I can't remember how many times I've seen FOTR and TTT. The first ones were in the cinema, of course, then the extended editions, then the cast commentaries, and those being shown in cable...I think I've lost count and I've still never gotten tired of it. And I'm still waiting for the extended edition of ROTK and it being shown on cable.
But then, that might be because I had already been a bit of a die-hard fan of the Lord of the Rings books before the movies even came out, so overall it's been a fantastic experience for me (except for certain deviations Peter Jackson made in the film from the books *twitches* but he does have to follow the canons of film art, so I won't blame him. Besides, that one would deserve a thread of its own).
Um, okay...what I've written above has mostly been very personal opinion, so to make my post not a complete waste
, I'll just insert the "theory" bit that I had once posted in a Tolkien board of which I'm a member. It's kind of the tip of my "why-I-love-LOTR" iceberg, and here I'm talking specifically of the books (since someone mentioned them in this thread and it's very difficult for me to pass up chances to talk about the books)...
[start spiel]
As far as narrative style is concerned, I can't say it's initially very appealing. No subtleties when it comes to plot construction, everything's straightforward and comes in chunks, not to mention a difficult readability that seems uncalled for. It reads a lot like a history textbook more than anything else, let alone a novel. And yet maybe that's the point. Maybe Tolkien was going for the journalistic effect as a device to make what he was writing even more genuine. Instead of thinking that he was writing a work of fiction, he must have thought himself more of recording something that truly happened, hence the factual and detached construction of the novel in the part of the author...exactly like a newspaper. No manipulations, no opinions or commentaries; it gives you merely the events in the most no-nonsense (and admittedly boring) way. But it's an intriguing invention at the same time...journalistic fantasy. To state the unreal as realistically as possible.
Anyway, that can be debated endlessly and so can the everlasting controversy of form vs content in literature, but I love LOTR primarily for its content (besides, I'm not very good in appreciating forms too well). It never fails to amaze me how extensive and defined are the societies and cultures Tolkien had managed to create. True, he based the races on certain ancient cultures, but still, consider the range of what he had accomplished! It's like creating his own World and writing a history for it that can arguably be as old and as rich as ours, with its own share of conflicting races, their full range of emotions, their evolution, and their eventual interconnectedness. Furthermore, there is a richness in the work as a whole so much so that people often find it difficult to pinpoint exactly WHAT Tolkien was implying in his work. You could do a Marxist reading of it, or an environmentalist one, a feminist one, a historical one, a moralistic one, a theistic one, a linguistic one, and...well, I'm don't how many approaches there still are, and that's precisely because the depth of the story can provide so much simultaneously.
Come to think of it, I don't admire the work as much as I admire the capacity of Tolkien's brain to be so far-reaching. I mean, really, how much could one person absorb such a gigantic extent of human psyche and history and encapsulate them into a work of fiction, set in a world that seems so different yet so similar to ours? It's incredible.
[end spiel]
Oh yes, btw, I originally made that post in the other board with the full assumption that the people who were reading it had read Tolkien's The Silmarillion (which accounts for the histories of the different races of Middle-earth) as well.
//gets off soap box//