Perhaps light spoilers, though hopefully I confuse you more than spoil anything. I say this in full awareness that I skipped every post everyone else made that, and now probably won't bother to read them.
I saw The Two Towers today, with family including brother but not sister-in-law. We arrived around 2:50 for a 3:30 showing, so while we, a line formed to sit while we sat in the lobby for a few minutes. By the time they let us go stand by the actual theater, we were instructed to stand behind the roped-off line--which happened to end in front of a different theater, so people had no compunction about walking down and getting in front of us. After the first few people skipped, we stepped over the low-hanging velvet rope--but by the time the theater was cleared, some young folk had invited people they (presumably) knew to jump ahead in line with them. But we did get our usual choice of seats (as close to the middle of the theater as possible) so it was OK as far as I cared.
Whereas people have gushed about it, I thought it was good but not great. Could it be that, instead of signalling how good a movie it really was (not to pick on Dorothea Salo!--at first I remembered chipuni saying it), differing reviews shows everyone's blinded by the hype and picks at the little things they alone see? And by hype I don't mean it in the usual sense of artificial enthusiasm bought through advertising, but real enthusiasm from viewers. I ran into high school friend Michelle McGill after; she about to see it and asked how it was, and I said, "Good--pretty good," to which she said she didn't want to sit through three hours of "pretty good." So there are good reasons for having high expectations.
Gollum, who's in Frodo's plot fork about all the time, didn't look real enough in the eyes (which of course is where you look). The rest of him looks exceedingly good, but something about looking at his eyes (or just gazing defocusedly upon, perhaps) that doesn't quite escape the uncanny valley. He reminded me of Jar-Jar a bit much.
I haven't read the books, so I wouldn't know if Jackson "diddles with the story... [in ways that] don't improve the story... don't make the story more coherent and... don't make it a better film." But you might, and his points do make sense to me. Should perhaps read the books at some point, me.
I also remembered David Brin's piece on the populist philosophy of Star Trek versus the at least oligarchal structures of Star Wars, so the scenes in the other plot fork--prominently featuring a monarch--didn't come off as flawlessly as they could've. (I mean, monarchs are so passé. If you really wanted to be safe from attack, set up a properly distributed democratic republic. Duh.) Thusly I'm not surprised to see another piece on the political structures in Lord of the Rings.
Calling the scientific worldview "soul-less," [Tolkien] joined Keats and Shelley, Sir Walter Scott, Henry James and many European-trained philosophers in spurning the modern emphasis on pragmatic experimentation, production, universal literacy, progress, cooperative enterprise, democracy, city life and flattened social orders.
