Sunday Best 1: Hello There

Hello and welcome to the very first Sunday Best, minutemonk’s weekly newsletter. Every Sunday I’ll be compiling the week’s posts, adding some bonus commentary and sending it all straight to your inbox. Let’s get started.

Fellowship 1: Mostly Darkness

I genuinely believe a good opening line can cure a lot of ills. Star Wars is ultimately just a bunch of random nonsense George Lucas made up on the way to work, but “a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away” makes the whole thing seem more like

minutemonkStephen Malone

The very first post on this site, and one I spent almost a week writing. You’d think it’d be easy to crank out ~250 words a day about the world’s greatest film trilogy, but no, it takes, like, effort and stuff. I also thoroughly maintain that a good opening line can solve a lot of problems in a movie, including the problem of “what the hell is this movie even about”.

Fellowship 2: Word Perfect

Yesterday was all about tone-setting, but today has a little more flash. Not since Titanic have I seen a movie announce so confidently that it has all the money in the world and it knows exactly how to spend it. Fellowship is *artisanal* in a way most blockbusters simply

minutemonkStephen Malone

It’s certainly blasphemy, but I’ve always wanted to try my hand at something like a Phantom Edit for Fellowship, just to see how much I could cut away until it stopped making sense. Could we skip the history lesson? Could we skip *the Shire*? Maybe Fellowship is actually just a 35 minute short film about a guy who meets some cute hobbits and then gets shot by an orc.

Fellowship 3: Let Fly

Minute three and we’re still in setup mode, but once again it’s brevity that comes to the rescue. We’re doing two things at once here: one, the rapid flow of “rings exist” → “Sauron sucks” → “elves beat Sauron” gives us everything we need to understand what’s going

minutemonkStephen Malone

Hugo Weaving is simultaneously terrifying and adorable, like a mountain face that occasionally cracks a smile. Oh yeah, and the intro is still great. What were we talking about?

Fellowship 4: Big Swings

We’re still in the intro, so let’s pivot for a second. Watching these movies one minute at a time is surprisingly agonising, so to increase my Tolkien dosage I’ve started reading the books as well. I’m only halfway through “Concerning Hobbits” so far (give me a

minutemonkStephen Malone

Another Harry Potter mention here. Believe it or not, this blog was almost going to be about the Potter films until I realised (a) it would genuinely take a decade of my life, and (b) Joanne doesn’t need any more supporters.

Fellowship 5: Plus Expenses

The 2000s are effectively the last time Hollywood truly gave a shit. Back then CGI was new enough that it could only be used sparingly, the last generation of physical effects workers were still spry enough to work and franchises weren’t the guaranteed cash cows they are now. Even

minutemonkStephen Malone

I love the Corridor Digital video where they try to replicate the forced-perspective shots from Fellowship, if only because it further proves how imprecise the whole process is. The Hobbit movies just put everyone on a green-screen and shrink them in post, but in 2001 if you wanted smaller people, you had to actually *make them look smaller*. What a concept.

Well that’s it: my first five blog posts down and only *six hundred* to go. We’re definitely in for the long haul. Thanks so much for subscribing to Sunday Best and I’ll see you tomorrow for the next post. Goodnight!