ARGH! WAITING ONE MORE YEAR! ARGH!

A couple of lines I would have rewritten and a couple of minor changes I would have made. But oh man, was it worth the wait and then some. Not as stunned as I was last year because this time around I knew with confidence that Jackson would deliver. And did he ever.

Second showing for me starts in just under seventeen hours. Time for sleep.

Grrr....*ahem* Never mind me. Just a huge dash of envy going on!

It is released today....Can I go? NO! I am forced to work today.

Mind you, my inner hobbit wants me to play hooky!

Dammit.

Torture, I tell you.

(full story to come)

I was meant to be seeing the first one this morning but STUPID FAT HOBBIT that I am I got there and discovered they were only showing it Monday and Tuesday, and I'd walked for an hour down the edge of the motorway to a mjostly deserted rubbish shopping center for nothing. Then 10 minutes later I realised that was only the Gold Class screenings cos the card was so appallingly laid out, and it was on and I missed it, but then I noticed there were tickets still available for the next Two Towers show, but the ticket machine wanted to charge me £6.50 and the card said £3, all show all times, so I went to the customer service desk cos there was nothing else resembling a box office, and he pointed "over there", and I went "over there" and found nothing, so I went back and realised he was pointing at the snack counter, and I felt very weird asking the guy in the silly hat for tickets, especially as there were no signs or anything. But then I still had to find the auditorium, and the signs said "< 5-8 1-4 >", and I wanted screen 5 which turned out to be on the right AAAAAAAAAAAAARGH, so I went in there and sat down and realised the show was in Screen 3 and I am a STUPID FAT HOBBIT. I've left off lots of other idiocy that happenned today, but that is the stupidest cinema ever, I am the stupidest patron, I think we deserve each other, frankly.

The fearsome EYE OF SAURON:
http://www.ctnow.com/media/photo/2002-09/4499432.jpg

aaargh two hours and THREE minutes!!

(um no Perry jokes please ;))

i am all twitchy like a COKE addict or something!

(Should I run a book on when Katie explodes?)

Graham is on crack.

Given that I'll eagerly read any Superman comic put in front of me, I am not thinking myself all superior and above it all or anything. I will be getting all excited about the Ang Lee Hulk, if the early indications are anything like as good as LotR or CTHD.

I would have a) Taken out all the rubbish dream sequences and maybe, just maybe keep the one were Agent Elrond and Liv argue. b) Remove the moronic enviromental/war affects us all message from the Entmoot. Go back to the orginal, much much more fun. And introduce the other Ent for crissakes.
But Gollum stole the show, take that jar jar! The scene where he is debating with himself was great. And it was nice to see the comic relief didn't get stuck solely on Merry and Pippin. The series of wisecracks from Helm's Deep were perfect.
Great start to the film as well.
But its not as good (or as close to the story) as the first. I can take the omissions and the beefing up certain threads but the more they add from out of the blue the more it takes away from the story.
I luckily avoided getting in the papers but I don't know if I escaped the 11 O'clock news. They had coverage of our lineup party outside and several people I was in line with ended up in the papers.

Im paying now at work for the 12:01 showing last night.

I hear you there. Eeg.

I wish I had wrote this. Haven't seen the movie yet, tho.

hahaha... :) well i was V HAPPY with it, apart from a few things eg. the ELVES turning up at Helm's Deep? Led by HALDIR THE GAY? Faramir being a complete TWUNT and trying to nick the ring (i was really hoping they'd put the line about "i would not pick this thing up if it were lying by the wayside")? and the Entmoot = rub, frankly. AND when they meet Eomer towards the beginning, and he's all like "oh sorry yeah we probably killed your friends. here's a couple of horses though!" and Arwen oh dear oh DEAR. when the horse was nuzzling Aragorn i exploded into giggles because it was OBV that he thought the horse was Arwen in his dream!

b-b-but! gollum! the Dead Marshes (i was TERRIFIED)! frodo turning on Sam (phwoar frodo show us your sting ect)! Gimli being HILARIOUS! Legolas not being utterly rubbish (though surfing down the steps of helm's deep i mean AHEM)! Aragorn being quite heroic! the "not idly do the leaves of Lorien fall" line (i love that line)! and GOLLUM ARGUING WITH HIMSELF it was one of the best scenes EVER!

and Grima wormtongue = he has a black velvet cape - he is a GOTH!!

hahaha! more later! i still want to HUNT SOME ORC!!

