Literature

ROTK: Extended Edition

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Will it be ready for XMAS? Of course, why el$e is Jackson working on it now:

“I’m going to work on an extended DVD version, though I don’t think all of that will make it in, because the pacing would be really weird,” Jackson told the magazine. “But there’s some good stuff that’s not in the book.”

I don’t know as I want much good stuff that was not in the book. As much as I loved the movie I am still smarting over the missing Scouring of the Shire.

Quicksilver Companion

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Those of you who have read or are reading Stephenson’s Quicksilver might also want to read Carl Zimmer’s Soul Made Flesh. PZ Myers reviews the Soul Made Flesh here:

The book is a fascinating combination of history, philosophy, biography, and science. And by “science”, I don’t mean the plain recital of observations and inferences, but the process of grappling with the evidence, testing hypotheses, and deriving new and better explanations. I’ll be assigning Soul Made Flesh as required reading next time I offer my neuroscience course.

and provides a comparison of the two here:

After all, both describe the same period of intellectual ferment, and both make it clear that it was not a good thing to be a dog in England in the last half of the 1600s.

Oh, and Myers has also posted the most titillating picture of the week. Read the caption here.
NB (1/18): Corrected Zimmer’s first name.

Theatrical or DVD LOTR

This entry was posted in Culture Literature LOTR Movies on by

Nate contemplates the possibility that Peter Jackson is insane.
Really, how could Jackson possibly think the theatrical versions of the LOTR trilogy is better than the extended versions? Well, they are his creations and each had its purpose.
I have had time to watch only the first disk of the extended Two Towers and if this is exemplary of the rest it is a huge improvement on a movie that I already thought was very, very good!
But, of course, this says nothing regarding Jackson’s sanity just that if the studio had allowed it he could have delivered an even greater movie to the theaters.
And, based on how easy it was to sit through RoTK I don’t think length would have bothered most viewers. In fact I was pleasantly surprised at how many folks stayed through the credits (though a few stood to watch them).