From the Salon review:

Tolkien purists may be less happy with "The Return of the King" than with the other chapters of Jackson's trilogy. Several subplots have been dropped entirely... and others...have been whittled to almost nothing. In some alternate universe, Jackson could have made a 30-hour miniseries to make such people happy. In this universe, he has merely made the grandest and most delicate of pop spectacles, an epic that is heroic but almost never grandiose, a story of war that understands that within every great victory there lies a kind of defeat.

Several subplots have been dropped entirely... and others...have been whittled to almost nothing

This is intensely frustrating. I'm assuming that's what accounts, for instance for the superpowers and the lost Faramir/Eowyn -- no time to go to the healing halls. It couldn't have been longer, but it should have been.

We didn't have those laugh points. There were some Gollum laugh moments that I didn't think very funny. Some "not done YET???" outbursts formed the bulk of our vibe harshers.

My "I totally don't see why you did THAT" for the movie was definitely the Arwen thing. Made precisely zero sense. Like the Ents coming to realisation so late in TTT and Carhadras in FotR, but moreso.

Once more with Hobbits

I don't think it needed to be longer. I'd have been happy exchanging some of the endless amassing for battle scenes for more character moments, like the Houses of Healing.

See, Jess, I found those to be character scenes. In the senses of the characters involved, the nations as characters, and the quest as a character too.

If I went to snipping, it'd pretty much be a random 10s off of every third scene, or something.

Until Xmas week so grandmother can babysit.

You know what the funny part is? The funny part is that grandmother heard about this plan and said, "No, wait, I'm going to this movie too."

There may be a series of viewings among the Nuttykin, each a different set of people with one left behind to keep track of Casper. I am doing my part by seeing it, with brother, tonight.

Hurray for Fandango and cell phones, as my planning is very much of the last minute. It is a womanful job, trying not to read the whitefont.

In the senses of the characters involved, the nations as characters

I can see that. For me, after the third or fourth time it happened, I was getting a little tired of PJ cutting away from Frodo & Sam to show us yet another wide shot of the Biggest CGI Armies Ever. I wanted to see more people fighting.

Those shots got a fair number of "oohs" from my last audience, Jess. I thought it was because of the increasing bleakness of it all -- the endlessness of Sauron's forces.

I mean 6000 sounds like a big number, doesn't it? But it's nothing.

So while I got the basic they're outnumbered premise, it kept being hammered harder and harder home. Although I enjoyed Frodo and Sam climbing more than I enjoyed them walking last time round, I didn't need to see any more of it. In fact, I was grateful for cutting from scenes I was really deep into (basically all Pippin) because I needed recovery time.

I mean [whitefont] But it's nothing.

Actually, that's a nitpick of mine -- he says "6,000 spears, less than half of what I was expecting." So he was expecting 12,000, at least. So what was with all the "Ten THOUSAND?!?!?! Nobody's got an army THAT big!" talk in TTT?

It's a small thing, but it caught my ear.

What's the exact line from TTT? I'd read it as Wormtongue saying that Saruman can't just get an army that big. It's not like he was working from a warlike country's population, or anything. The orcish numbers must be reasonably known and constant.