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According to Boswell's Life the great Dr Johnston when observing the rapid re-marriage of a man who's previous married life had been far from happy came up with the great one liner that it was "the triumph of Hope over Experience" and this, not surprisingly, reminds me that last weekend I took the children to see the second film in the Lord of the Rings series.
Now of course like a good citizen (which, by the way, I'm not, being merely a Resident beeping Alien) and unlike, as it turned out before the end, several of our fellow cinema-goers (who probably were citizens, if not necessarily good ones) I dutifully turned my mobile phone to its "Vibrate" setting.
Isn't it an amazing and depressing thing to note that, with all the excessive noise and the fast cutting in today's movies, and the forty foot high close ups right up the actors' noses and the wild computer simulations, that with all that the most, the absolute most thrilling thing to happen to me in the theatre last week end was when the vibrator on my mobile phone went off---and it puts the etymology of 'thrill' into a real close up as it originally meant a hole, as is preserved in that famous linguistic fossil 'nostril'---a snot-filled hole up the nose of humanity.
Not that for one moment would I wish to give the impression that I got no pleasure from the event, nor (even more un-impressionistically) that it got up my nose: that it was somehow some new technology after the talkies, the surround-soundies, the seat-shakies, now we have the mucus-ies!
Nor either would I admit that things were not helped along by the fact (since of course this did happen in Texas) that in the two (or possibly four) seats to my immediate left were two huge beings (or maybe just one being with two heads) who brought with it their very own gravitational anomalies and spent all the time eating: so that I was in constant fear that they would run out of popcorn and turn on me---why I even considered changing places with my daughter Rowena, and would have done except that I figured that, anyway, they would only want to supersize her with me so it wouldn't delay them by enough time to escape.
In spite of those provisos about the absence of not being entertained, I found this an experience to dash my hopes even more resoundingly than the first one.
And now that I've finally been able to bring myself to it---to the nubbin of my discontent. I have to say how much I am distressed for the shade of Tolkien's poor battered plot that was so carefully crafted, and is now for the sake of a few supposed super nostrils---sorry forget the nose I just mean thrills, made foolish and trite.
I mean I do accept that it is necessary to change books to turn them into movies, that's not a problem, no the problem to me is that almost all of the changes made by the film makers are to make the actions of the characters conform to the apparent current taste for the motiveless and the pointless.
Ents, for example, who are supposed to be unhasty, wise folk, given to almost endless consideration of any matter in hand are in this travesty tricked (by Merry and Pippin) into attacking Saruman on the spur of the moment. Faramir, who is an admittedly fairly boring paragon in Tolkien is not (as he should be) unlike his brother Boromir but in the weirdest deviation is similarly tempted by the Ring. Theoden, King, is made to appear quite stupid when he takes all his folk halfway across the kingdom (largely on foot) in war-time instead of just up the road to Dunharrow as in the original---apparently just so that Aragorn can be apparently killed:
Oh! The pathos of that!!
Only, hold on a bit, the other characters don't seem to be that upset (I suppose they've all read the script) and the audience isn't worried ('cause we've all read the books)---Blimey! I'm left with the decided impression that whenever they had to drive New Zealand's ubiquitous sheep from the set (as I'm sure they frequently had to) that the average IQ of the neighbourhood went down.
Herebeorht had the most succinct comment on the deviated septum of the plot, which while it was a bit extreme (as befits his thirteen year old status) is apposite. He asked, as we left the theatre "Now was that Lord of the Rings two or Harry Potter three?"
Cheerio for now
from Richard Howland-Bolton
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