Lord of the Couch Potatoes

I did something on Saturday that, in retrospect, might not have been the best use of half my entire weekend.

To set the stage: Several acquaintances of mine think the Lord of the Rings movies are the best movies ever made in the history of cinema. Or close to it, anyway, judging from how they talk about them in hushed, reverent tones. I’m not even as obsessed with Blade Runner as these folks are with LotR (and that’s saying something!), but I certainly enjoyed the movies well enough when I saw them in theaters.

Perhaps my lack of obsession stems from the fact that I never read the books. Or, more accurately, I should say that I haven’t read all of the books. I read The Hobbit as a kid and loved it. So imagine my surprise when I cracked open The Fellowship of the Ring and slowly came to realize that (a) there were no dragons in this one, and (b) I was going to spend the next three hundred pages reading about people sitting around sumptuously stocked dinner tables, trying to figure out what to do with a little ring that could apparently destroy the entire world, even though it only had the power to turn Bilbo invisible when I'd last read about it. Simply put, my 12-year-old mind just wasn’t interested. Needless to say, my copies of the second and third books in the trilogy remain unread.

Anyway, I seem to have matured recently, and as soon as The Return of the King came out on DVD I decided I needed to see all three of them back-to-back. I was especially interested in watching the director’s cuts of the films, since I had been assured by the aforementioned acquaintances that the longer versions didn’t contain any extraneous bullshit the way a lot of DVD releases sometimes contain extraneous bullshit. (Pontification time: James “The Abyss” Cameron knows how to release an extended version of a movie. Russell “Highlander 2” Mulcahy does not. [Nor does he know how to direct, period. But that’s another blog entry altogether.])

So once the foul winter weather set in, I asked a friend of mine if I could borrow her collection of the extended DVDs for a snowy weekend, and in the process of asking her, I explained my intentions to watch them straight through. This was her reaction:

HER: You’re going to watch them together?
ME: Yeah.
HER: [pause] You know they’re each 3 1/2 to 4 hours long, right?
ME: Yup.
HER: You’re going to sit on your couch for 11 hours straight?
ME: [doing my dad’s thing of answering a question with a question] Remember when Amazon put the first season of 24 on sale for $15 and I told you I was probably going to buy it and watch the whole thing in two sittings?
HER: [horrified] I thought you were kidding!
ME: It ended up taking me just a day and half.

A word of advice: Don't bet against my ability to sit on my ass for extended periods of time. You will lose.

So when she handed the DVDs to me, shaking her head in disbelief as she did so, I reminded her that she was the one who supposedly loved these movies so much--I was just watching them the way Peter Jackson intended. (Right, Peter? Back me up, here.)

And I did it. I started a little late (just before noon on Saturday), but I slogged through. Sure, I took a few minutes of break time in between each disk, to eat or whatever, but I pretty much stayed on my couch until a little before midnight. (I even did my standard thing of watching all the credits—until I realized that the studio had tacked on a “Thanks to the Geeks” list at the end of each movie, naming each charter member of Tolkien’s fan club. I sat through the first one, which crawled up my screen for over 20 minutes. Even I’m not dumb enough to sit through that two more times....)

All in all, it was an interesting experience. One might even call it mind altering. Not in the “Whoa, dude, that was trippy!” way, but in the “I think my brain just turned to mush” way. You see, although I can easily suspend my disbelief within the first 30 seconds of any given movie (even a really bad one), I’m usually capable of retaining some subconscious level of understanding that what I’m watching isn’t real.

Not so in this case.

Allow me to illustrate: As I was expecting, Legolas’s various x-treme sports-type stunts in The Two Towers (most notably, surfing down a staircase on top of a shield, and using his arm--in a way that categorically defies the physical laws of how an arm bends--to mount a horse mid-stride) were still utterly dumb and kind of broke the mood for me. But by the time the Battle of Minas Tirith rolled around, I’d been staring at my TV for nine straight hours and had become completely mesmerized. So when Legolas started jumping around on that oliphaunt like a monkey, the last vestiges of my “it’s just a movie” skepticism had been replaced with wide-eyed, unblinking submission and the occasional chant of encouragement to my fictional friends. “Yes, Legolas. Kill it.”

Put another way: if I’d been watching an all-day zombie epic, I would’ve been hunting for fresh brains come midnight.

Fortunately, I didn’t dress up in a fur cloak and a wizard’s hat when I went back to work on Monday. That’s what Sunday was for.

Here are some things I learned while watching LotR for a second time:
1. First and foremost, I need a bigger TV. I love letterboxed movies, but on my 21” screen the big battle scenes were somewhat less than impressive, to say the least.
2. I still can’t tell the two “comedy relief” hobbits apart. Though thanks to ABC’s Lost, I could at least identify one of them as “Charlie” whenever he popped up on-screen.

(Hm. That’s not very much, is it? See, this is where the “Was this the best use of half my weekend?” question comes into play...)

Some things I already knew:
1. Smėagol, or “Gollum” if you prefer (i.e., if you’re an insensitive, heartless bastard like Sam, with no empathy for the frail vulnerabilities of human/hobbit-kind), is the most tragic character in cinema. Perhaps the biggest disadvantage to seeing these movies in the theater was having to suffer through the audience’s ignorant laughter during the heartbreaking scenes in which Smėagol tries to overcome his darker side. “Oh, ha ha. The funny little CGI creature is arguing with itself. How mirthful!” Ugh.
2. I don’t like the elves. They are a bunch of cold, calculating übermensch fascists (blue eyes? blonde hair? relentless talk of being the “superior race”? that’s a teensy bit scary, isn’t it?). Even when they showed up at Helm’s Deep, I got the feeling that they were there because it was The Right Thing to Do, not because they wanted to help out the humans or anything. What smug, self-righteous dicks they are... (Legolas excluded, I suppose. Oh, and the one played by Liv Tyler. Risking death to get it on with a human? How scandalous! Then again, I’ve been told--often--that Viggo Mortensen is what’s known as a “hottie,” and therefore well worth dying for.)

In the aftermath of my epic ass-planting session, I was too exhausted to do anything but watch more television. Naturally. (This is, I think, the fundamental problem with television. It’s like a narcotic. Watching it only makes me want to watch it some more. Until I pass out.) So I watched Saturday Night Live.

The Scissor Sisters were the musical guest, and they performed a cover of Pink Floyd's “Comfortably Numb” redone as a disco song, complete with Barry Gibb-style falsetto in a grating duet by the band’s two singers (male and female). They even had a bit of a disco look in their wardrobe.

It was terrible. Really terrible. In fact, it was so terrible that if I had been in another room and someone else had turned on the TV in the midst of this song, I would’ve shouted, “What the fuck is that noise?”

Speaking of songs, Tina Turner’s “What’s Love Got to Do with It” got stuck in my head on Sunday, and wouldn’t leave until I blasted it out with Juno Reactor’s “Nitrogen, Pt. 2” while on my way to work yesterday morning.