Review: Return of the King (LOTR)
Review of Lord of the Rings: Return of the King
By Dr. Grouchy
[Disclaimer: Dr. Grouchy's opinions are his own and not supported by or endorsed by any official body, including the National Football League or the International Olympic Committee. In fact, no grown man or woman, or ape that knows sign language would agree with most anything that he says.]
Well, it’s a good thing that I sit in front of a computer on my ass all day, it prepared me for the latest long and arduous Lord of the Rings episode. Return of the King. This is a pretty good and involved film, but totally wrong in every account when it comes to historical accuracy. I cannot find this king in any history book I’ve ever read. At least they didn’t have Elvis do a cameo, that would have really ruined the movie. I don’t think I would have enjoyed it as much if it were romantic-comedy and a musical all in one!
Let me recap the previous two movies, as I sat through them and all of the associated documentaries and outtakes over the past week. I actually had to take a week of sick leave just to carry this out. Thankfully, after a week of sitting glued to the tube, watching all 320 hours of the Lord of the Rings extended DVDs, I was as pasty-white as a frail Hobbit, and had a hacking cough. [Gollum! Gollum! Excuse my hacking cough....]
In the first movie, there is a whole town of midgets. Maybe they were originally circus-folk or something, but they aren’t very hard workers and they seem to sit around a lot and drink ale and smoke weed. And, they were the first sign that Middle Earth really needs a chain of Supercuts. Can you say, 
“Queer Eye for the Hobbit?” Well, I suspect there are a number of hole-dwelling Hobbits who are light in the loafer (if they weren’t always going around barefoot with those awful big hairy feet… does Supercuts also give pedicures?) They liked to wear lots of green velvet and in this movie, Frodo is chosen by a bunch of stuck up Elves and others in a big 
City Council meeting to take this old ring to throw in a volcano. Along the way, they do some hiking and kayaking, and camp out and eventually everyone gets jealous of Frodo, who has the best clothes and curly hair and a manservent along with this gold ring and pretty undershirt. So, after much ado, they part ways. (That took about six hours in the extended release. It seemed not that unlike a remake of the 1970’s classic, Deliverance, which was much shorter and to the point.)
In the second movie, Frodo and his friend Sam who has this real obvious crush on him, have to walk a lot. Kids these days don’t like to walk much. It showed with the young Hobbits who were always complaining about their journey. 
It was good that Sam was their to rub Frodo’s big hairy feet. They added back in the lost hot-tub scene in the extended DVD, so you could see where this relationship was going. 
Anyhow, while they were hiking, kayaking and enjoying nature, there was this big war with Orcs off in Helm’s Deep. There were a whole bunch of black Orcs (are there also Caucasian Orcs? I’ll discuss how racist this moview was later) and some who were bigger and smarter and some who were dwarf-Orcs. The humans were outnumbered, but they won in the end, because the Elves came to help and some others showed up at the last minute. They weren’t very organized, so they were fortunate they won at all. I think there were only a few people left at the end, and I don’t know if there were any Elves left, but they only came begrudgingly and they seemed mad that they were missing some boating event. Other than that, there was lots of walking-talking trees, and Gandalf died in the first movie and when he came back to life his clothes had all been bleached. (Again, this points out how racist the filmmakers were. All the “black” guys were bad and all the “white” guys were good. Even though that’s a reasonably acurate sterotype and all, it seemed to oversimplify everything in this movie. But, I think it might be because there weren’t any black people in England in those days.)
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