The Toronto Star Review January 2005
This review appeared in the Toronto Star after the reviewer saw the film in Park City at Slamdance.
We must remark that the reviewer misunderstood the narration and Professor Tolkien did not call his fans "Cultists." He called them "My diplorable cultus."
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Jan. 27, 2005
A film about the Tolkien's 'cultists'
He deplored them — doesn't matter
GEOFF PEVERE
PARK CITY, UTAH—The late J.R.R. Tolkien called them "my deplorable cultists" and there is much in Ringers: Lord of the Fans, the new documentary about Tolkien's ever-swelling legion of intemperate enthusiasts that has just premiered at the Park City alt-Sundance festival called Slamdance, that the author would certainly deplore.
Certainly he would wonder about the Ring-wild twin teenage girls interviewed in the movie, both of whom seem to have had cosmetic enhancement to their incisors and eyes, the more to presumably look like vampires. (What teenage girl would spend good money to look like a Hobbit?) And he might well wonder about having Lemmy Kilmister, the feral-looking, evil-vibing, veteran heart and soul of the undying heavy-metal unit Motorhead, as one of those who proudly call themselves "Ringers."
You can bet he'd shake his head at the woman who sold her home in America in order to attend the premiere screening of The Return of the King in New Zealand. Indeed, he'd probably deplore the movies themselves, which have expanded the Ringer legions several millionfold. After all, as one interviewee in Ringers reminds us, was it not Tolkien himself who called his Middle-earth trilogy "unfilmable"?
But Tolkien created the Lord of the Rings trilogy, he did not create the cult, and that crucial difference is what Carlene Cordova's Ringers is about.
It tells the story of a fandom strangely independent of the works that generated it, which means it's really a case study in fandom itself, for fandom is what is sparked spontaneously from the alchemy between an artefact and its reception. It begins at the moment the creator relinquishes control, and evolves into something both rooted in the creation and an organism utterly unto itself. Sorry, Professor.
Tracing the growth of the Rings' cult through the decades of its growth and along the various branches of its mutations, Ringers culminates with the release of Peter Jackson's globally blockbusting movie adaptations. Much of the movie's non-fan interviews are with the likes of Peter Jackson, Sir Ian McKellan, Elijah Wood and Viggo Mortensen, and the movies are acknowledged as the catapult that vaulted the phenomenon, bigger than ever, from the last century to the current one.
Indeed, a huge number of the "Ringers" interviewed seem to be caught either in a state of twitchy pre-screening anticipation or blissful post-screening rapture.
One woman mentions how she spent nine consecutive afternoons watching The Fellowship of the Ring, while another makes the impressive claim that she and he her husband have already seen the movies "hundreds" of times. Considering that the films in question range anywhere from 13 months to three years old, and that each is a hefty three hours or so in length, you've got to wonder if she and her husband have done anything else but watch the chronicles of Frodo.
Fandom is of course just a couple of syllables away from fanaticism, and while Cordova's movie doesn't shy from the line where enthusiasm crosses over to obsession, it's a little too breezy and good-tempered to dwell for long on the other side. But it's a fan-generated project after all (it's produced by the massively popular Ringer website TheOneRing.net), and its goal is ultimately not to question the cult but to honour it and, let's be honest, appeal to it.
But even within the restrictions such a positive inclination implies, Ringers is comprehensive, entertaining and informative pop cultural history.
It reminds you that there is an alternative history linking LOTR with the rise of heavy metal and prog rock in the '70s (Rush's Geddy Lee is on hand to testify to that), and its most tantalizing what-if scenario involves John Lennon trying to interest both David Lean and Stanley Kubrick into making a movie of Tolkien's fantasy epic.
It looks at the rack upon rack of thick-spined fantasy novels found in every bookstore today and suggests, quite reasonably, that none of these would exist without Lord of the Rings. Nor, very possibly, would Star Wars, which is basically Lord of the Rings in blue-screen space.
Although marred somewhat by cheesy, low-budget sequences designed to evoke various periods of the cult's history (from the black-and-white 1950s, through the psychedelic '60s and so forth onward), the movie offers a convincing portrait of a cult with sufficient innate organic energy to reproduce itself no matter what the historical context.
This probably says as much about the enduring, deep-mythical metaphoric power of the original stories as it does about fandom, and it's therefore fascinating to learn that no one resisted metaphoric readings of the books as Tolkien himself. Then again, it's not his baby. He only gave birth to it.
Ringers: Lord of the Fans has no distribution arrangement as of yet, but it's almost inconceivable that it won't appear somewhere, in some form, sometime very soon.
Those "deplorable cultists" will see to that.