I thought the film was great and my few qualms were almost exactly the same as katies above.

I liked the dream sequences - found the Eowyn/Aragorn attraction thing was good - it's in the book after all, just given a bit more attention in the movie. I actually really really liked the Eowyn character and the bit of ice-maiden thing , surrounded by death , stuff. I think it'll lead into the next movie well.

I didn't like Elves at Helm's Deep and Faramir taking the hobbits to osligoth(sp?). I wished the ent thing was more true to book as well - rather than Merry tricking treebeard to go south. Wished that the Ents/ Huorns (where were they?) went down to Helms Deep like they do in the book.

Viva Gollum! Viva the Dead Marshes! Viva Grima!! and Theoden!!

Palantir: Grima throws it out of Orthanc at Gandalf, Merry(?) looks in it & sees The Eye of Sauron, Aragorn keeps hold of it as descendant of Numenorian Kings?

cripes new message alert... um he kind of announces his presence to Sauron via the palantir to STRIKE PH34R into his heart, and wrests control of it away from him. its more a psyching-out measure i guess.

I have no idea what any of you are talking about.

Fwoooooooaaaaarodo!

honestly, pay attention Graham ;)

― katie (katie), Thursday, 19 December 2002 15:00 (twenty-three years ago)

it will be RED HOT.

You know, Gygax, I could have you killed.

from a friend's email today:
I went to visit a friend at Network Appliance, and they are supplying Peter Jackson with over 250 Terabytes of storage for the new movie. Apparently there are something like 20,000,000 non-human "actors" in the movie.

And based on the preview Marianna called it. :-) And the Huorns are going to turn up and the descent on the rope scene at the start of the Sam/Frodo/Gollum sequence and the Entdraughts and...

(I just find it very irritating to have to switch discs, and I know that a lot of early DVDs were double-sided because of sloppy coding.)

? Not following you here. You mean only two feature length commentaries instead of four?

But all four commentaries are good in their own ways (and the director/script one is the only spot throughout where Fran Walsh directly participates; she consciously avoided participating in the documentaries because she's generally a more private person, I gather).

The director/script one is the only other one I've heard in full -- the others, I've put on to listen to while I was cooking, something I can't do in this apartment since the kitchen is not similarly close to the living room.

How true! Sad gal that I was, I hadn't listened to most of the commentaries until this past weekend. In spots, it was more fun to listen to the commentary (as I'd seen the movie already, natch). It's rare that you hear every actor in a cast actually say that they loved doing a project. Where else would you find out that Christopher Lee smashed his hand before filming?

Not even that, early 20s.

I dunno, I liked that (and he wasn't saying 'cool' all the time or anything)! If anything he was talking about sheer enthusiam for the joys of cinema as a watcher and I think it came across really well. He might not have been Pauline Kael or the like, but are we expecting that of such commentaries?

"orlando bloom, he might look good on the poster, he doesn't have many lines does he?"

Elijah Wood has often noted that he was never able to finish LOTR itself, so personally I don't think that's much of an issue. But if you must play the card, Bloom *does* say on the commentary that he had read it at least once.

* Though I still think that the Ents come off as almost willfully ignorant on certain things and that they could have written the movie to have Treebeard be more immediately understanding, they do set it up so that Saruman's decision to start hacking into Fangorn happened almost right there and then in second-movie-timeframe terms, and thus making it more an honest surprise.

* The seemingly complete rewrite of Faramir's character from the book is much more conditional now -- the Faramir/Denethor/Boromir plays out the tensions described but not directly encountered in the book within that family and his initial actions are less surprising/less of a switch than before.

A lot of the additional scenes came straight from the book or used a lot of the direct dialogue, v. nice -- and Old Man Willow sorta shows up indirectly!

Liv Tyler elf lady doesn't really have to worry about being alone. old Legolas will still be around won't he? I can't remember if he left or not?

It's been twenty years! Remember when!

Well, those of us on the podcast did...

https://www.megaphonic.fm/bythebywater/45