Ryder Blue Cavazos shoots at ACL Fest as her father looks on.
Photo by David Brendan Hall
As an avid music fan, my love for concert photography should come as no surprise. Many of my fellow concert photographers can attest to the thrill of getting that one shot of that one band you love.
When my 7-year-old daughter, Ryder Blue Cavazos, began tinkering with my cameras at the age of 3, I was obviously a very happy dad. Just the interest in the tool itself was enough for me. As she got older, that interest grew more and more to the point where she was requesting her own camera.
Using a hand-me-down Canon 20D equipped with a 40mm pancake lens, Ryder set out to shoot a few acts during the second day of 2014’s Fun Fun Fun Fest. She had cut her live music chops by shooting Fitz and the Tantrums a month prior at ACL Fest. FFF Fest gave her an opportunity to join me in the pit and see how that process worked.
A year later, we were in contact with Echosmith about having Ryder shoot from side stage during weekend one of this year’s ACL Fest. This was especially meaningful to her since the Chino, California quartet is one of her favorite bands. The gallery above features some of Ryder's favorite shots from the shoot.
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 how 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 character 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.