So worth it.
So unbelievably worth it.
Undeniably.
Even though it meant I got home at 4am.
Run, don't walk, to see LOTR:ROTK
You know something is a cultural event when the homeless guys sleeping under the el tracks ask if it was a good movie as the crowd files out at 4am.

I found the false endings less distracting than others around me, but then again I was not ready to leave the theater (despite desperately needing a bathroom and then bed).

We were let into the theater pretty soon after we got there (around 10:30) and found fantastic seats. We got asked trivia questions by reps from onering.net, all of which I knew the answers to. So now I have some LOTR trading cards, which is, uh, I dunno...not quite my level of geekdom, but still pretty cool. I stumbled a little under pressure though, correctly identifying 4 of the 5 races of the fellowship but forgetting... hobbits... at least for a few seconds. I got the card though, I think the guy recognized that if I knew Gandalf was maia I was just choking under pressure and exhaustion. That and I said the answer along with his "um, no, you're forgetting the most obvious".

I mean, how often does a guy in a black cloak carrying a fake sword (or maybe just the sheath, I don't think they were letting weapons into the theater) ask you trivia questions.

I was definitely one of the least geeky in the crowd, which given my really high geek quotient was pretty scary.

But oh!! SO good.

Amazing battle scenes. Amazing personal moments. Moments where I came very close to crying at the heartbreak of it all, even though I knew the ending. I caught myself thinking things like "the movie can't kill off [insert main character here] if the book doesn't, can it?" (for the record, it didn't).

It was in some ways more faithful to the books then the other movies, despite the lack of shire-scouring. Or maybe it was that the alterations were so subtle and necessary to bring it to the screen that I didn't notice as much as I did, for example, the absence of Tom Bombadil from LOTR: FOTR. (I'm liking the acronyms today).

I may have gotten very very little sleep, but I'm a happy person because of it.


- posted by Heidi @ 10:59 AM