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So today I watched ROTK. It made me feel all warm and squishy. (When I saw Fahrenheit 9/11 there was a preview for a movie called Danny Deckchair that had Miranda Otto in it. )
Two random thoughts I had upon watching it again. One was that you know where Frodo tells Sam in CU that they've taken the ring and Sam says they haven't, and explains, "I thought I'd lost you. So I took it." Damn, that sounds incredibly suspicious. I mean, NotInHIsRightMInd!Frodo's got even more reason to be suspicious of Sam in the movie than in the book. "I thought I'd lost you," is just so...lame sounding. Especially since presumably Frodo's got no way of knowing how very dead he seemed. And when you think of the whole theme of Sam losing him--the last time Sam thought he'd lost Frodo was when Frodo had taken a left in the cornfield and was all of ten feet away...it just struck me how totally suspicious poor Sam might seem there.
The second thing is harder to admit, but, you know when Sam's carrying Frodo up the mountain? And it's so dramatic and we should all be thinking about what a good friend Sam is and how much Frodo's sacrificing? I seem to always wind up staring at Frodo's cute little behind in that scene. It's just sitting there upside down right by Sam's ear in those silly little trousers with the suspenders. So there it is.
Naturally, watching this movie made me think about one of my favorite book bits, Crickhollow. I think if anybody was to ask me what place and when in a book they'd like to be, that would be it. I don't mean what part of a story I'd like to live, just a fictional place I'd like to go--my happy place, I guess some people would call it. Maybe I'm just the most unexciting person in the world, but that's got to be my idea of the perfect evening--a cozy house on an autumn evening, a hot bath after a day with lots of walking, your best friends, good food, wine, and a fire. Usually when I think about fictional places I think about how they look, but when it comes to Bag End or Crickhollow when Frodo lives there I always think about how it must smell delicious. (And being a hobbit slasher, there would be a wide variety of board games to round out the evening in my smial.)
I'm trying to remember if there were any other fictional places I really wanted to climb into before Crickhollow. I used to sit on my parents' dresser and try to figure out how to get into the mirror. Also my mother had this doohickey thing hanging at the end of the chain to the light in her closet and I used to want to get into that. I always imagined it would look like the inside of Jeannie's bottle on I Dream of Jeannie, you know with the circular purple velvet cushion couch and the colored windows. Only it would float and go places, like Willy Wonka's Great Glass Elevator (which I don't think I knew about yet). I also had a specific book of The Snow Queen where the illustrations were all done with like miniatures and models and I always wanted to go into Kay's house with the window boxes and Gerda next door. But those were all visual things, not so much things I just got from a description. There must have been something. I'll have to think.
Anybody else have places like that?
Two random thoughts I had upon watching it again. One was that you know where Frodo tells Sam in CU that they've taken the ring and Sam says they haven't, and explains, "I thought I'd lost you. So I took it." Damn, that sounds incredibly suspicious. I mean, NotInHIsRightMInd!Frodo's got even more reason to be suspicious of Sam in the movie than in the book. "I thought I'd lost you," is just so...lame sounding. Especially since presumably Frodo's got no way of knowing how very dead he seemed. And when you think of the whole theme of Sam losing him--the last time Sam thought he'd lost Frodo was when Frodo had taken a left in the cornfield and was all of ten feet away...it just struck me how totally suspicious poor Sam might seem there.
The second thing is harder to admit, but, you know when Sam's carrying Frodo up the mountain? And it's so dramatic and we should all be thinking about what a good friend Sam is and how much Frodo's sacrificing? I seem to always wind up staring at Frodo's cute little behind in that scene. It's just sitting there upside down right by Sam's ear in those silly little trousers with the suspenders. So there it is.
Naturally, watching this movie made me think about one of my favorite book bits, Crickhollow. I think if anybody was to ask me what place and when in a book they'd like to be, that would be it. I don't mean what part of a story I'd like to live, just a fictional place I'd like to go--my happy place, I guess some people would call it. Maybe I'm just the most unexciting person in the world, but that's got to be my idea of the perfect evening--a cozy house on an autumn evening, a hot bath after a day with lots of walking, your best friends, good food, wine, and a fire. Usually when I think about fictional places I think about how they look, but when it comes to Bag End or Crickhollow when Frodo lives there I always think about how it must smell delicious. (And being a hobbit slasher, there would be a wide variety of board games to round out the evening in my smial.)
