LotR, rant-less
Academy Awards. Well, you know they weren’t awarding just the third movie, they were awarding all of them together, they just waited till this year to do it. Fine. So of course it deserved everything. (And probably more, but we won’t go into the elitist prejudices against speculative fiction as a genre and so on and so forth.) Particularly the adaptation award. Because they did do an awesome job. I have issues with some things, particularly in the third movie, but by and large it was amazing, and far better than I feared (and hoped) when I saw the trailer for Fellowship on somebody’s computer, back in college. I also feel I must see the extended edition before I can make any final judgments.
I won’t bore you any more with my analyses of the movies (unless you ask for it). But here are a couple of mildly amusing related thoughts/stories/quotes/whatever.
A teenage acquaintance of mine (who has, as far as I know, never read the books; whose favorite of the three is Fellowship and who spends a fair amount of time writing her own first name in combination with "Bloom") saw it the Friday before it came out -- she won tickets on the radio to a sneak preview. She told us that she was disappointed; she said there was a lot of crying and blood. To which Ni’s brother said, "Well yeah, there's a lot of crying and blood when you're saving the world."
Too true.
Learning about how Edoras, for example, or Rivendell, were built in national parks that had to be returned exactly to what they had been... it makes me think of striking the City of Angels set, a musical I worked on in college. I remember the sense of loss, how much effort and time we had put into those costumes and those few boards and painted backdrops. It's hard to imagine how emotionally hard it would be to break down sets like these that took so very VERY much work, so much creative energy. There and then gone. It touches me in a small way to hear about all the people who took various props, like Elijah Wood having the Ring, and a map they used, or Peter Jackson packing Bag End into a storage unit till he can find a place to set it up again.
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