Watching Lord of the Rings
Last week, The Girl came home with a huge paperback that contained all The Complete Extended Edition DVDs of The Lord of the Rings. The discs are in these nice book-looking cases, in maroon, deep green and blue. Sana nga gold or yellow na lang instead of blue para kulay sablay. Hehehe. Each volume had maybe 4 discs in it. The film on 2 discs, with commentaries, then 2 more discs of features alone. N, who lent her the DVDs, said that the 3 movies amount to 10 hours, with the features, it's 24 hours all in all.
Guess what we've been watching since then.
I remember going to the first day screening of The Fellowship of the Ring in SM City. And because we had no reservations and came in after classes at the university, we sat two rows away from the screen. There were girls in school uniforms who screamed, "Ang guwapo ni Nicolas!"
I don't have much recollection of the next two movies, although I must have watched them or maybe snippets of them when they're being shown on HBO or my brothers are watching.
So imagine my surprise when we started watching The Two Towers and Gandalf emerged with his new outfit and rebonded hair--and then learning that we're just halfway through the movie. I forgot that the movie was around 3 hours long and we just started Disc 2. I started twitching every time Treebeard was on screen. "Can't he talk faster?" Then Treebeard said something about the Ents only speak with each other when they think it's worth talking about in Tree language.
Then I felt sorry that Arwen only appeared as some kind of dream/flashback to the delirious/should be dead Aragorn. In the DVD features, while all the guys talked about the close friendships that had formed between them, the girls--mainly Liv Tyler and Miranda Otto--felt like visitors to this strange frat house in New Zealand. They would be flown into New Zealand for some weeks at a time, study swordfighting or horseback riding and being really, really luminous and then they're off again. The guys thought of them as inspired apparitions, and Orlando Bloom was Liv Tyler's driver. Haha.
But the most interesting character is really Smeagol/Gollum. There's a feature on how Gollum was really the product of three (or was it two?) kinds of animation inspired by the on set performance of the actor Andy Serkis. He would crawl and roll and do weird things to his throat to get Gollum's voice (aided by 'Gollum Juice': ginger juice, warm water, honey--salabat!). It's a very taxing performance and yet, people sometimes just think, "But it's CGI."
Anyway, we finished watching Two Towers at past 11PM. One more volume left and maybe 8 hours more of screen time.
Guess what we've been watching since then.
I remember going to the first day screening of The Fellowship of the Ring in SM City. And because we had no reservations and came in after classes at the university, we sat two rows away from the screen. There were girls in school uniforms who screamed, "Ang guwapo ni Nicolas!"
I don't have much recollection of the next two movies, although I must have watched them or maybe snippets of them when they're being shown on HBO or my brothers are watching.
So imagine my surprise when we started watching The Two Towers and Gandalf emerged with his new outfit and rebonded hair--and then learning that we're just halfway through the movie. I forgot that the movie was around 3 hours long and we just started Disc 2. I started twitching every time Treebeard was on screen. "Can't he talk faster?" Then Treebeard said something about the Ents only speak with each other when they think it's worth talking about in Tree language.
Then I felt sorry that Arwen only appeared as some kind of dream/flashback to the delirious/should be dead Aragorn. In the DVD features, while all the guys talked about the close friendships that had formed between them, the girls--mainly Liv Tyler and Miranda Otto--felt like visitors to this strange frat house in New Zealand. They would be flown into New Zealand for some weeks at a time, study swordfighting or horseback riding and being really, really luminous and then they're off again. The guys thought of them as inspired apparitions, and Orlando Bloom was Liv Tyler's driver. Haha.
But the most interesting character is really Smeagol/Gollum. There's a feature on how Gollum was really the product of three (or was it two?) kinds of animation inspired by the on set performance of the actor Andy Serkis. He would crawl and roll and do weird things to his throat to get Gollum's voice (aided by 'Gollum Juice': ginger juice, warm water, honey--salabat!). It's a very taxing performance and yet, people sometimes just think, "But it's CGI."
Anyway, we finished watching Two Towers at past 11PM. One more volume left and maybe 8 hours more of screen time.