Come to New Zealand, see the authentic Elvish ruins!

[williamjm]

Yesterday I went down to London to watch all three Extended Editions of Peter Jackson's advert for the New Zealand Tourist Board (aka "The Lord Of The Rings") with snowking and some other friends of his (I'm still not sure who half of them were, but they seemed a good bunch for watching DVDs with). I hadn't seen Andrew since he left Edinburgh (which I guess must be over 2 years ago now) but it was just like old times, watching DVD for excessively long periods of time and making lots of sarcastic commentary on them.

I hadn't seen the Extended "Return Of The King" before, overall the additions were good, it was nice to have some closure for the Saruman plot thread, although the Extended Paths Of The Dead sequence was a bit silly. It was decided that the entire War Of The Ring was caused by the Elvish merchants of Rivendell Market and The Gap (of Rohan) so that they could sell more of their 'authentic' magic rings and staffs (Gandalf seems to go through at least 6 during the films). Overall impression of the films is still that they're very good, although the early parts of The Two Towers lets the trilogy down a bit, and while the battles are visually impressive they don't always make much sense.

On a related note, I just watched some LOTR parody movies. The Theoden ( http://teamlorio.mybesthost.com/flash/theoden.htm ) one is amusingly silly, although the main parody ( http://teamlorio.mybesthost.com/flash/lotrp1.htm ) is disturbingly reminiscent in places of some of yesterday's discussion about how close some of the characters really were.

Comments

[dsky.livejournal.com]

Those people will be a whole lot of my online friends - ajr, despotliz and fba. They are good folks :-)

[williamjm.livejournal.com]

Andrew did post a list beforehand of the people who would be there, but I seem to have failed to match up names(or online names) to faces for several of them, partly because while I was introduced to the people who were there when I arrived, I wasn't introduced to the later arrivals.

I think I figured out who all of the women there were, I know who Andrew is (obviously), I think know who I am and the person who turned up 3 hours late and then moaned about us starting was called Niall IIRC but I'm a bit vague who most of the others were.

[despotliz.livejournal.com]

Niall is coalescent.

Ian had the long brown hair and the laptop, and is truecatechresis.

fba is Stewart, who has a beard and a shaved head and was being filthy about hobbits much of the day.