Wednesday 26 December 2001

Pic of the day: Continued in next book, if you don't want to wait another year to find out how it goes. Probably available at your local bookstore right now. Probably not at your local library for quite some weeks.

Lords, rings & stuff

So the ever thoughtful SuperWoman had pre-ordered 5 tickets for Lord of the Rings on second day of Christmas. I'd be just as happy with just 2, but that would be too date-like I guess. Not that I object to going to the movies with 3 young woman, which is what actually happened. I am insatiable, am I not? Heh.

Actually we didn't even hold hands. Which is just as well, or I would not have noticed the movie. 'Cause every time we touch, my heart goes FWOOM! (or was that BOOM? FWOOSH? something like that.) But that's another story entirely, or none at all. Back to LotR. I'll just pretend y'all haven't seen it twice already.

Oh, and we didn't get the tickets we ordered, because we were way too late to pick them up. Luckily we were there before the actual movie started, and luckily it had gone for so many days that there were 20 places left - all in the front row. We survived that too, for 3 hours, with only moderate damage.

***

The girls hadn't even read the book. Imagine. These are not 11 years old either, but ranging from almost 18 to almost 25. Where have they hid their heads for all these years? (And nice heads, too.) Anyway, the good news is that they still got most of the story. And a side order of manly men, too. (The movie is rather heavily slanted to the male side of things, though there are a couple of really powerful and good looking Elvish princesses showing up briefly.) The guy who played Aragorn (Viggo Mortensen) was the absolute main course. I think he looked a bit rough.

We were all impressed with the film technically. Reality and animation blended so seamlessly that we had no idea where one ended and the other took over. We saw sights that we knew were impossible, but we could not say how much of it was real. One thing that may have helped them was the ever moving camera. Yes, it seemed that there was no single time in the whole 3 hours of movie when the perspective was at rest. Even when people stood still, the camera moved around them. This must have brought its own challenges; but it also means that the viewer has no time to fix his eyes on any detail. They all move and shift in and out of view.

A movie is not a book, and usually you either won't like both or you will think of them as two different works of art. If a movie follows the book slavishly, it tends to get disjointed and fragmentet. Somehow, this was avoided here. The movie does cut some parts (like the whole Bombadil part, as you may have heard) and expands just slightly on the Arwen & Aragorn romance (but only a few minutes out of 3 hours). But mostly, the movie is true to the Fellowship of the Ring, so much as to blend into one experience. And yet you can easily watch the movie without having seen the book. In fact, since the movie ends so undecided, I suspect the follow-up books will be hard to get at the libraries for a long time to come.

I don't need to tell you to go and see it, right? You've already been and seen it, right? Go and see it again. I still may, but probably not. Being me, I can largely replay it in my head, cheaply in the comfort of my own sofa. (OK, someone else's sofa this time, but you get the drift.) I suspect I shall buy the DVD some years hence, though, if I'm still around by then.

***

Later in the evening there was more gathering of family and their in-laws and in-loves. The young ones compared Xmas gifts. I'm happy to say that the watch was held in high esteem. But SW's younger brother had bought a ring to his girlfriend, similar to the one I gave to SW a few years ago, and it was the star of the show. Rings seem to command a special interest. Strange, isn't it?

I still haven't gotten the third diamond in SW's ring. I am nor sure whether she consciously evades it for some reason, or if it's just bad luck. This time she had planned to get back to the south coast once more before Xmas, which was when we'd take care of the ring business. But reality intervened, and I did not see her again until the Saturday before the holidy. I still feel it's a kind of unfinished business.

Oh well. We shall surely continue to drift apart, but it is a process of glacial slowness. There may still be time, somewhat depending on whether she finds herself a boyfriend in the coming year, and if so, how jealous he is. I guess most boyfriends want to be their girlfriend's ... "Lord of the Rings".