I'm trying to remember if there were any other fictional places I really wanted to climb into before Crickhollow. I used to sit on my parents' dresser and try to figure out how to get into the mirror. Also my mother had this doohickey thing hanging at the end of the chain to the light in her closet and I used to want to get into that. I always imagined it would look like the inside of Jeannie's bottle on I Dream of Jeannie, you know with the circular purple velvet cushion couch and the colored windows. Only it would float and go places, like Willy Wonka's Great Glass Elevator (which I don't think I knew about yet). I also had a specific book of The Snow Queen where the illustrations were all done with like miniatures and models and I always wanted to go into Kay's house with the window boxes and Gerda next door. But those were all visual things, not so much things I just got from a description. There must have been something. I'll have to think.
Anybody else have places like that?
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Anyway, fictional places I would have liked to have been? Heh, I definitely went into the ward-robe, hoping to find Narnia at the other side. I also wanted to go to Fantasia in Neverending Story. And I blame the first book in the Little House on the Prairies series (the one where they're living in the forrest), for my longing for a little cozy, secluded, cottage deep inside the forrest.;-) Though I'm not exactly sure if that's what you meant with your question...
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Though I'm not exactly sure if that's what you meant with your question...
I'm not sure what I meant with it, but I think you got it! Heh--I love that you loved Little House in the Big Woods. When I worked at the kid's bookstore I remember this boy coming in who didn't like it at all. He sighed, "They should have called it: How to build a log cabin. How to bake bread. How to make maple syrup." Apparently the details of pioneer life did not interest him!
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Hee! I hate to stereotype, but maybe it's a gender-thing? Because I remember I recced the "Prairies-series" to a friend of mine who, as a rule, didn't like books where "nothing happened", and she still liked that well enough to finish the series off before I did... To me, all those details and pioneer life, how they handled the meat Charles brought home and stored it for the winter and such, was definitely one of the reason why I loved that book so much, I can't even explain it, but the entire book felt like this big comfortable safety-blanket. Like, it was fully possible for that family to make everything they needed themselves, and it still was so damn cosy. :D Of course, Little house in the Big Wood was my favourite through the entire series. I liked all books, but the rest of them weren't as cosy as the first. I guess that probably was because when Laura got older, she got more insight in how hard the pioneer life could be as well, so the "safety-blanket" was sort of lifted?
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Damn, you stole my answer. :) I think I loved that place because it was so cozy and different--a different world, a new lifestyle--and I just got a kick out knowing they did everything for themselves. (I was always a very crafty person.) I guess it's also because I loved learning about new things through books with characters I care about. I love history, and the Little House series is basically a bunch of history books with a starring character. But yea, I loved the Little House in the Big Woods because it seemed so real and homey, and the people seemed so wonderful and loving. I couldn't believe people actually used to do that back then! I remember being so disappointed that my life was so different from Laura's--I lived in a big apartment in the middle of a big city in the Middle East then--so I used to ask Dad to take me hunting all the time. He took me to the grocery store. "Look, cows!" Somehow, it just wasn't the same.
Anyway, my new answer to SM's question is the treehouse in the Bearenstein Bear series. Ever read that as a kid? That treehouse was just amazing, with separate rooms and again, Papa Bear made everything himself. I found it so cool how the house was built *into* the trunk of the tree...and don't tell me it's probably physically impossible, I won't listen. ;)
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I remember at the bookstore this woman who once came in wanting to order this other series about the frontier that she thought was so much better than the Little House books. Basically this was because they were totally historically inaccurate so that they could conform to 20th century ideas. Like she was proudly saying, "And they don't kill things all the time like they do in those books. And they're friends with the Indians!"
And we're like, um, yeah, that's probably because Laura Ingalls Wilder was describing ACTUAL life on the prairie, while your books are describing life in the suburbs in 1999 and pretending they're on the prairie. We were all wondering what the ate if they didn't hunt. Tofu?
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*giggle* I tend not to notice little things like probability in that scene, because my Inner Slash Goddess has thrown her popcorn to the floor and is standing on her chair shouting JUST KISS HIM ALREADY, YOU MORON!! But you do have a good point. In the books, the natural suspicion Frodo might feel under the circs is disarmed by the way the narrative emphasizes just how hard it was for Sam to FIND Frodo. I mean, CU was a big place. Sam had no particular reason to believe that Frodo was in one part of it or another. Personally, if I had to rescue the hobbit I loved from an Evil Tower, I would assume that there were dungeons and start there. Book!Sam has to look around desolately for a while, give up in near-despair, and find Frodo only when he sings and Frodo responds (something that always reduces me to a Puddle of Goo (TM)). Movie!Sam has apparently implanted Frodo with a radioactive locator chip that allows Frodo to be found easily in an Evil Tower. So yeah, there's more pressure on the line you mention to do some actual explaining, and, um, it doesn't hold up all that well, maybe. That doesn't prevent my Inner Slash Goddess from reaching for her Kleenex, though.
