[Thenamir]

I'm sorry folks. I've gotta vent here. According to a souce I read today, the anal-retentive Tolkien purist-snobs represent less than 10% of the expected audience. I am glad not to be in that cult.<P>Now that I've earned the flames of everyone here, let me go on to say that I enjoyed the movie immensely -- as cinema. How many of you complained about the fact that the original Jurassic Park little resembled the Michael Crighton book upon which it was "based"? Cinema is a different animal than a book. It requires different pacing, and necessary compression of Tolkien's beautifully languid storyline. FOTR the Movie works as a movie on a different level than FOTR the book.<P>I was able without any difficulty at all to handle the differences from the text by mentally noting them and then continuing to concentrate on the story as presented on screen. While I can make the comparisons, it did not detract from the overall beautifully-produced, brilliantly-acted, cinematically-near-flawless presentation. I have no sympathy for those unable to detach themselves from considering Tolkien's exact words as a sacrosanct canon which can not be altered one iota in order to make a good flick.<P>And another thing I don't understand is why so many people are ragging on the money-making aspects of the film as a *bad* thing. If it were not for the money making potential of the movies, they would not have been made at all, and tweaking them for the masses (which, heaven forbid, might actually make them want to go read the BOOKS!!) is not necessarily a bad thing.<P>I had my complaints about the movie. I like the travel-transition sequences in the book as much as anyone, and would have liked to preserve some of them in the movie, but in the grand scheme of things, 3 hours is a lot to ask of the public butts to sit thru. I didn't like the fact that Merry and Pippin just sort of "fall-in" with Frodo and Sam and start following, no questions asked and no explanations given. I would rather have seen the info in the prologue given, even in flashback, in the council of Elrond. <P>But all that is secondary to why I go to movies. I go to see a good yarn well-presented. FOTR was the embodiment of all that I have looked for in other modern so-called blockbusters, which are usually 10 minutes of glory surrounded by 100 minutes of sewage. It was transporting, involving, soaring cinema on a scale not seen by me since I-don't-know-when.<P>Those perfectionists complaining about plot changes, go sit in your dark corners and get back to re-reading your dog-eared, manually-footnoted and cross-referenced copies of the LOTR and HOME, and let the rest of us (most of the movie-going public) enjoy ourselves. <P>But you really should get out more -- you're beginning to look sort of thin, stretched and bony. And you might want to think twice before referring to your books as "my preciousssses"...