[mormegil]

Dare I tread these waters that so few have and agree with Saucepan Man? Unfortunately it is not an innate ability of mine to so eloquently elaborate on my ideas. I however feel that PJ characterization of Gimli was in order. PJ was faced with a rather daunting task of giving depth and personality to around 15 characters. (9 in the fellowship, Gollum, Denethor, Eowyn, Eomer, Théoden Sauruman etc...) and he had 3 long movies to do it in. The unfortunate part of translating a book to a movie is that you cannot give narrative or express the characters thoughts overly well. Tolkien had over 1000 pages in which to establish character depth and PJ had 9 hours. In PJ's defense he needed to show the beautiful friendship that develops between Legolas and Gimli (one of my favorite parts of the book) but to do it true justice he would have detracted from the main thrust of the story. I think one of the reasons Gimli was the comic relief was to develop this intimate friendship with Legolas...the box joke is hilarious in my opinion. Due to the fact that there has been much debate on the burping scene I will give my two cents. I didn't find it humorous but I'm not sure that it was meant to be such either. So I don't feel that it was thrown in to get a cheap laugh (albeit some find it humorous which is great with me) but I feel that more so it was put in, as has been recently discussed, to give the audience the feeling that "right now I don't like Théoden".

I know that many of us feel that PJ should have created the movies just for us, but sadly New Line Cinema disagreed with him and wanted a movie that appealed more to the masses. That's not to say there isn't a great deal of appeal to us but it's not made specifically for us. I fully realize that the popularity defense has been used and hated but it's a definite reason as to why.

I hope this makes some sense and I appreciate the intelligent and lively debate.