LOTR

Saw LOTR, yesterday, with my brothers.

Except for a bunch of dorky college students sitting behind me making sadly unfunny commentary throughout the previews and first half hour of the movie (until I finally looked back at one of them directly in the eye), I really enjoyed it, probably more so than Fellowship. Not surprising, though, as there was more opportunity for cinematic action and special effects off of this book.

A couple of random comments:

This might make me a bad, awful person, but I thought they wimped out on the fact that young boys were slaughtered by the orcs at the Battle of Helms Keep even though we were set up to have an emotional attachment through sappy children-torn-away-from-mothers scenes in slow motion.

And golum's schizophrenia was fairly engaging, but I thought the gimmicks used to show the split personality were a little too obvious (particularly the scene where Smeagol "kicks out" Gollum.. reminded me of those Speech and Debate days doing Interp... rapidly shifting camera angles).

Whatever... definitely the best movie I've seen in as long as I remember.