Back to Contents

THE LORD OF THE SPECIAL EFFECTS You are not going to believe this but I swear that it's true. The scene - a slowly moving queue entering a cinema where the film The Lord of the Rings - The Two Towers is showing. In the queue are my grandson Daniel and me. Immediately in front of us two cinema-goers are chatting.     FIRST CINEMA-GOER: You would have thought Tolkien would have     called it something different than The Two Towers after September     the 11th wouldn't you, Charlie.     SECOND CINEMA-GOER: Yes, it was a bit insensitive of him, wasn't it. My mind boggled! The expression 'boggled' came to me very easily, probably because it's a very Tolkienesque word, such as 'hobbit' and 'baggins' and 'throppit', and having recently subjected myself to another dollop of Tolkien-speak it sprang to mind quite readily.      After I had seen the first Lord of the Rings film I vowed that I had seen my last Lord of the Rings film and said as much. In fact on remembering that one of the characters in it was called 'Legolas' I remember remarking 'I don't know about Legolas but I would have to be Legless before you'd get me to see another Lord of the Rings film.) But good grandfather that I am I allowed Daniel to persuade me to take him (His father is divorced from my daughter; probably because he realised that if he hung around too long he would one day be roped in to take his son to see a Lord of the Rings film.      What sort of person falls for this tripe? I can understand children being impressed by The Lord of the Rings, and his bastard child Harry Potter, because their minds are not yet fully developed, but grown men and women? 'The ultimate triumph of Good over Evil' was how one film critic described it. The ultimate triumph of style over content, of special effects over plausible story, more like.      I am reminded of an anecdote about the late Sam Goldwyn, the 'Goldwyn' in the Hollywood film studios Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Apparently he used to rate films by how hard it was to tear yourself away from them to go for a pee. The best films were of course the ones where no matter how badly you wanted to go to the gents you didn't dare go for fear of missing something. If you could bear to go only once, this would be a good film according to Goldwyn, or as Goldwyn himself put it, 'A one piss picture'. A two piss picture would be a poor film. Using Goldwyn's rating system I would judge The Lord of the Rings, The Twin Towers to be a four piss picture, although in fact I had to relieve myself five times, but that was probably because during the intermission I slipped out for a couple of pints in the pub next door, the object being to fortify myself before facing up to the rest of the performance.      I mean the film just didn't make sense. I said as much to a Tolkien-loving acquaintance of mine. He smiled at me with what looked to me like pity and a sort of benign condescension and said: "It's not supposed to make sense." So that's where I've been going wrong! Silly man! I was expecting it to make sense, just as when I watched 'Billy Elliot' I expected it to make sense. But hold on, Billy Elliot did make sense to me. Well quite obviously I was wrong, and it wasn't about a boy who discovered within him a love of the ballet and despite his working class roots and his dysfunctional family rose above those impediments and grew up to be a star of the Royal Ballet, culminating in an appearance in a starring role in Swan Lake - no, it was really about Billybo Elliobog travelling to the Inner Earth to slay a one-eyed giant swan by sticking a sword up it's Ring. Well I'm glad that's been cleared up.