I have been waiting for this movie with some odd feelings. It is not about movies being always worse than books but something a little more personal. I finished all the Tolkien books - I mean all, the poems, the essays, that unfinished next book - by the time I was 12 and then moved on to viking sagas and welsh mythology and early middle ages histories. [Lasted until Hemingway struck me at 15 and I wanted nothing but terse doubt.] Odd to think of it but placing those images and that story in my pre-technologically enhanced life
adds to its importance. When I read it, there were no PC's, CD's, money machines, VCRs, pocket calculators, cable tv, nintendo, etc. in my life or in the life anyone I knew in mid-70's Annapolis Valley. We walked through woods from school to home, we drove bikes down paths, played sports without adults, had school yard fights without expulsions - technological recreation was table hockey. The hobbits struck me and my brothers and friends who read the books. We identified and saw the enemies and weapons they faced not as video games - they did not exist - but hell - which did in that church going era where the old guys in the pews were WWI vets who had fought a war in hellish darkness. I worry that the place the books have sat in my recollection - a very pleasant part of childhood - will be disturbed. Right now, the darkness in everything related to the Middle Earth is a big part of it - even the elvish world is lit in my mind with fireflies - only Rohan, that land of horses, is bright in a fall afternoon way. The trailers for the movie strike me as too filled with light. I may go but I think I may read the hobbit instead over Christmas.

By the way - happy Yule's Eve: http://www.tartans.com/articles/celtchristmas.html. That is another thing I got out of the world of the books: semi-paganification of everything.

I think thats awesome that your office closed for LOTR!! Wish my office was as cool as me :_(

Lord of the Rings: Best Hollywood movie since Brazil.

Best thing: Almost 3 hours of pure entertainment for bloated movie prices.

Worst thing: Pop culture reference to Dwarf Tossing. Out of place and out of date.

Am I insulted by the 12 month delay in releases? 1/2 yes 1/2 no. It took me 8 years to read the first 50 pages of Dune and 4 months to read all 7 books once I did. Fine, but I want to see the second movie in Mordor now, damnit.

I have not read the books but will now. Everything needs a catalyst.

Goodbye.

best hollywood movie since brazil...i think spaceballs holds that title.

I find it weird to call The Lord of the Rings or Brazil Hollywood movies considering not one inch of either film was shot in Hollywood, or the US for that matter. But yeah, I guess the money came from Hollywood, so they're Hollywood. And goddammit, Windom, Spaceballs is a terrible film. Hudson Hawk, however, is a highly underrated movie. And I'm not being ironic either.

hey wassup

Ah your all geeks

nah nah nah nah nah nah nah nah ahay your all geeks