NFL commissioner Roger Goodell is really mad at Ben Roethlisberger. Just not mad enough to upset any of the league's lucrative television partners.
Goodell suspended the Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback — who keeps getting accused of rape — for six games this afternoon. Which, in one of those amazing coincidences, will give Roethlisberger just enough time to make what will be a highly-anticipated return in the Steelers' first national prime-time game of the season.
That stern Goodell probably consulted with Tiger Woods on appropriate return times.
CultureMap first reported that Roethlisberger was likely looking at a five to six game suspension last night. You didn't have to consult tea leaves or Dionne Warwick to see this coming. Once the NFL schedule came out and all five of the Steelers' prime-time games happened to take place later than Week 7, even Snooki could have made the leap.
Big Ben misses those first six games, goes through that surely stringent "comprehensive behavioral counseling" that Goodell is mandating, takes his first week back to get re-acclimated and then ... snap, he's running back onto the field for the Steelers' Week 8 Sunday Nighter at New Orleans. Suddenly, the NFL's premium game of the week gets a sure ratings bonanza.
Goodell just lost all his tough cop credibility. When is NBC Sports President Dick Ebersol sworn in as the new league czar?
Hèra (Gaia Wise) in The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim.
The Peter Jackson-led Lord of the Rings movie trilogy in the early 21st century was such a smashing success that people have been trying to recreate that magic for a long time. First came the ill-conceived The Hobbittrilogy, which made lots of money despite mostly poor reviews. The recent Amazon TV series, The Rings of Power, has gotten generally good reviews, but doesn’t seem to hold a place in the wider pop culture consciousness.
And now comes The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim, an anime-style film that seems like an attempt at both reclaiming the world in animated form from the weird 1978 film, and a nostalgia play for fans of the original series. Set 200 years before the events in J.R.R. Tolkien’s books, it nonetheless takes place in two very familiar locations that are recreated to appear exactly like they looked in Jackson’s films.
The story centers around Hèra (voiced by Gaia Wise), the only daughter of King Helm (Brian Cox) of Rohan. An early conflict with Lord Freca (Shaun Dooley) leads Freca’s son, Wulf (Luca Pasqualino), to develop a deep grudge against Helm and his family. Wulf pursues that ill will for years, eventually driving his foes into a fortress in a valley to make a final stand against his aggression.
Based on information found in the appendices of Tolkien’s novels, this is the rare instance when choosing to use animation holds back the creativity of a film. Typically, animation allows filmmakers to do things that wouldn’t be possible in the real world, but director Kenji Kamiyama and his team seem beholden to the look of Jackson’s films. While the animation itself is great, it doesn’t offer the fluidity of live action, and so the action scenes are often stilted and flat.
The story itself is not very compelling, as a quartet of screenwriters have concocted a plot that relies on revenge and heroism tropes that allow the audience to predict almost everything that happens. There are a few surprises to be had, but as the conflict revolves around a strong-willed female and her unwillingness to be told whom to marry, it’s generally clear how the story will be resolved, with only the specific details left to be discovered.
It also would have been great if the film weren’t so dependent on nostalgia for the original films. The two main locations are ones that played a big part in set pieces from those films, and their usage here doesn’t measure up favorably. Eowyn (Miranda Otto) serves as narrator, and other characters/actors from the original trilogy also make appearances, leaving little room for this film to establish itself on its own terms.
The majesty of the original Lord of the Rings trilogy, with its New Zealand vistas and incomparable visuals created by Wētā Workshop, set a high bar that none of the subsequent projects have been able to meet. The War of the Rohirrim is a competently-made film, but it doesn’t hold up to scrutiny with the Oscar-quality work of 20+ years prior.
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The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim opens in theaters on December 13.
