so I can't say this from firsthand knowledge, but it seems a lot of the criticism is coalescing around the thoroughly unlikeable character of Galadriel. Disparu, above, does make an effort to separate Galadriel—at least somewhat—from the actress playing her, Morfydd Clark, although Clark does come in for a beating regarding her lack of varied facial expressions. Her default expression, based on the many stills and video clips I've seen, is always somewhere in the neighborhood of stern/annoyed/scornful. How much of that is Clark's fault, and how much comes from how the actress is being directed? Hard to say.
Having relayed a ton of critical commentary about this series, I'm going to throttle back, now, and wait for Part 3 of Miss Nerd Cookies's* criticism (if she does a Part 3). The Critical Drinker has said he won't give a full rundown and assessment of the show until he's finished the whole season, so I'll wait for his video as well. Those will probably be the last two videos about "the Rings of Power" that I'll be posting. The point has been made: Amazon shat out a billion-dollar turd that fails in almost every way, and I personally am happy not to be wasting my time watching it. Reading and watching the criticism has been a lot more fun.
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*If a noun is in the plural, and you want to add a possessive apostrophe, you normally just attach the apostrophe to the end of the word, e.g., the robbers' stash. I was therefore stumped, at first, re: how to handle "Nerd Cookies," which is already in the plural, but which is also a proper name for a single person. I chose to stick with the proper-name route, so I treated "Nerd Cookies" as a proper name ending in -s, like Jones or Williams. There's some stylistic wiggle room when it comes to names ending in -s, but I always default to making the genitive form of s-final names by adding apostrophe-s: Jones's, Williams's, Nerd Cookies's.
I watched NC's video yesterday, I think, gritting my teeth through her "airy fairy" narration, as you put it (although I will admit that it does become less conspicuous over time). I wasn't surprised by anything she said, given everything I've read/heard about RoP.
ReplyDeleteAs for the actress who plays Galadriel, I'm always hesitant to place the blame on the actor. It might even be something more ephemeral than the direction, like the general mood of the production of the cultural zeitgeist (for lack of a better word) surrounding it. I haven't seen her in anything else (and I guess I haven't really seen her in this, either), so I will reserve judgment.