Grumble. The Two Towers is sold out until the weekend. I suppose I’ll just have to rent the LoTR DVD in the meantime. Hoping that someone will buy me the extended disco remix, all-Aragorn-all-the-time DVD for Christmas, I haven’t actually sprung for my own copy yet. The first movie, the drippy Arwen aside, was as stupendous a conversion of novel-to-screen as I’ve ever seen. Doing Lord of the Rings was some risk and I suspect that it couldn’t have been done by an American. With Jackson’s film, you always get this sense of the grandeur and the seriousness of the books and none of that daft ‘sword-and-sorcery’ vulgarisation of the fantasy that one might have feared – and which might have been imposed on even the strongest US director by the studio execs. The mood, the colours, the design of LoTR were all spot on and the acting (mostly) worked. And the landscapes of New Zealand are perfectly meshed with the sets to make a truly epic spectacle. I always thought of Strider as older, more care-worn than Viggo Mortensen, but somehow he captures the character. Now that the second Star Wars trilogy has patently failed to deliver (more Jedi than Empire), I prefer the mythology and scale of LoTR. Or maybe I’m just older now and beyond the demographic of The Phantom Menace.


Currently: Pondering a dash through the ice to the post-office to send off the Xmas cards. Ho -hum.