Ye Olde Staging Point

So here I am in southern California--where it's raining, but is still a good bit warmer than it was in Michigan when I left. Right now I'm sitting at the living room table looking out at the amazing view from my parents' house. It's too cloudy to see the ocean today, but I'm watching a gigantic white cloud moving through the valley below, following the the course of I-15 through the mountains. Michigan really, really needs more mountains.

Last night I saw The Two Towers for the third time--and despite my love for the film, even this fanboy needs a break from the movie for a while (I'm thinking a few days). This time around, I noticed some new aspects of the film that slipped past me in the first two viewings (spoilers blah blah):

• Aragorn can apparently be bested in swordsmanship by every female in Middle Earth.

• To Arwen: have you noticed that all the other Elves in the movie manage to portray their Elvishness without breathlessly whispering all of their lines?

• Aragorn, Gimli, and Legolas can faultlessly track a troop of Orcs that have a full days' head start on them, but they only notice a thundering horde of mounted galloping Rohirrim about 5 seconds before they charge onto the scene.

• Elrond and Galadriel need to sharpen their seeing-the-future skills. Elrond has supposedly foreseen that the quest will claim Frodo's life. No, it won't.

• Shame on Peter Jackson for killing off Haldir at Helm's Deep. I'll forgive him for putting canonical Middle Earth characters in places where they really shouldn't be, but when you do so you aren't allowed to kill them off.

• the "female dwarf" discussion is just classic.

• the battle of Helm's Deep was one of the few "large battle" scenes I can remember seeing on film in which we, the viewers, knew what was going on tactically during the battle even while we witnessed the exploits of individual heroes. Usually movies like this seem to focus in exclusively on a handful of characters throughout the fight, leaving you with little sense of the larger strategic picture. Nice.

• I noticed for the first time the burning Ent dowsing himself in the flood-water at Isengard. Very cute.

• The entire kingdom of Rohan apparently consists of:

  • 54 cute children and babies
    
  • 75 mothers and old women
    
  • 164 really old guys
    
  • 7 actual warriors
    
  • 1 cowardly king

Now I'm off to DM a Dungeons and Dragons session with some friends, in what seems to be our annual dungeon hack-fest. Bring on the Orcs!