My Solstice present from Kevin this year was a set of the Extended Edition versions of the Lord of the Rings films. I watched the whole thing through over three days. That’s 12 hours of movie, which is quite enough for me, thank you. There is much in those films that is ridiculous, and more in the story that is disturbing, but there’s no doubting the visual and emotional impact of the films. They also have a lot of good memories for me. Probably the sharpest is meeting Sean Astin when he came to ConJosé to collect the Hugo for Fellowship. But of course I saw all of the films with Kevin. They were pretty much the only things we went to the movies for. I suspect that I am emotionally invested in those films. I’ll probably watch them next year too.
4 thoughts on “Hobbits and Memories”
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I saw all the films originally in the movies with my wife. Beautiful memories indeed. (Just last week, we were talking about The Hobbit; we’re not as excited to watch it as we were to watch any of the LOTR films, but we love going to the movies together and we know we will have another good memory to cherish in the future.)
It’s funny, I haven’t seen those films in years, and towards the end we were kind of wiped out by them (I’ve still never seen the extended version of #3) but I have so many emotional responses tied up in them still!
I was blase about the Hobbit movie, not even bothering to watch the new trailer (though Tumblr has ensured I saw most of the individual images from it!) probably more excited about the casting than the fact of the film, AND YET, when I heard that it was going to be released in December next year, I got all awwwwwww because for three years, going to the new LOTR movie on Boxing Day, the second it was available, was such an important tradition for me and my partner!
We annoyed relatives, abandoned other Christmas celebrations, and NEVER queued for any other movie the way we queued for those.
They were definitely that sort of “event” movies that create lasting memories.
Mine: Going to see The Two Towers on its opening weekend. We went to a neighborhood theater that was a well-kept secret (so well-kept, in fact, it had to close down a few years ago). I’d seen big movies there before in reasonably uncrowded conditions.
I got advance tickets for the first time ever, which means I had no inkling of what was going to happen until we showed up and found ourselves having to wait in line with a bunch of other people, all saying to each other in bemusement, “But this place is NEVER crowded!”
A few further thoughts.
Gollum is by far the most memorable character in the films. Andy Serkis and the animators did a superb job.
I love the fact that Ian McKellen based the character of Gandalf on Professor Tolkien.
Return of the King is a very weird film. It has some really powerful scenes in it, but it also totally jumps the shark on the silliness in the battle scenes, and it has that awful, drawn-out ending.
And yes, I am going to see The Hobbit in a cinema, even though there isn’t a cinema in the town where I live.