elvish has left the building

i went to that ridiculous lord of the rings trilogy yesterday. when i signed up for this thing, i thought, “well, it would be cool to see all three of them in the theatre, back to back, so you can tell what is going on in one continuous story arc, and also on the big screen.” i do remember watching the two towers, and after a few hours frodo and sam were ready to go into mordor, and i was like, “ok, now something’s going to happen, i’m ready!” and then the movie ends. so this sounded like a good solution.

little did i know that it was actually the extended editions of the first two movies, meaning that the first one started at one in the afternoon, the second one at five, and we wouldn’t even get to the final one until ten at night! actually, it was a really nice experience. the theatre was really cool about stuff, keeping people comfortable, having a special guy bring in a cart with food so we didn’t have to leave the theatre to buy concessions, and even giving free pop refills. and actually, they even bent their rules and allowed us to bring in our own food if we wanted to!

to be honest, the extended footage wasn’t bad. it didn’t really make much difference to me for the first movie, but it did make the second movie make more sense. although a lot of the extended footage was just waiting for liv tyler to try and say her lines in elvish. sheesh.

the return of the king was pretty great, and i’m probably a lot more objective than the rest of the audience, not really being a lotr fan in the first place. (why was i in there again?) the battle scenes were incredible (don’t mess with oliphaunts), i mean really epic, like some of the best i’ve seen, like braveheart or spartacus or ran, not crappy like gladiator. and it was really good from a movie standpoint: it didn’t drag, and was pretty captivating and exciting. of course, wait until the 5 hour extended version comes out…

oh, and at the end (1:30am!), they gave us all a little resin stand with a filmstrip frame from each of the three movies, actually cut from a print of each film, to commemorate the trilogy. very nice, and these immediately showed up on ebay for $30-300+. mine has aragorn, gandalf, and eowyn.

Posted at December 17, 2003 11:47 AM