And meanwhile, Frodo can finally be at peace.

Over there.

Where I can't see him.

Perhaps I'm a little possessive of the characters of the story.

Maybe in a couple weeks I'll listen to it again. The pain is too new (I wish I were completely joking there, me and my silly allergies, justastory, justastory).

Over there.

Where I can't see him.

Oh, now you've gone and done it. sniff.

But! I have tickets for tomorrow's 11:00AM matinee. It's DH's last chance to see it schoolchildren and jaded dating people theatre-filled-free until after the holidays, since he works second shift, and all. We'll see it and then he'll go into work all red-eyed and weepy and have to explain himself. Heh. But he doesn't want to wait, and I want to be able to talk about it with him.

And Kathy, your tag cracks me up!

I snagged it from one of the posters at C-O-E, who put it in the "Little Things I Liked from RotK" thread, since someone else already snagged my favorite one-liner (Kate, I'm looking at you!!). All my other favorite lines are spoilers, unfortunately (" I can't carry it for you, but I can carry you!" "I know your face--Eowyn..." and "That only counts as one!" ).

The separation of Sam and Frodo at the Grey Havens was so sad, but necessary for both of their sakes. Frodo was never going to truly heal in M-E, and Sam would have never been happy seeing his best friend suffer. I always like imagining their reunion in Valinor, though--both of them old men, but Sam finally seeing a content Frodo at last, and maybe Frodo would help Sam over the loss of Rosie before they both die .

Kathy, I'm about to cry.

I really want very badly to watch the first hour of FotR right now. But it's very late. And I know I couldn't stop the movie before it was over. And then I'd have to watch TTT. And then it would be time to go to the RotK matinee. And I'd be hypersensitive and sleepless again. Um, no.

Finally saw the movie, so now I can read the whitefont!

I only got teary at the end. And I made Pete leave the theatre before the song over the closing credits could get into full verse, because I knew it would make me cry more.

Oh! I managed to watch all of the Shelob scenes without closing my eyes. I scrunched down in my seat and shook a lot, but did indeed watch the giant spider. Pete thinks that the spiders from the 2nd Harry Potter movie were actually creepier than Shelob, because the design made her more monster-like, while the spiders from HP2 were just (just! ha!) wolf spiders the size of cars. I will have to take his word for it, as I still haven't watched those scenes.

I'm in the camp of "didn't mind Liv as Arwen". When I think about all the horrible things that COULD have happened, casting-wise, I can't really get too worked up about the pretty pretty elf princess.

Yay, Jilli! Good for you!

I must to bed, so I can make the matinee tomorrow with DH. He has to go to work after, poor man.

With that I have to acknowledge that the book royally tees me off at the end when Eowyn gives that whole speech about [whitefont]

As my mother likes to say when I get going, "(smonster) took this class in Gender Issues and she's never gotten over it."

t makes out with smonster a LOT

His reason: he didn't want to see things that would make him feel like the events of the War of the Ring didn't actually take place and he felt the exhibit might do that.

Huh. Considering the detail of many of the props, they'd have exactly the opposite effect on me.

Pete thinks that [whitefont]

Jilli, first, I'M SO PROUD OF YOU!!! (It was tough for me, too). Second, I can see what Pete means when I think of Shelob's face, but I thought Shelob moved much more like a spider than the HP2 spiders. Particularly in that overhead shot, just after Frodo has left the cave, and she comes crawling out silently, above him. Her legs slpayed and moved in just the right way. It made me break into cold sweats, it did.

Shelob's way the fuck creepier.

IJS.

Plus, I couldn't watch her without having Gender Issue Issues. Which is actually something I noticed was bugging me throughout the movie. Not Shelob. The gender issues. And while I recognize that Tolkien was from a very male centered society, and that women were tangential in the emotional realm of men, it's something that has always bothered me, to the extent that books I have from my childhood have sections where I, err, changed the genders.

No actual cry points. A couple close ones, mostly Mippen related.

We talked a lot yesterday about the absence of mothers in LOTR. The conversation started with one person asking, "Elrond is such a dick, clearly hates men, and has daughter issues...why are they trusting him? I kept waiting for him to betray them all."

So I explained about what happened to Elrond's wife (and brother), and how he's a little bitter and doesn't want to lose Arwen also, and that kicked off a "Yeah, all the mothers, including the Entwives, are missing." So gender issues, sure, in this story. But Tolkein was writing a skaldic lay, where the men are the ones who go out into the world and do things. And, more tellingly IMO, in the Appendices and Silmarillion and other writings, it's clear that he was fully aware of just how much pain and suffering the women bore, how much the strength of women like Aragorn's mother contributed to the eventual victory, how much Denethor and Elrond were affected by the loss of their wives. The Ents aren't functional without the Entwives.

And you also have the Lay of Luthien, where she's a complete hero.

Shelob being female is zoologically accurate.

In other words, I've always felt that criticizing LOTR for lack of strong female or good female characters is a bit like criticizing a war movie for same. No one criticized Saving Private Ryan for lacking female characters. LOTR is the war story of Middle-Earth.

In one of the History of Middle Earth books, there's a great quote from Gandalf about Frodo and Sam:

Oh, now THERE GO THE ALLERGIES AGAIN!

ihsk

I was out to dinner with my parents, brother, and his girlfriend last night. None of them have seen Rotk yet. It was well nigh impossible for me not to talk about the movie, so I tried to keep it to trivia and TTT EE stuff. I HAD to tell them there was no Scouring - I really think they needed to know that before going in (my mom used to reread the trilogy every fall).

There was much discussion of how I've taken over the sci-fi/fantasy geekship of the family from my brother.