Balance:
Yes, that’s the really over-the-top bit. My point was, at least in part, that it would have been impractical even to send a message to the Old Forest. Sending one to a city nearly three times as far away, with more serious hazards along the way, makes no sense at all in this context. (The barrow-wights should not be a problem for an elf, but Saruman might be another matter.) It took Boromir over three months (110 days, he says) to make the trip, and he arrived on the day of the Council. Even assuming a tireless elf and a horse liquored up on miruvor , the messenger would have had to start out at least 4 to 5 months before the Council. If Elrond planned the meeting that far in advance, why didn’t he send anyone to Frodo? Oh, wait–if he had, his summons would have arrived before Gandalf even left Hobbiton .
And yes, that part of the EE stands out partly because Jackson generally did a much better job with timescales. (Of course, I also dislike it because I dislike pretty much every moment of screentime for Denethor.)
As much as I dislike Movie!Denethor, he does give us Peregrin Took singing Bilbo’s traveling song, making it beautiful and heartbreaking.
squeegee:
OTOH, Jackson’s Hobbit movie seems to be compressing time ridiculously, in that apparently (though we can’t be sure until another movie appears) the trilogy is the origin story of the Witch King, who in the books had been hanging around ME for 1600ish years but in the movie he’s 1540 years late.
I have not and will not see THE HOBBIT (absent a date-night DVD choice by my wife, which seems unlikely). I’ve seen enough of Jackson’s work to decide that my affection for FELLOWSHIP and TOWERS was an anomaly; in general I don’t like his film-making choices.