Oh yes, that was another LOL moment reading the James essay. Fear of sentiment my flat white fanny. If anything, I would have knocked the whole trilogy for being too sentimental.

Eowyn is brittle and deadly, with a needy core underneath, and Eowyn would have been the first to cry "Death!"

Katie and I are one. I have some patience/forgiveness on this matter, because so much of her storyline will have to wait for the EE, but yeah. More despair! I sort of wonder if the filmmakers didn't quite trust us on the despair front.

More despair! I sort of wonder if the filmmakers didn't quite trust us on the despair front.

Frankly, although I eagerly await extra pain in the EE, I'm pretty okay with the amount of despair RotK presented me.

But that may be my Pippin issue.

Kathy, I am with you on Pippin being carried out to escort the soldiers from Gondor back in. It makes no sense, except to compress the story so that Faramir can see Pippin right then, and tell them about Frodo and Sam.

In general, the heroes were less heroic in the movie than in the books, and the bad guys were less evil. Eowyn was obviously less psychotic, but I think it's a reader thing to be able to associate with her psychosis; I doubt it would come through well on the screen. Sam may have come across as more heroic in the movies, which is cool, since I've always maintained that he's the hero of the books.

The line "Now that I'm here, I don't think I want to do what I came to do" was truncated and moved to the entrance to Shelob's lair. Funnier in that setting, but talk about sucking the power out of the dialog.

So. Guys. I got to the movies yesterday, saw this little flick. Not sure if anyone's heard of it, it's from New Zealand or something. It's pretty good, though they seemed a bit confused as to how big elephants and eagles really are. Expect a scathing review in National Geographic.

A friend told me the battle in that movie was based on the Battle of the Somme.

I had no idea there were really big elephants at the Somme.

I had no idea there were really big elephants at the Somme.

Raquel, may I please tag?

This is going to sound really dumb, but in a way the pterodactyls/dragons swooping out of the sky and randomly killing people *did* remind me of World War I. I could get this visceral feeling for how shocking and against all the laws of nature it must have seemed for there to be that kind of attack from above, for the battlefield to turn into a three-dimensional matrix when for millennia people had been thinking of it as a two-dimensional one. (Okay, I know that's not quite right and topography is important -- but figuring out how the lay of the land affects battles is just so different from being attacked fromt he sky.)

Katie - Re: your #7. I echo everything you said about Eowyn, every little thing.

I've been wondering why this seemed to me to be an exceptionally good movie rather than THE. BEST. MOVIE. EVER. And I think that, aside from my insane love of the Shire and thus wicked bias towards Fellowship, that the mishandling of Eowyn has a lot to do with it.

I love the Buffistas because they don't make me feel like a bad person when I don't like something as much as all my friends do.

Also, I'm 99% certain that Legolas was all set to marry Aragorn, before Aragorn caught sight of Arwen .

Micole, that didn't even sound dumb when you said it twice. When the dragon-thangs started divebombing the towers of the city, it gave me a dull sick "That's wrong, it's cheating, it's not fucking fair" feeling in the pit of my stomach (approximately the same feeling I had the entire six weeks my European History class spent on WWI).

how shocking and against all the laws of nature it must have seemed for there to be that kind of attack from above, for the battlefield to turn into a three-dimensional matrix when for millennia people had been thinking of it as a two-dimensional one

Yes, this exactly.