I AM A COLOSSAL GEEK

Okay, so I went and saw Return of the King on the nerd shift. Midnight, last Friday night. It finished four days later, and by the end, only 28 of a 400-plus member audience survived, the rest having succumbed to dehydration, toxic shock, despair and the cannabalistic depradations of stronger and more determined survivors, such as myself.

This movie has been praised all over as the movie of the year. My thoughts, more or less at random:

Of the more than 130 films about killer spiders, I believe this is the first that was actually any good at all, let only contained a believable -- and to be honest, fucking horrifying -- giant spider. Holy fuck. What an unbelievably tense scene. And it had a bigger than fuck spider. The one thing missing was the personality with which Tolkien imbued Shelob. I would have loved to see some subtitles as the thing menaced the midgets.



I couldn't believe the wholesale slaughter of elephants. Ivory must be at a premium in Middle Earth. Even my friend, a refined and compassionate woman, cheered when the pretty elf downed Babar. Was I the only one who felt any sympathy for those poor beautifuls beasts?

It was nice to see the Nazgul actually do something for a change. I guess that it was true to the books that their big show was to make the characters talk about how much other people feared them, but it was nice to actually see them cut loose and do rad shit like pick people up and throw them, and bash the fuck out of the Enemy. Um, I mean, the heroes. To be fair, their rides did all the work, and the minute one actually got down and started mixing it up, a girl shoved a sword through his face. But after two movies where all the the Ringwraiths did was scream like women and stab midgets. Fuck, if Sauron had me working for him, you can bet I would have done more than dress like a Dickensian stereotype and shreik nonsensically against the vertically challenged.



I thought it was pretty badass when Eowyn wasted the Witch King, even though the drama and momentum was damaged when the movie cut away to something I don't remember. That was disappointing.



Also disappointing was Aragon's public display of affection with Arwen. I could see him going for the Arwen of the books. God help me, I even realized that in my time, I've subconciously praised luminous brunettes by comparing them to her. I'm not sure that last sentence is going to survive into the next draft. But in these films, we're expected to believe anyone would choose a chubby, pontificating Liv Tyler over the welcoming and vivacious Miranda Otto? Fuck that. Sure, Arwen is an older woman, one who has presumeably laerned more in her thousand years of life than how to speak like priss. But she's also his fucking cousin, and now that I think of it, she never actually kills somebody, and her big action set piece involved running away from the Ringwraiths and then luring the morons into a river, which accomplishes the amazing feat of them coming back in the next movie, on even cooler rides than before. Yeah, Arwen, she's a real fucking catch.

I hope in the extended version, we get to see Faramir acheiving what is to my mind, the greatest triumph of the trilogy, which is to say he gets to marry Eowyn, the woman who is by far the best of the three women who live in Middle Earth, actually, does get to marry one of those three women (does extinction awaits man?), and best of all, gets to retain his top-ranking hereditary title with a thousand years of history and lineage behind it, while being only slightly demoted, presumeably to grow fat on the fruits of a life funded by the public while doing nothing for the rest of his days.

Can a man die with dignity when he is running around, encased in flamed, screaming insanely?

I was really rooting for Gollum, whose evil plan to sow discord among the Hobbits was straight out of Beverly Hills 90210.

One of the eighteen endings of Return of the King was awesome, as in what has to be the prettiest homoerotic reunion in all of fantasy, Frodo is joined on his bed by each survivor of the Fellowship in turn, each looking more beatiful, and hair breezing in slower motion than the last. It has to be seen to believed. Gimli opens his arms expectedly, like a mother welcoming his bitch back to maximum. And then fucking Legolas walks in wearing a headband. And finally Aragorn walks in wearing a white towel.

Gandalf whirling around with a stick and a sword was pretty cool, too, although I must have skipped the twenty pages that must have been devoted to it in the books. Perhaps they were in song. But it was badass on screen, making me wonder, how come we don't see that sword and staff two-handed combo more often?

Sloth from Goonies was the leader of the evil troops for the first battle. For a while, I dismissed this bloodless bureaucrat of an orc, but then, when he casually stepped out of the way of a house-sized boulder catapulted to his position, I gained a bit of respect for him. The he promptly went back to spitting over-disciplinary, even astrategic orders, and I again concluded that I was a better villain than him.

It's interesting how the institutionalized extended editions have shaped, and damaged Jackson's work on this series. Those seem like the real movies, and the theatrical versions come off like an edit of its eventual extended cut. Jackson was screwed by his reliance on these extended editions, completely dropping Sauruman from the final film, leaving a what the fuck happened to the heavy of the last two films vibe hanging over the third. Much of Return of the King comes off like the third act of David Lynch's Dune, where the story just started being summarized rather than completely told.

Speaking of Lynch, I thought of him when Gandalf rides up the sevel levels of Minas Tirith. And he was dramatically shown riding up one level, then a second, then a third, I realized, Christ, they were going to show him ride all the way up. Man.

Okay, I give up.

In conclusion: Miranda Otto!