Return of the King--no spoilers

i love working at a place where we can leave at noon for the movies. actually, let me clarify. we've only left for one movie--though it had three parts--Lord of the Rings. thank you to john for letting us see this defining cultural event three years in a row. i will be very, very happy when this becomes a greater commercial and artistic success than Titanic, which, frankly, was wearying and just pointed out the general sappiness of our current culture. so finally peter jackson daringly makes a movie boys and girls can like together...although i'm sure there are several of you who would disagree vehemently. but when i'm a grandfather, hopefully my grandkids will still like this movie. and if they don't, i'll complain that they're just stupid kids and to help me get up and go to the bathroom because granddad's laxatives have kicked in finally. whoa, i digress. so the movie was good. i'm obviously biassed for reasons i've specified--at painful lengths--earlier. but i really do think that if you're looking for one of those tales that punch you at some sort of primeval level, this will get you. or you'll leave really confused because you had to walk out to pee at that crucial moment in the movie and never caught up to the story. i do feel like--and i've read other reviews that would concur--that certain fairly significant moments of the book were left out or greatly altered, probably in the interest of time. but paradoxically, the movie felt rushed somehow. and then there's a little matter of the drawn-out ending. but compared to the book (which I read again the day before the movie--and was chastised for doing so by my not-as-obsessed friends), the sped-up parts were necessary. and the ending was shorter than in the book. one thing i'd like to comment on--i don't think this spoils anything--is that the Shelob's Lair segment, while saturated with tension, etc., really didn't do justice to the book. Shelob herself, much like the other CGI characters, was extremely believable...i had nightmares. but there was too much other sam/frodo/gollum conflict in the wrong places to really let it build up to the absolute terror i felt when i first read the scene in the book where the light of Galadriel's Phial reflects off Shelob's eyes in the darkness. the movie was too well-lit in this part. you could see everything and never really felt like Frodo was lost. and i really felt like if they followed the book and gollum tackled sam while frodo was caught unawares by Shelob and Sam got to watch Frodo get stung and wrapped by Shelob while he was busy with Gollum--a grisly part in the movie would have become much more climactic and character-based rather than just a terrible event. but it was still a good movie. it still deserves an oscar for something other than score, special effects, and costumes, which it should be a shoe-in for anyway.