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Wasted
So, I had a weekend in which I pretty much did nothing, as part of a vacation that finishes up today in which I pretty much did, you guessed it, nothing. The only time I left my house since Wednesday to do anything other than to go to the post office was when I had dinner with friends on Thursday. The rest of the time I just sat around being bored. Didn't even read much. Played some computer games, and watched a few DVDs. Friday and Saturday I watched a bunch of Thunderbirds episodes. Saturday night I watched FotR, then I watched it again Sunday morning with the cast commentary turned on. I hadn't listened to any of the commentaries before. There's some interesting stuff, although some of it made me blink a bit. EW made a comment about the Rivendell set being in a state of perpetual autumn to represent the fact that the elves were in the autumn of their time in Middle Earth. Well, maybe, but I think the fact that it's *October* probably had more to do with it.
That got me thinking a bit, and I pulled out my copy of LotR and started flipping through the appendices. I don't remember a lot of the stuff that's in there, and I wonder if I actually read them all those years ago. That would certainly explain the gaps in my knowledge of Middle Earth. So I read the stuff about Numenor, and then started in on Arnor, but got side tracked because I really wanted a map, and the little ones in the back of the book just weren't big enough. Somewhere in the attic there's a jigsaw puzzle of a map of Middle Earth, but despite looking in all the likely boxes, I couldn't find it. I did find the really big map from the old SPI game War of the Ring, which is nice, but it's also distorted because of the hex grid, and the mechanics of the game. Bother.
Anyway back downstairs, some more page flipping, and I found the timeline. I guess I'd never made the connection that the main events in the book take place in the *winter*. The Fellowship leaves Rivendell on December 25, and the ring is destroyed three months later. I don't remember that being all that clear in the book, and in the movie it doesn't appear to be winter at all, at least not a northern latitude winter. The only snow we see is on Caradhras, and right after they leave Bree, which is in early October. (According to the cast commentary the snow outside of Bree in the movie was due to a snowstorm the day before they shot the scene.) In fact, in TTT, we see heat lines in one of the scenes of Aragorn riding to Helms Deep. I dunno, maybe winters just weren't as cold in the Third Age. It would certainly explain why all the trees in Fangorn, Lothlorien, and the surrounding areas still have all their leaves in January and February.
Later on I watched The Two Towers. Ever since![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
veejane pointed out to me that Legolas gets the direction to Isengard wrong (he says it's to the northeast rather than northwest), I have obsessed about what direction the pursuers are actually headed in the film. There's also a scene where it appears that Legolas looks into the rising sun as they're pursuing the orcs to the west, but on further examination he actually turns around almost 180° from the line of pursuit to look at the sunrise, so that's actually correct. I did catch another directional mistake, though. When the pursuit meets up with Eomer, Eomer has just come from the edge of Fangorn Forest, where the company slew the orcs. Fangorn is to the north, yet Eomer says that he can't stay with Aragorn because his company must ride *north*. Dude, you just came from there! In the book, he tells Aragorn they're heading south. </nitpicks>
Meanwhile, it turns out that I missaw something the last time I watched. For some reason, I was sure that I saw a huge forest of trees appear behind the orc army during the charge of Eomer at Helm's Deep, but rewatching last night I realized that I had mistaken the charging Rohirrim for the orcs, and the orcs for trees. Oops.
That got me thinking a bit, and I pulled out my copy of LotR and started flipping through the appendices. I don't remember a lot of the stuff that's in there, and I wonder if I actually read them all those years ago. That would certainly explain the gaps in my knowledge of Middle Earth. So I read the stuff about Numenor, and then started in on Arnor, but got side tracked because I really wanted a map, and the little ones in the back of the book just weren't big enough. Somewhere in the attic there's a jigsaw puzzle of a map of Middle Earth, but despite looking in all the likely boxes, I couldn't find it. I did find the really big map from the old SPI game War of the Ring, which is nice, but it's also distorted because of the hex grid, and the mechanics of the game. Bother.
Anyway back downstairs, some more page flipping, and I found the timeline. I guess I'd never made the connection that the main events in the book take place in the *winter*. The Fellowship leaves Rivendell on December 25, and the ring is destroyed three months later. I don't remember that being all that clear in the book, and in the movie it doesn't appear to be winter at all, at least not a northern latitude winter. The only snow we see is on Caradhras, and right after they leave Bree, which is in early October. (According to the cast commentary the snow outside of Bree in the movie was due to a snowstorm the day before they shot the scene.) In fact, in TTT, we see heat lines in one of the scenes of Aragorn riding to Helms Deep. I dunno, maybe winters just weren't as cold in the Third Age. It would certainly explain why all the trees in Fangorn, Lothlorien, and the surrounding areas still have all their leaves in January and February.
Later on I watched The Two Towers. Ever since
veejane pointed out to me that Legolas gets the direction to Isengard wrong (he says it's to the northeast rather than northwest), I have obsessed about what direction the pursuers are actually headed in the film. There's also a scene where it appears that Legolas looks into the rising sun as they're pursuing the orcs to the west, but on further examination he actually turns around almost 180° from the line of pursuit to look at the sunrise, so that's actually correct. I did catch another directional mistake, though. When the pursuit meets up with Eomer, Eomer has just come from the edge of Fangorn Forest, where the company slew the orcs. Fangorn is to the north, yet Eomer says that he can't stay with Aragorn because his company must ride *north*. Dude, you just came from there! In the book, he tells Aragorn they're heading south. </nitpicks>Meanwhile, it turns out that I missaw something the last time I watched. For some reason, I was sure that I saw a huge forest of trees appear behind the orc army during the charge of Eomer at Helm's Deep, but rewatching last night I realized that I had mistaken the charging Rohirrim for the orcs, and the orcs for trees. Oops.
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In London we had about one notable snowfall a year, on or around January 4th, if that helps.
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The thing about Lothlorien is that it's magical, so the trees keep their leaves all year round, as though they were evergreens instead of deciduous.
I liked the CGI for the Ents a lot, I just wish the whole Fangorn sequence had been closer to the book --this is the biggest flaw that I find for the adaptation so far, and it will be interesting to see if the extended version corrects the lacks I'm seeing.
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And Imladris isn't? You're saying that Elrond doesn't keep as nice a place as his MIL? Sigh.
Yeah, I agree about the Ents. I don't know why Jackson felt he had to do it that way. Made no sense.
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There was that map someone linked to in the LotR thread:
http://lotrmaps.middle-earth.us/maps/r3t_M11.jpg