Last Son Of Middle-Earth

Salut, Tonez... Laid up with a cold at Bill's house...Just finished reading TELEGRAPH DAYS By Larry McMurtry. I am no literary connoisseur but I dig his prose enough so that I'd read all of his books. We did a run of LORD OF THE RINGS films and while I know you have BIG issues with them, I was wondering about what aspects worked WELL with the whole project...what scenes/portrayals/approaches that enriched Tolkien's mythos rather than detracting from them. Let me give you a semi-analogy. As much as I like Superman, there are some aspects of his media portrayals that --->I<--- hate. Movies III and IV are the big ones. But even THEY had aspects that I think they nailed correctly. For example, the Smallville depiction/Superman and Clark fight in III, the very LITERAL dumbass comic-book aspect of IV.(It read just like one of those dumbass stories from the 1960's when every other issue had Lois trying to trick Clark/Supes into revealing his secret identity and/or into marriage. (Always the basis of a sound relationship, you know?) Also HATED LOIS & CLARK but there was an episode where Lois got busted for her abject stupidity of not being able to tell Clark from his caped alter-ego. ("How STUPID was she?", I believe the villain spouted. PLUS, I think Terri Hatcher made a FINE Lois Lane. (And sorry, YES, I did like SUPERMAN RETURNS. Let's make that official.) Anyway, the reason WHY I bring up Middle-Earth is that the films has whetted my urge to revisit the source material. I still have the original paperpacks that I read in high-school so it's only fitting that I read them again and appreciate some of the details that I missed the first time around. (There's no WAY I'm going sit there and try to translate an Elvish poem or some shit like that...You know, I like--even LOVE---Star Trek but I'm not going to devote any time to speaking Klingon, Vulcan or whatever...) Any thoughts you have on the above would be welcome...GaP