radagastly,
good point about gandalf, I was going to bring up how well that was done in my earlier post. just because we don't have large special effects shots on certain scenes doesn't mean we can't have them in other places.
It's a matter of context. Gandalf's 'confrontation' was with an old friend near the start of the book. Jackson would not want to show Gandalf in the same light as he showed Galadriel later.
With Galadriel I think Jackson was trying to show just how dangerous the Elves CAN BE. (Add to this, in my humble opinion after reading Silmarillion a while back, what a bunch of arrogant, selfish, hateful, nasty group of people the Elves can be at times)
nb I'm ducking to avoid rotten tomatoes thrown at me 
We had moved on a couple of hours into the movie by then, and Jackson was jacking up the tension and danger that Frodo was facing. To me this scene worked
PS Our viewpoints on various parts of dialouge within the LOTR movie is like a piece of prose by Shakespeare. One director might have read Galadriel's temptation scene with her speaking softly (as I must admit I did before the films). But I think it works far better with her voice raised and her 'power' urging to be unleashed to take the Ring.....