Flutterby™! : Fellowship of the Ring 2003-12-19 17:44:48.582354+00

Fellowship of the Ring

2003-12-19 17:44:48.582354+00 by Dan Lyke 4 comments

Last night we gathered at Phil's house to watch the first in the Lord of the Rings trilogy (long version) on a projector borrowed from work, tonight the second, Saturday we'll go out and see Return of the King. I'm not sure the longer version is a better movie but it is a different one, some of the "true to the book" bits dragged a bit (And was that bit about them getting gifts in Lorien in the original movie? I kept waiting for Galadriel to whip out a brain for the scarecrow and courage for the lion). It takes some damned good actors to pull off some of those lines, Sean Astin is awesome. There was a little less catcalling than I expected, so Charlene and I made do with some snide quiet comments back and forth to each other, but overall I'm pumped for the next installment tonight and the conclusion tomorrow.

#Comment Re: Fellowship of the Ring made: 2003-12-19 18:06:06.274174+00 by: Mars Saxman

I saw the extended versions of Fellowship and Two Towers for the first time last week, and I definitely prefer them to the original versions. All the points where the pacing started to get choppy and the story became confusing in the original version miraculously smoothed out when the extra footage was added back in. I'm sure I will be able to tell where the extra parts were cut out of 'Return of the King' just by looking for the same rough edges.

I did think the opening of Fellowship took too long wandering around in the Shire, though. You can tell Jackson really loves the place, but by the time Bilbo's party got started I was quite ready for something to actually happen.

If you're interested, I wrote up my impressions of the two movies at some length on my site.

#Comment Re: Fellowship of the Ring made: 2003-12-19 18:37:35.807376+00 by: Dan Lyke

One of the issues I had with the extended sequence of the overnight on the way to Bree is that they still meet up with Merry and Pippin after Sam's taken his furthest step ever out of the Shire. And if they're still that close to the shire (stealing veggies from another hobbit), then it's kinda weird to have the elves marching through on their way out.

I did, however, get a better feeling for some of the distances involved, which I think is important to the story, and the extra screen time spent on Aragorn's transformation was really worth it.

I was more conscious in this first one of a kind of video game approach to the combat, which I remembered slightly (and a problem I think the second one didn't have), but no matter how bad-ass these fighters are, some of the "urukhai only come at 'em two at a time" scenes broke the illusion for me.

#Comment Re: Fellowship of the Ring made: 2003-12-19 19:41:34.760013+00 by: Dan Lyke

Both Ken and Phil have recommended the Cheat sheet for bathroom breaks in Return of the King, with precise timings for the good spots to slip out in this one, and general guidelines for DiCaprio, Bruckheimer and Hanks movies.

#Comment Re: Fellowship of the Ring made: 2003-12-20 19:39:49.620965+00 by: Shawn

Dan; If I remember correctly, meeting up with the elves takes place inside the Shire boundries in the book too. I remember I've always felt that was a little off - in the same way you describe.

We haven't seen the extended versions yet - mainly waiting to get the full, 3-movie set in one package. Saw ROTK last night. Katrina says she likes it the best, followed by FOTR and then TT. Like all of them, I thought it was reasonably good, although not stupendous. As with the other two, there are some parts that feel forced and some parts that are just plain dorky. Overall, above average fare though.

If you watch carefully, in the final scenes at the harbor you can catch the actor who plays Celeborn watching [Bilbo and Elrond] for his queue before turning to Galadriel.