Drinking heavily whilst wearing earmuffs to block out the honking guffaws of Media luvvies in a South Kensington pub ("The Ivory Tower" owned by my insane Uncle Nebuchadnezaar) the other day, I was jerked out of an eye-poppingly frank daydream by the sound of a young man. "Mr Zonkotron, have you seen that film, Lord of the Ring 2? What did you think of it?" His question was a good one, because as luck would have it I'd been privvy to a private preview performance only hours or possibly days before. "I have had a lot of thoughts about it" I replied. Here are some of them. Thoughts. What I had.
Lord of the Rings was a big book, frankly too much of a chore to read when I was at school. Even The Hobbit was a bit of a brow furrower, though I'd read bits of it in English classes. Memorably, the bit about Gollum confusing the fella with riddles was read to us in English when we were eleven or twelve and we were asked to write a descriptive piece about Gollum, including a riddle. I was totally useless at thinking of riddles, so mine went something like:
The slippery creature reared itself out of the water, slopping itself into a bucket which Bilbo was carrying. "Alright there?" It said. "Ssssssss."
"Who are you?" Bilko was concerned about the talking jellyfish, because it looked clever, like it might want to ask some riddles or something.
"I am Gollum. I'm going to prevent you from crossing this lake by asking you a difficult riddle. You ain't never crossing this lake. Thhh thhhhhhh ssss." The creature flopped about, it had no bones. Bilbo could see that it was likely to pysically prevent him crossing the lake somehow. He had no idea how.
"Right, go on then, ask me a riddle."
"My riddle is this... A man marries his sister and has seven children. One of his children marries her Mother's brother. They have a further seven children. One of the second batch of seven children marries the cousin of the first batch of seven children. What is the relationship of the children of this cousin to the original man?"
Bilko paused for a minute. "That is the sickest riddle I've ever heard. You are revolting."
Gollo shrugged his boneless shoulders. "It was pretty wrong. You can go across anyway. Looks like I've got
some thinking to do. Sssss"
Bilko upturned the bucket, allowing Gollum to think pretty hard about stuff back in the water of the lake.
He murmered thoughtfully to himself as the jelly creature sloshed away. "Sister's cousin... hmm"
Not bad, I thought.
Anyway, the film itself was pretty true to the parts of the book I'd actually read, in that it was based in
New Zealand (Couldn't they have recreated New Zealand in Ireland or something?) and had the usually cast of Munchkins,
devils, warriors, hobbits etc. Particularly impressive was the computer rendering of Clown Mountain, the wacky,
red nosed chuckling rock which is shown whenever something particularly funny happens in the film. Frodo falls over...
Clown Mountain. Oboe calls Frodo a "tool"... Clown Mountain. Homo leaves his car unlocked, allowing Bingo to fill
it with custard and push it into a crowded swimming pool... Clown Mountain. It's the visual equivalent of a laughter track,
and I think it worked well.
It's not all fun and gags though, the film swings into dark areas which had me gripping the edge of my seat with both hands
on my head. Christopher Reeve's portrayal of Harpo the Dark Lord was extraordinary. I think it was Christopher Reeve,
I tend to get him mixed up with the bloke who played the burglar in "Uncle Buck", though I may be thinking of "Home Alone 2".
The way the fella called Hobo a "Beady eyed little bastard" was brilliant, terrifying.
All in all a great film and one I'd rate as three out of five.