current selection | morcheeba – the sea (acoustic)
feelin’ | tired
what an absolutely awful movie……that battlefield earth is. i was forced to see it on a flight once, right after millenium man. anyway, enough about bad movies. the return of the king destroys everything…as if stating that came as a surprise to anyone. the movie is still processing in my mind…because there are so many “big” moments in the movie that the mind isnt fast enough to absorb everything instantaneously without going into a vegetative state, not unlike an eggplant. the first hour or so starts calmly and rather slowly, but then proceeds to steamroll thru the next 2 hours til it calms again and slowly ticks down. the battle of pelennor field is some crazy shit. while its less hero-centric than the hornburg, the scale of it was exponentially larger and the events utterly awe-inspiring. the charge of the mumakils was absolutely ridiculous, the excessively cited badass legolas take-down (it does rock), not to mention the bitch-ass witch-king himself turned out alot better than i initially thought he would. as for the ending, i can see why the first (and sometimes the only) complaint people have are the multiple endings. most linear narratives would just give you a start and a stop. rotk starts and stops, then stops again, and then again, and again. narratively it might feel a little awkward, but i thought it was an appropriately slow wind-down from the crazy shit that you just saw. i personally had a different version in my mind…with dialogue-less cuts of everybodys futures (not unlike a visual version of stand by me). they instead focused on the hobbits, which is fine by me. the only other complaint i have…and probably the majority of tolkien fans, is that the movie feels pared down. alot. and im not just referring to saruman hitting the cutting room floor…faramir and eowyn, the path of the dead, the corsairs, and gandalfs fight with the witch-king (seen in the trailers). from a pragmatic standpoint, the cuts were understandable and necessary…a 4-5 hour movie is unrealistic. which is why the rest of us will be waiting for the “real” version to come out on dvd sometime next year. i forget which review i read this in, but they described the theatrical movie the best by saying that its “a three and a half hour trailer for the return of the king.”
