It's official: I still can't stand Tolkien. I tried to read the Lord of the Rings trilogy way back in like, the late 70s, or whenever it was trendy among my late-teen crowd, but I never got more than a hundred pages into The Hobbit. I thought it was really really boring. So when the movie came out I didn't rush to see it, but I've heard so many good things about it and the trilogy is winning so many awards, I decided to give it another chance. Here's my review: Yawn. It's visually amazing, stunning, breathtaking, a great demonstration of moviemaking talent, but just like the books, boring as hell and practically plotless. Hobbits, elves, ring, evil, power struggle, good guys and bad guys, yeah, yeah, I get it. Three seemingly endless hours later, I still didn't care about any of the characters and could barely tell them apart, except that the hobbits and the bigmouth dwarf were really getting on my nerves. But it was not a wasted morning, I did make enormous progress on Bardot - if I hadn't been knitting I would have turned the movie off, but it was a good time to really plug along and get that sweater moving again. So I have come to accept that I don't get LOTR and I will never get it, just like I don't get why people think Jim Carrey is funny. I rented the first two parts of the trilogy, but the second movie is going back unwatched. I do have "Lost in Translation" for later, I'm looking forward to that.