A Lord of the Rings drinking game. (Also check out her review of RotK and also Cold Mountain, which makes continual comparisons to RotK.)

Ted's a shirking shirker. Pass it on...

I was going to, but it was too much responsbility.

Bwah!!!

Oh frell, are we still white-fonting?

But mostly, the problem is this: I've seen Samwise Gamgee carrying Frodo Baggins up the slopes of Mount Doom. I've seen Faramir, captain of Gondor, ride to what he believes will be his death merely to earn the love of his father. I've seen Peregrin Took leap onto a burning pyre to save a dying man he doesn't know in repayment for a debt owed that man's dead brother. I've seen an entire world shrink into molecules of fading hope and acts of selfless love. After that, how can the troubles of one Confederate soldier and one Southern belle amount to even a hill of beans in this crazy world? Nothing they can say could upset me.

Now I'm really mixing my movie-geek metaphors. Does it make me a completely irredeemable nerd that The Princess Bride helps me explain why The Lord of the Rings makes me unable to get worked up by Cold Mountain? Does it make me irredeemably "biast"? I know neither of these things is a newsflash. I'm sorry that I cannot be more objective, but I only know how to tell you how a movie makes me feel. And as prejudiced as the reasons may be, I couldn't feel a lot for Cold Mountain.

Well said.

Interesting reactions from a non-reader: he assumed that Gimli was The Last Dwarf in Middle-Earth, due to the Moria scene. Also, he keeps asking me what happened to Solomon [sic] and Grima.

I ended up feeling like it was one big battle scene with the occasional cutaway to have Pippin make the point that War Sucks or because Oh Right, We Need A Frodo And Sam Update.

Totally my feelings, too, except I thought there were, in general, too many cutaways. TTT played out in big chunks of one story at a time, which I thought worked better than the "nope, not gonna let this scene end either" style he seemed to prefer in RotK.

Oh frell, are we still white-fonting?

The movie's been out for well over a week. We don't need to whitefont.

Yeah, non readers I've spoken to seem to assume that Treebeard pulled down Orthanc and killed Saruman. Maybe that's just the non attention payers.

It particularly irks because Christopher Lee was a personal friend of Tolkein's, playing a very important figure in the story. I think Jackson should have at least kept the confrontation between Gandalf and Saruman at the ruins of Isengard, even if his final end was left off along with the rest of the Scouring.

I think so too, Matt. When I first heard Lee making noises, before the movie aired, I thought he was being an ego case. I was shocked to realize he wasn't in the third film at all. I also think it took something away from the story.