"Return of The King" gets a Berkeley Square Blog thumbs up from me!
I loved the books as a teen and have reread them several times since (though not in a while...). The movies have all been superb. Watching the third today, I just marvel at their technical brilliance, sense of spectacle, and overall quality. The third one really was Ben-Hur, Star Wars, The Ten Commandments, and Henry V rolled into one.
Seeing it after Saddam was captured made it perfect. It intrigues me that Viggo Mortensen is so anti-war, yet carries a film that could be a 3 1/2 hour RNC commercial for Iraqi liberation. As Andrew Sullivan mentions, John Reys-Davies, who plays Gimli, is not quite on the same page:
My father took me down to the quayside in Dar-Es-Salaam harbor. And he pointed out a dhow in the harbor and he said, “You see that dhow there? Twice a year it comes down from Aden. It stops here and goes down [South]. On the way down it's got boxes of machinery and goods. On the way back up it’s got two or three little black boys on it. Now, those boys are slaves. And the United Nations will not let me do anything about it.”The conversation went on. “Look, boy. There is not going to be a World War between Russia and the United. The next World War will be between Islam and the West.”
This is 1955! I said to him, “Dad, you’re nuts! The Crusades have been over for hundreds of years!”
And he said, “Well, I know, but militant Islam is on the rise again. And you will see it in your lifetime.”
He’s been dead some years now. But there’s not a day that goes by that I don’t think of him and think, “God, I wish you were here, just so I could tell you that you were right.”
What is unconscionable is that too many of your fellow journalists do not understand how precarious Western civilization is and what a jewel it is.