the lord of the rings

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When he came to visit in early April, my longtime friend/collaborator/partner in crime “Weird” Ed Woody gave me a birthday present.  It was The Lord of the Rings, Extended Edition on Blu-ray.  It’s been sitting unopened on my shelf ever since, ‘cuz I haven’t really availed myself of its beauty (I hadn’t actually watched any of it by that point but having seen the DVD version I could readily imagine how splendorous the Blu-ray would be).

Yesterday I finally cracked it open from the shrink wrap.  I was working on the book and needed something for background noise.  So I popped in Disc 1 of The Fellowship of the Ring.  Every now and then I’d turn to look at the screen and be astounded at the beauty of the film, but mostly I was just listening to it for inspiration as I stared at MS Word open before ...

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I held off on listening to anything from Howard Shore’s score for The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey until my grubby lil’ paws had hold of the soundtrack CD when it was released on Tuesday. I went for the collector’s edition, which has extra tracks, lots of nifty pictures and a bunch of liner notes about Shore’s return to the music of Middle-Earth.

So all the cool kids knew about this song already (it was released on the Intertubes a few weeks ago) but the track I’ve playing like crazy over and over again from this score is “Song of the Lonely Mountain”, performed by Neil Finn.

This is what’ll presumably be playing when the end credits roll on the first part of Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit trilogy.

“Beautiful” doesn’t begin to do it justice. Now I loved the songs that played over the credits of each of The ...

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Is it 1998 again? ‘Cuz I’m getting the same feeling now that I did when word first broke all those many moons ago that Peter Jackson would be making a film trilogy of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.

Well, ever since the third and final installment The Return of the King came out more than a half-decade ago, there’ve been whispers on the wind about Jackson adapting The Hobbit as well, as a prequel film. And for those of us who’ve been paying attention, it’s been a very crazy ride toward no assurance that this would be happening at all (conflicts with the Tolkien estate, Jackson’s dispute with New Line, etc.)… which makes me hope all the more that it’s gonna go down this way.

GeekTyrant reported last week that The Hobbit will be THREE movies, with Guillermo del Toro directing the first two chapters and ...

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In one of the more bizarre stories to come out of Iran in the past week or so, it’s being reported that the country’s state-run Channel Two is running a marathon of Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy, intending to keep protesters off of Tehran’s streets and watching the adventures of Frodo and Sam instead. The average citizens of Iran are quite fond of movies from the United States and Europe, but usually only get to watch them once or twice a week on television. Since the protests began, Iran’s ruling regime has increased it to two or three movies per day.

Methinks that this might not be a good move on the part of the Iranian government, especially since one of the bigger messages of The Lord of the Rings is that “Even the smallest person can change the course of the future” 🙂...

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It’s true! Peter Jackson and New Line Cinema have made nice and are producing a big-screen feature of The Hobbit, just as Jackson did with The Lord of the Rings several years ago.

But that’s not all: the deal also includes a sequel that will “bridge” the events of The Hobbit with The Lord of the Rings that took place sixty years later. If you’ve ever read some of Tolkien’s other works, you know that there was a lot more going on in that period that the books just hinted at.

Ain’t It Cool News has more, including an official press release and some mention about how Howard Shore may already be working on the music for the new movies.

The Hobbit will hit theaters in 2010.

(Okay Lisa, you can stop worrying now: they are making this finally 🙂...

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We watched two movies on DVD over the weekend and oddly enough both were made by Peter Jackson.

The first was one that I’d heard of for awhile but had never seen before: Heavenly Creatures, which came courtesy of Netflix. This 1994 movie stars Melanie Lynskey and Kate Winslet (in her first-ever film role) as Pauline Rieper and Juliet Hulme, the central figures in the Parker-Hulme murder case that rocked New Zealand in 1954. It’s a fairly disturbing movie, but quite a fascinating one as well. I wound up spending a good part of the night after the movie reading about the real-life events involving these two young friends and how it went so bizarrely, totally wrong. But I don’t know how long it could be before I could watch Heavenly Creatures again. This is a movie rife with those kinds of things that once you see, you ...

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The History Channel re-broadcast Star Wars: The Legacy Revealed last night. It’s a two-hour documentary about the film saga, its mythic roots, and the timeless values that it’s tried to share with the modern audience.

As the program was winding down I thought, and not for the first time lately: after all of these years of being a devout Star Wars fan … well, what is the point of it? What has been the point of any of the loyalty that we as fans have shown these movies?

Guess what I’m wondering is: in spite of the multitude of morals and lessons that this movie series has given us, what have we actually done with them, at all?

F’rinstance, George Lucas intended for the recent Star Wars prequels to be a parable about the decline of republican government: that democracies invariably become dictatorships. The final step toward tyranny usually happens ...

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