And who the hell would name a boy "Merry?"

Finally caught The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King on Saturday night. For someone who is not a fan of the genre, I enjoyed the trilogy immensely. Still, there was this feeling as we plowed past the third hour that I was completing a marathon. (Come to think of it, I could have run two marathons in the time it took to watch the series.)

I had heard a lot of people talk about that "dragging" feeling at the end, so I wasn't surprised when we kept having meaningful fades-to-black with very "conclusive sounding" Howard Shore music ... only to see another scene start up. But when we finally faded to white for the first time ... only to came back to another scene, I couldn't help but roll my eyes. God bless him Peter Jackson for being so faithful to the author's original words (which I've never read, by the way) and following each story to Tolkien's imagined conclusion for the sake of accuracy. But the problem lies in the pacing of those conclusions.

The scene where Frodo wakes up safe in bed and everyone piles in to see him was relatively quick (though I admit I was waiting for Frodo to point at each hobbit in the room and say: "And you were there, Merry! and Pip, you were a scarecrow! and Sam, you were a tin woodsman!..."). But later we have this ridiculously drawn-out goodbye on the docks, with a five-minute hug between Frodo and Sam, and I'm feeling like, "Jesus, little people, get a room with a big round door and just consummate it, already!"

(Along those same lines: Am I the only one who thinks Jackson left off the ending where Merry and Pippin move to Vermont and get married?)

Laura decried the movie, noting that the CGI was somehow not as realistic this time 'round (and I concurred that there was some awful work as Frodo and Sam run in to the mountain to dispose of the ring) and that it lacked more light-hearted moments like the conclusion of Legolas' defeat of that giant elephant creature. I admit that the second intallment is probably my favorite, but I really feel like you have to give Jackson and the movie the Oscar this year in recognition of the entire trilogy. I mean, no director has ever taken on such a project, and I think there were very, very few people who believed that he would achieve this level of critical success (especially from the people who lived and breathed these books). And New Line studios basically leveraging their entire company on the backs of this movie -- wow. And it paid off!

Not that this will make anyone else in Hollywood take such a chance again. Things like this only happen once in Hollywood. No sequel here. I did hear recently that the film version of The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe will now be filmed in New Zealand. I guess they're hoping for a little bit of that Kiwi good luck left in the flora. Though if I were the New Zealand Tourist Authority (or whatever they're called), I'd order an outright ban on any more Hollywood movies being made on NZ soil for a few years, lest the rest of western civilization discover what an amazing place that country is, move down there, and completely ruin it.