Ludicrous Speed

[evay]

Originally Posted by Infinite Improbability

On a recent crosscountry bus trip I suggested to my friends that we watch The Princess Bride. The approval rating was well over eighty percent. I doubt that Lord of the Rings would have gotten that kind of response.

That's because LOTR is twelve freakin hours long. You have to be really devoted, or travelling from Maine to Alaska via Texas, to want to sit through all that at one clip.

[Nate the Great]

Yeah, I keep hearing people say that you need twelve hours to tell LOTR properly. My question is: why? Who says we need the 100% complete Tolkein experience? I tried to read the trilogy a few years ago and got halfway through Two Towers before I gave up. To many characters, too much description, too many parallel plots. Hey, I'll be the first to admit that the effects are awesome, but when you look at battlefields with thousands of soldiers in them, my major problem becomes "do I want to see thousands of imaginary people fight each other?" I'd rather have two armies with a few dozen each, if they were all real.

Bryan Singer made a comment in his X-Men commentary that in the scene where Magneto has usurped all of the cops' guns and is holding them all at gunpoint, some of the guns are CG and some are real ones on wires, etc. I can tell. The guns felt real, I could "see" their physical presence in the scene. That means more to me.

[Nate the Great]

Looks like Dave Barry is a fivist and doesn't know it. In a column (http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald...ry/5023564.htm) he summarizes Two Towers quite well. Definitely worth a read.

[e of pi]

Yeah. He does things like that occasionally, though this is the first time I've seen him do it in that actual format, and for a movie that actually exists.

[Nate the Great]

Hey, another Barry fan! Always glad to meet other followers of the Church of Exploding Toilets.

[mudshark]

Hawley Smoot.

[Scooter]

What a tariffic rejoinder.

[NeoMatrix]

Well, I saw Spaceballs 2 on the Hollywood Stock Exchange.

http://movies.hsx.com/servlet/Securi...l?symbol=SPCB2

[evay]

Originally Posted by Infinite Improbability

Yeah, I keep hearing people say that you need twelve hours to tell LOTR properly. My question is: why? Who says we need the 100% complete Tolkein experience?

You don't, necessarily. You don't necessarily need four hours for Jane Eyre either, but I like that version (BBC miniseries) much better than the shorter ones. There are shorter versions of the LOTR trilogy (animated and such) which you could also watch.


I used to read Dave Barry every week, but he started getting tired in the late '90's and repackaging old columns with a few sentences changed and not admitting it was a rerun. I enjoy his style of humor, but he hasn't had anything new to say in a long time. That Two Towers column is from 2003.

[Derek]

Originally Posted by evay

I used to read Dave Barry every week, but he started getting tired in the late '90's and repackaging old columns with a few sentences changed and not admitting it was a rerun. I enjoy his style of humor, but he hasn't had anything new to say in a long time. That Two Towers column is from 2003.

That's pretty close to my feelings as well. I'll read his column if I have a paper and nothing to do, but without a subscription anymore, those times don't occur much.

[mudshark]

About the same here. I used to find Dave Barry quite funny 15 or 20 years ago, or whenever it was that he first came to my attention, but I don't think I've read a new column of his in quite some time. It did seem to me that in more recent years, as was pointed out above, he's had a tendency to recycle or to just plain phone it in.

[Nate the Great]

Well, I still find him funny, but I guess that's because I really haven't read that many of his columns as they were in the papers. I read his books and own the vast majority of them. My local papers didn't publish his columns back when he wrote them regularly, so I rely on the books, which are of much higher quality. It reminds me of Erma Bombeck. I got to know her by her books first, and by the time I read some of her columns I could tell where she'd stolen the jokes from to make her books.

[ijdgaf]

Dave Barry spoke at my commencement address. The Rock was there as well.