Re: the lord of the rings

["Christian D. Lindemer" <CD-Lindemer at wiu_edu>]

Don Smith wrote:
> Bruce wrote:
> 
>>i'm the only one man enough to stand up and say, "hey!  this is complete and
>>utter garbage, guys!!"
> 
> 
> Oh, Bruce.  Now you've gone and done it.  How will I ever recover the respect I
> had for you that you just shattered?  :-) Speaking as one who owns every book
> Tolkien ever published (except for some of the scholarly articles I haven't
> been able to track down)...
> 
> ...you're just wrong.  ;-P
> 
> And Duran Duran is a bunch of no-talent has-beens.  ;-) :-) ;-)

Not only that, but your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of 
elderberries!

Now that the scholarly discussion is over (because I say so, that's 
why!) time to go on with the senseless argument.

I can, without the least hint of uncertainty, declare that LotR is an 
interesting story, and definitely worthy of some respect, but it's just 
TOO MUCH to be presented in three movies.  Perhaps it's because I'm 
sleep-deprived, perhaps it's the fact I have not actually read the 
books, but TTT didn't have me enthralled.  I was eager for the movie to 
be over by the two-thirds mark.

Maybe the real reason this movie didn't have me is because it did not 
GRAB me and make me its own in the first bit.  My memory is akin to that 
of a pot-riddled ferret, so remembering just what happened a year ago in 
the first movie took the first fifteen minutes of the movie.  All that 
time I was trying to figure out exactly why there were two hobbits 
riding on the backs of some creatures that were definitely /not/ horses.

This could have all been helped with a little more review, but Jackson's 
already packing a plus-size story into a size four movie, if you catch 
my drift.

I tried to convince my roomie that the whole series would work better in 
four, or maybe even five, chunks.  He assured me that the way everything 
is paced now there is one big battle per installment; breaking them 
apart would result in at least one dull (in action, anyway) movie.  To 
me, though, the war is not necessarily essential to a good movie.  What 
do I know?

Minor unrelated things:

1) I feel like an illiterate fool for the misspelling of Smeagol. 
Especially when I should have known better.  Maybe y'all thought it was 
pert of the humor.  I assure you that ::thinks quickly:: YEAH I meant it.

2) I never read Narnia, but maybe someday I will get to it.  First I 
have to finish re-reading the L'Engle books (1/4 of the way through the 
Time Quartet!  Woo!) and a little Engdahl.

-Smitty the Splinter Cell

NP: Death Cab for Cutie - 405

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