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I’d have written this earlier, except I broke Aquarionics’ admin section with a badly formed class. ‘tis fixed now.

This weekend I did something that could be seen as slightly foolish. Me, and 10 other people, watched the entirety of Lord Of The Rings, Extended Editions, from Shire to Doom, A to Z, Beginning to all three false endings.

It took 13 hours, including pizza, dead limb and disc changing breaks. It included a count of Legolas’ facial expressions and various other fun things. It lasted from mid-afternoon on Saturday to 05:30 on Sunday morning. Then we slept. We were very tired.

As three theatrical releases they were quite good movies. As extended editions they are very good movies and in some ways tell a better story than the original books (Not as deep, certainly, but a more engaging story in places), but it’s as a single movie in three parts that they really do shine, and the running threads make far more sense. I’m still not entirely sure about some of the changes (Though the two major scenes removed – Tom & Scouring – were reasonably obvious ‘whole chunks’ to keep the thing under, say, a day) but I’m positive this is the best version of the classic series that we were ever going to get.

The weekend was fun though – although the trip back was something of a disaster – and I got to meet New and Interesting people, and exchange puns.

Which is always fun.

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