Fictional places I've wanted to go: Rivendell. My family used to go to this big old Victorian hotel called Lake Mohonk and I would pretend that was it. Bag End. Never successfully pretended any place was there. Fangorn. I play Fangorn whenever I go hiking. As another poster mentioned, Narnia. When I win the lottery I shall buy a large wardrobe for this purpose. Green Gables. Since I won't win the lottery, I'll just have to go to Prince Edward Island someday.
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::sigh:: Now that would have really made the scene.
But yeah, in the book there's that wonderful set-up with the song (that I SO missed in the movie!) where Frodo had good reason to see Sam as his rescuer first and then realize he was missing the ring, at which point Sam brought it out. And Book!Frodo's first response is his rational one--he's thrilled that Sam kept it from the orcs. But in the movie I guess because there's the emphasis on the surprise, with Pam sort of taking the ring out with more of a...not flourish exactly, but just more drama, it seems more planned or something. Now it's making me think of that great line when they're leaving Rivendell where Sam has packed some personal items for Frodo for the pleasure of being able to whip them out in triumph when Frodo realizes he's forgotten them.
Fictional places I've wanted to go: Rivendell. My family used to go to this big old Victorian hotel called Lake Mohonk and I would pretend that was it. Bag End. Never successfully pretended any place was there. Fangorn. I play Fangorn whenever I go hiking. As another poster mentioned, Narnia. When I win the lottery I shall buy a large wardrobe for this purpose. Green Gables. Since I won't win the lottery, I'll just have to go to Prince Edward Island someday.
I love all of these! And really, is there any other reason to have a wardrobe other than the possibility of getting to Narnia? I thought that was the best scene in the movie Shadowlands, btw, where the little boy is sitting in front of the wardrobe after his mother's died. That said it all for me.
OMG, I just remembered that when I was little...well, our backyard had sort of two levels with stairs leading up to a hill and a stone wall at the bottom of it. I used to pretend there was a secret door in the wall and a little house inside--a house under the hill, iow. Must have been my instinctive hobbit nature looking for Bag End there...
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(As for your second confession, I laughed a lot on reading that. Thanks!)
I have a couple of ‘book places’, some of which I still retreat to from time to time. The Shire is one, although only when I’m feeling in a more sociable frame of mind. Another place is Narnia, although I’d probably dream more about being on the Dawn Treader.
The third place is real, more or less. When I was still pretty young I read Paul Gallico’s book ‘Thomasina: The Cat who thought she was God’. I wanted to go there (ie the Highlands of Scotland), where there were mountains, and streams and wild places. Where the witch lived, alone in a little cottage surrounded by trees, looking after the animals. It sounded (and still does sound) like the best place in the world, to me.
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And now that you've described those Highlands they really do sound like the best place in the world!
I love that the Shire is someplace you think of in sociable moods--because it's true, it's not a place you go for seclusion or privacy. Though I suppose Frodo and Bilbo found their own privacy within it inside Bag End and on their walks.
I think in that scene in the movie I was also thinking about...well, I always sort of laugh at Frodo's, "I'm sorry! I'm sorry for everything!" (which I've noticed is not enough for some people who insist HE NEVER SAYS HE'S SORRY!). Anyway, I can't help but laugh because he really does owe Sam a great big I'M SORRY and also his mistake almost got him killed and would have if Sam hadn't saved him. But it's hard because at this point they just have to move on with the story so there's no real time to play out the possible consequences of what's happened. So in my mind it's almost like Frodo's saying, "Sam, I'm so sorry. I'll never invent scenes again! I'll follow the book from now on, I promise!"
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Hee, you and me both.
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Aaargh! How's a girl to keep her platonic passion for The Hobbit from evolving into... um....something else... with comments like these all over the place!
(I hear evil laughter... but maybe I'm imaginging things...)
I agree with the general consensus (more's the pity!). I have to force myself to look... elsewhere... during that scene so as not to be unduly distracted. Go walking!
Sometimes I am not successful however. (hangs head....)
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Think of it as a work of art, in its own way. It's just aesthetically pleasing. This time watching the movie I was impressed with the Nazgul's teeth as well.:-)
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I hadn't really thought about Sam's line to Frodo about taking the ring. I think by that point (and I mean in all three times I saw the movie) I was still trying so hard to nudge the movie into being the book that I was trying to put their fight totally behind them. Without that... well I think that I could see Sam was genuinely upset. Though Frodo didn't see any of his scenes before that so it's hard to say what just that one scene would look like to him... no I'd have to think about it. Well, that was clear. :)
I can't recall where I used to try to enter as a kid, what fantasy places. I just can't remember. The closest I can recall is about three years ago when I saw Kiki's Delivery Service and she runs into this cool girl who lives alone in a cabin in the woods and paints.