Word: hobbit
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King a dead cert for Best Picture? Already the sixth all-time worldwide top-grossing film, the finale to Peter Jackson's hobbit-forming trilogy has also received plenty of critics' laurels. But to grab the big statuette, LOTR: ROTK will need to overturn a serious Academy prejudice: no flat-out fantasy film has ever nabbed the top Oscar...
...winner of last week's World Idol competition, gap-toothed Norwegian KURT NILSEN, proved that international fans will forgive a mediocre mug. "You have the voice of an angel and the face of a Hobbit," the Australian judge told Nilsen. "If they had Middle-earth Idol, you'd be it." Still, Nilsen beat out American Idol's Kelly Clarkson and nine others. We assume American Idol washout Justin Guarini and the potent Scandinavian voting bloc hit the phone lines hard...
Viewers don't play this movie like a video game. They are seduced to live inside it. In one brilliant visualization, the hobbit Pippin (Billy Boyd) manages to light a bonfire at the top of Gondor to alert his distant comrades to a military victory. On a far hill, a second fire is lit, its flame echoed on farther mountaintops, on and on into the dawn. At last, it's wartime...
...comradeship, sacrifice--soldiering on, under an immense, sapping burden. Though the trilogy percolates with bracing adventure, it is a testament to the long slog of any war. Pain streaks the faces of the film's stalwart warriors. They know the enormity of their foe and know that the child hobbit who bears the Ring is far from them--surely in peril, perhaps lost forever. At one point Aragorn asks Gandalf, "What does your heart tell you?" and in a little movie epiphany, the wizard's face briefly warms, brightens, and he says, "That Frodo is alive...
...boldly choreographed battles are really a diversion from the story's great drama: three little people--Frodo, his companion Sam (Sean Astin) and the ex-hobbit Gollum (Andy Serkis and a lot of CGI geniuses) on their way to Mount Doom with a mission to destroy the Ring. Cringing and crafty, Gollum is the rebellious servant, subverting Sam's selfless impulses, trying to twist allegiance of the pallid, ailing Frodo away from his friend. (So poignant are Gollum's turbid emotions, and so persuasively is this computer critter integrated with the live performers, that he deserves a special acting Oscar...