I'm not usually a plot hole kind of person, but these movies are extremely long, extremely detailed and have already had their structural integrity extremely shattered by having been shoved through the narrative meat grinder that is the art of film adaptation. So let's go ahead
Hello and welcome to the very first Sunday Best, minutemonk’s weekly newsletter. Every Sunday I’ll be compiling the week’s posts, adding some bonus commentary and sending it all straight to your inbox. Let’s get started. Fellowship 1: Mostly DarknessI genuinely believe a good opening line can
The 2000s are effectively the last time Hollywood truly gave a shit. Back then CGI was new enough that it could only be used sparingly, the last generation of physical effects workers were still spry enough to work and franchises weren't the guaranteed cash cows they are now.
We're still in the intro, so let's pivot for a second. Watching these movies one minute at a time is surprisingly agonising, so to increase my Tolkien dosage I've started reading the books as well. I'm only halfway through "Concerning Hobbits&
Minute three and we're still in setup mode, but once again it's brevity that comes to the rescue. We're doing two things at once here: one, the rapid flow of "rings exist" → "Sauron sucks" → "elves beat Sauron" gives
Yesterday was all about tone-setting, but today has a little more flash. Not since Titanic have I seen a movie announce so confidently that it has all the money in the world and it knows exactly how to spend it. Fellowship is *artisanal* in a way most blockbusters simply
I genuinely believe a good opening line can cure a lot of ills. Star Wars is ultimately just a bunch of random nonsense George Lucas made up on the way to work, but "a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away" makes the whole thing seem
I have vivid memories of *almost* becoming obsessed with The Lord of the Rings. When I was a teenager in the early 2000s, we visited my aunt & uncle out in the country. They had just bought a DVD player and three movies: The Fellowship of the Ring, X-Men