I agree about ROTK…it’s going to be a cinema stopper. I think he has that planned for us…Jackson i mean.
I was nervous about the Kiwi/Aussie actors ;). Otto, Parker, Urban etc were mostly in soap operas and I wasn’t sure how that would translate to acting in a Big Movie. They carried it off.
The details, the sheer detail of it all. Awesome, awesome, awesome. The Easterlings! They were exquisite. They were bad guys and they were just exquisite!
The South Island played a starring role, of course. It really is that beautiful. You really can get in your car and be in countryside like Rohan very quickly.
As far as I know, it was only ever in Toronto, and closed on December 8th.
…especially since I spent half the time I was reading Two Towers thinking, “Where the spackle is Isengard?” I was looking up north beyond Mirkwood for some reason. Then Faramir pulls out the map and there it is, all nice and labeled for me.
Exactly! I’d forgotten about that until you mentioned it, but watching that scene in the movie gave me deja vu, it was so close to how I’d pictured it.
wow…same here…i didn’t realize it, but i’d have to say the forbidden pool was just exactly what i thought it was…
Forbin: Seriously… are you my dad? He does the same thing. My mom’ll drag him to a play, and he’ll come home raving about the theater’s ceiling. He has this strange fixation with ceiling beams.
Don’t go there!
Obscene joke! (discretion forbids the poster to type it)
Seriously though, roof structures are sexy with a capital S.
Now your dad may have a thing for ceilings, and there’s nothing wrong with that. There’s a lot of crossover.
A dome type theater has, how shall I put this, just one.
The ceiling is the underside of the roof. That’s not always the case, but those types (the one piece jobbies) are the best.
Hammer beam roofs are the coolest of the cool, though I don’t think we had on of those in LOTR.
Westminster Hall has the world’s largest Hammer beam roof structure IIRC.
Coffered ceilings are cool too.
I like the interplay of geometry on a roof. Being a technical, builder type guy, I also get a little exclusive thrill, ‘cause I know what’s goin’ on. Looking at roofs is, for a builder type guy, like watching blood flow through capilaries or something. Remember those high school biology films where you got to see stuff like that? How things worked? Looking at a roof is very revealing about structure. If one can recognize the basic dynamics of what’s happening, how load is being carried, they’re fascinating.
I also like to see how drainlines are situated. I don’t mean gutters and such. What I’m talking about is the grander scheme of, “How does this building prevent water from lingering/infiltrating?”
Other kicks of mine?
Stone masonry
concrete masonry
Bridges
Dams
etc.
Too many to list really.
I often think that my eyes are picking up an invisible ink drawing that surrounds (whatever structure). The invisible drawing is dynamic too. It has load, tension, compression, shear and so forth forth.
Your dad’s cool.
Son.
Forgot one: they used the Wilhelm scream! I noticed it when one of the elves was getting thrown over the wall at Helm’s Deep.
(I can’t find a stable link to the sound file itself; do a google search on it and you should be able to find it.)
I like the “director’s cameos” He usually appears in all of his movies somewhere.
(He was the belching Bree man with the carrot, in FotR)
I think this time he was at Helm’s Deep. There is a moment when they were lifting those wooden slat things up, to hurl stuff at the Uruks/Orcs coming up the causeway under shields.
I’m pretty darn sure that the man throwing a rock, was him - it lingered on him just long enough to make me go "That looks like Peter - " Will have to wait for the re-watching though, to be sure! 
Dude… Have you read The Return of the King? Gimli is your kindred spirit.
That was him. He was also in the scene where Sarumon is whipping the horde of barbarian looking men (I forget who they were) into a fighting frenzy.
And his kids are also in them, as are the kids of some of the cast members.
The pool scene was eerie, but I almost died laughing when Gollum sang and slapped the fish on the rocks.