11:02 p.m. - 2003-01-04
Two Towers
Whenever people talk about their pet peeves I always furough my brow and think really hard. "Do I have any pet peeves?" I ask myself. "Nothing really seems to bother me that much. I'm pretty flexible and even tempered. There just isn't anything that consistently riles me up."
Ok, so I confess. I do have a thing about people studying in their cars WITH THE ENGINES RUNNING!!!!! but other than that, I really can't think of anything.
Well, just when I was taking pride in my flexibility and even-temperedness, along comes something that I realise I have always hated. Hated with a seething, frothing, incoherent passion.
I hate it when movie people turn a book into a film, and they change certain key parts of the book FOR NO APPARENT REASON!!!! The changed parts aren't better, don't make the story any shorter or longer, don't even enable the filmmaker to add some really eyepopping special effects. The story in the movie isn't any better than the book, it's just different. And irritating!!
This little rant was inspired by seeing The Two Towers tonight. One of the things I liked most about Fellowship was that it stayed so close to Tolkien. I suspect, however, that the screenwriters went on a Glenfiddich binge when they got to the second book, though, because there are just all these gratuitous changes. Grrrrrrrr, it reeeeaaaaaalllly annoyed me!
So Bruce had to suffer through the movie with me hissing like...like Gollum. About every ten minutes I would make some snit comment like "He's not supposed to do that! He NEVER did that in the book!!" or "They never showed up at this point! What the Hell is this about!" There were also, of course, my inevitable observations such as: "Oooooh! Gollum reminds me of Linda!" or "Looks like Arwen had a nose job!"
And of course there was the rabbit eating scene. Did they really have to eat real rabbits? Couldn't they have just used animatronic ones? You know, like that jerky black cat on Samantha the Teenage Witch?
I did actually enjoy the movie for what it was - a big Wellywood spectacle. It was just frustrating after having enjoyed the first one so much more.
So now I'm going off to look at one of the real geniuses of filmmaking. I broke down and bought something I have wanted since we got our DVD player - a DVD of Melies films. I love Melies films. I've loved them since watching old,grainy copies of "A Trip To The Moon" and "The Infernal Cakewalk" in my film class at Mass. Art. I can watch them over and over and over.
And now I can really watch them over and over, since I have them on DVD!!!
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