jervo

1. Kath and I raced home after work and watched the extendo-Two Towers DVD, which is - wait for it - scrumptrillescent. First, let me get this right out of the way: my favorite scene in the book (actually, in the whole trilogy) is when Frodo, nearing the end of his rope, randomly meets up with Faramir, and they have a great pow-wow and Frodo goes off to Mordor feeling a bit better about everything; in the theatrical release, Faramir is a huge dickhead and takes Frodo to GONDOR. In the extendo-DVD, Faramir has a much more in-depth backstory, and so he's a bit more sympathetic about his reasons for taking Frodo to Gondor. Anyway, the new version is as fantastic as you'd expect, and the new scenes (of which there appear to be a ton more than in FOTR) are wonderful and make the film feel truer to the spirit of the book than I'd thought after seeing the original version. We didn't get into any of the special features, but, I mean, the new version is nearly 4 hours long and we were pretty much spent afterwards.

2. Also, finished Dark Tower 5: Wolves of the Calla on Monday. On the whole, very enjoyable, and in the afterward SK acknowledges the obvious debts to Sergio Leone and Kurosawa's "Seven Samurai" (which I'm even more grateful to have finally seen, now). Of course, in the very last pages of the book, he throws in a plot twist so mind-boggling that I have absolutely no idea how he will reconcile. The only thing I can compare it to is one particular path from my absolute favorite Choose Your Own Adventure book, "Hyperspace", where the author (Edward Packard, I believe) enters the story and tells you that you're just a character in the book, but that he also has become a character in the book.