[Boromir88]

1/ The movies will never be as good as the books.

Very true.

2/ but the films are the best 3 movies ever made. period.

I would disagree, but that's your opinion and the purpose isn't to argue whether these movies are the best or not.

3/ a film cannot be all things to all men (unless it's written verbatim from the book - the clsoest I've seen is Shawshank Redemption - but then this is an ABRIDGED version of the book)

Of course not, Tolkien admits them himself, which is one of his biggest reasons he didn't think his books could be turned into movies. But, I think it would have helped if meaningless scenes were cut leaving more time to explain things left out. Again, the Boromir example (and some other ones that I will probalby harp about later), we already see him being corrupted, we already know his feelings, why continue to beat it into our heads? Though I do agree with Elladan and the rest of you, in that I think this scene is a lot better, and works a lot better than Galadriel telling us what's gonna happen.

It's not differentiated scenes from books and movies that irk me, as we know whenever any movie is made from a book Hollywood has to morph and dramatisize everything. Again, it's meaningless added scenes.

4/ PJ has a GREAT love of this book - You can see in the 10 years or so of effort he put into making the movie

Sometimes I question this, but there's no doubt he put a lot of money, time, and effort into making these movies. Though this is expected from any director who is making a movie.

6/ People always see the negatives in things first

Again you hit the nail on the head.

7/ PJ deserved every single Oscar he achieved for these films, including the scriptwriters award for ROTK

I actually think the movies deserved more oscars, especially for it's acting. I really thought Sean Astin was going to win for his performance in ROTK, I still think he should have.

Unfortunately, and this is not a go at ANYBODY, but these movie chapter by chapter discussions have finally joined all of the other movie discussions and are mainly an area for us to say what was wrong with the movie.

What's wrong with that? My understanding of these discussions was to critique the movie. And not critiquing by just saying the positives, or by just throwing the excuse of "well it's different in the books." But, discussing what was possibly wrong, what could be better, and how could it be changed to make it better. Which, I think we have been doing great job at doing all that. I didn't think this sub-forum was created just so we could praise how great Jackson was. It's a look at the movies from the movie perspective instead of doing the same old, Tolkien wrote it differently.

Believe it or not I think FOTR was the best made of the three, so it will only go down hill from here (atleast from my rantings). But, of course Jackson does great things, as far as filming, scenery, score, he uses some Hitchcock tactics, he makes good use of camera work (which I think I've pointed out atleast one on every sequence-except this one ) And mastered drawing comparisons with his characters with the use of similar and identical snapshots.