Well, it’s been a while between entries hasn’t it? There’s two reasons for this. The first is Christmas, which tends to mess things up fairly effectively, and the second is HEAT.
For the last week or so Perth has been stuck in one of the most appalling heatwaves I’ve ever experienced. A high pressure system stabilised in the bight, fixing a low pressure trough down the coast in such a way that it started wobbling irregularly back and forth and sucking down moist, warm air from the tropics. The end result of which was temperatures between 20 and 25 at night, and 35 to 40 during the day, all with sappingly high humidity. So, I haven’t been up to much except sitting in front of the TV and sweating, which is annoying because I’ve only got two weeks off work and I’ve gotthings to do!.
But anyway it’s over now, and we’ve got a nice break with temperatures in the mid twenties for a few days. Then it’ll start getting hot again, although hopefully less humid. Hopefully.
So, what did I get for Christmas? Let’s see…
1: A bunch of rather amusing books from Ali (although she says that they’re last year’s presents, and this year’s are still to come 🙂 including The Worst Case Scenario Survival Guide – Travel, which has some truly delirious “emergency phrases” in the back in German, Spanish and Japanese (“Hello – I have been seriously injured” “Can I borrow a towel to soak up the blood?” “Why is the water brown/green/black?”).
2: A very entertaining V-CD from Helen, and a picture of Cliffords Tower in York, which we were talking about at one point.
3: An ornamental statue of King Arthur from Mum and Dad, which is nice if not terribly practical.
4: A copy of the Pixies’ Trompe Le Monde from Andrew, which rocks.
5: A garlic holder, a wallet and a few other sundries from various English relatives.
6: A large food hamper from Aunts Faye and Beverly who seem to be under the impression that since I moved out from home I have been completely unable to feed myself.
7: Probably a fair few things I’ve forgotten about.
So all in all a fairly good haul.
On Boxing Day (of course) I went off to see The Two Towers with Ryan, Fabian and Michael. Ryan had booked tickets for the first showing (at 10:00 am), which was pretty cool since it meant queuing outside the Galleria waiting for them to open up, then racing in like rabid lemmings to get a good seat. We even met a genuine Orc from the Helm’s Deep sequence, and since we had a spare ticket let him have it in exchange forlistening to his stories about the filming (he could have been lying, but he had authentic looking papers, and the stories were good).
So, what did I think of the movie? Frankly I was disappointed 🙁
The Fellowship of the Ring was excellent. OK, there were numerous scenes left out for sake of brevity, some of the characterisations were way off, there were a number of plot alterations and several plot elements were skimmed over (some of which were amended in the special DVD edition), but on the whole it stuck to the novel pretty closely. The Two Towers on the other hand. Oy.
The movie is not Tolkien’s Two Towers. It has plenty of elements taken from the book, but ties them together into a very different plot. Given the remarkable effort at veracity in Fellowship I’d go so far as to call part two an outright betrayal 🙁
So what’s so wrong? I’ll deal with the problems point by point.
(This entry was way too long, so I’ve cut it into two. I hope this works 😉
