Speaking of Tolkien, Bruce Baugh offers up a brilliant reading of the movie of The Two Towers and, specifically, the ways it departs from the book: it’s the Rohanian-propaganda version of the War of the Ring.

I won’t spoil the movie or Bruce’s points by quoting specifics, but you can read his post here.

Speaking for Teresa and myself, we saw it at noon on opening day (geeks? us?), enjoyed it like crazy, and have been niggling about the details ever since. As I said coming out of the theater, “I have about four dozen arguments with what they did, and in about two dozen of those cases, I could just as easily argue their side.” But just as with the previous movie, any film of Tolkien that gets so much so right earns a lot of slack from me. We’ll probably see it a couple more times in the next week or two. [11:23 AM]