I, For One, Will Go Quietly  I'm well past caring what the filmmakers do to Tolkien. I'll freely admit that the eye candy in Lord of the Rings so completely won me over that they could reveal that Sauron was actually a tentacled space alien ("Frodo...I am your father."), and as long as Minas Tirith looks right I'll still feel it was money well spent.
   I shouldn't even call it 'eye candy.' That's sort of unfair. We are talking about one of the most thoroughly realized worlds in literature, which I'm sure the filmmakers gave a lot of thought as to how to visualize. I never feel like the picture they put on the screen matches the picture I have in my head from reading the book. With Lord of the Rings, they tapped into some kind of mass consensual visual hallucination, because it seems like everybody I know had the same reaction: "So that's what that looks like."
   Of course, I imagined the Arwen problem would get worse before it got better. But honestly, nobody was going to pony up $180M to make a trilogy where the love interest would get, according to Jackson, "maybe ten minutes of screen time...over six hours." (Thu 10 October 2002, 06.28 PDT)     @ #