Revering LOTR

Whenever I run out of movies to watch, I draw the curtains closed in my room, set up the speakers, recline on the bed, prop my laptop onto my lap, and commence a delicious ‘LOTR’ marathon. That is one movie that never fails to amaze. Although a marathon stretches into 10 hours (director’s cut version), it never feels as though the movie stretches a bit too much at any point of time. As much as people say the relationship between Sam and Frodo looks gay, true ‘LOTR’ fans find that easy to go past because the know the movie is so much more than just the plots. The picturisation, the locales, the photography, the screenplay – fabulous. I’ve not seen any other work of fiction match this work in two aspects:

• The storyline that seems to involve all emotive and active aspects of the living. Tolkien’s saga moves elegantly past Lovecraft’s bizarre brainchildren as well as Poe’s narrative. Although the book is a monstrous 1000-pages thick, reading it never seems a bore (unless you’re a die-hard Harry Potter fanatic).
• The blandiloquence with which the characters and kingdoms in the book have been brought to life. Recently, Dan Brown’s ‘The DaVinci Code’ was painted on the silver screen by Ridley Scott with poor results and unsavoury responses from the watching crowd. ‘LOTR’ screen writers Peter Jackson, Phillipa Boyens and Fran Walsh knew what to cut out of the script an what not to. That said, I’d like to see how ‘Shantaram’ shapes up.

When the movies began to be released on an annual basis some six years back onwards, my father touted them to be a big flop; he called them “childish and probably worth a snore when in the theatre”. I don’t think he has still reconciled to the fact that it is impossible to snore in the theatre while watching ‘LOTR’ and I, for one, have been having a hard time convincing myself that he only refuses to agree because of him being unexpectedly wrong!

(Oh yes, that reminds me, ‘The Hobbit’ is slated for release in September of this year. For those who are not familiar with it, ‘The Hobbit’ is the precursor to ‘LOTR’.)

Watching the movie has me yearning to be in it, to live and breathe and fight in it. It draws out a gallant and chivalrous gentleman’s character from within me. Even though I know the dialogues in the movie line-by-line, when I watch the movie again, I wait with my lips shut and waiting for the goosebumps. They come. Always. That movie has to be revered in filmdom as much as the book is considered to be a cornerstone in redifining the fantasy sub-genre in works of fiction.