It is hot around here. It's been hot for weeks. On Wednesday, it rained. I was driving at the time and when it was slow, infrequent drops, I avoided switching on the wipers, knowing it would make things worse. When I finally did switch them on, they indeed left thick arcs of smears. It's like it was raining grease. Which would match somehow with gunky-feeling heat that persisted.
Yesterday and to-day were the usual cloudless bowls of yellow-blue hot. My plan this morning was to read at Starbucks while completing the requisite first, strong black coffee, and then maybe going to Jamba juice to add some haphazard fruit to my diet before getting to Boschen and Nesuko. That first sip of coffee in the morning usually takes everything out of my mind--it's a beautiful moment of bonding with the great coffee spirit. But the Starbucks I went to only had Mild, and it took a little while before I could concentrate on Gulliver's visit to Luggnagg.
But, having finished that, I find myself now in the middle of a Passion-Mango Matcha with Green Tea and I think it might do. I want to rewrite the end of the new Boschen and Nesuko chapter before I start on storyboards, which I ought to've done yesterday, except yesterday I was rewriting bits of the chapter and was too damn tired from it being Thursday to do much else.
When I finished the script of the previous chapter, I had a very definite idea of what was going to happen next, but I compulsively re-wrote it in my head for weeks before I actually sat down to the first draft on Wednesday. I'd been re-deciding points, working out certain logistics, and then, having it on paper, found a whole new set of things to puzzle through. I wrote six pages on paper, and then changed them drastically while typing them up, and now I want a different ending.
You know--and this doesn't really relate, but for some reason, it got me thinking about it--one of my biggest complaints about the Peter Jackson film version of The Return of the King is Sam and Frodo splitting up due to Gollum's machinations just before they reached Shelob's cave. The director and writers, in the commentary, explained they felt they needed to do this because they didn't consider the trio's difficulty with Mordor's terrain to be dramatic enough. They needed character conflict and they needed Gollum to succeed once in his goal of driving a rift between Frodo and Sam.
And that pisses me off. I don't like those motives, as they seem to cynically place a desire for teh drama over sensitive character portrayal and the simple logistics of the situation. Man, it eats me. I don't think Gollum really could have driven them apart. I don't think Sam would really have abandoned Frodo just because Frodo told him to. Not merely because of loyalty and a awareness of what the ring was doing to Frodo, but also because Sam must know in his heart that he probably doesn't have the means to return home. I don't believe the little personal drama would divert their attentions from very big and sinister Cirith Ungol and the other perils of the environment. And I don't feel two friends barely getting along in a hellish land is boring, or less interesting than a pointless squabble.
And I didn't need to feel like Gollum had psychological power over them. That's not what's interesting about Gollum and it's not relevant.
Well, I still basically love the movie, but I have more complaints about it than any of the others. I also don't like that Gollum didn't die with the ring in the same, accidental way he did in the book, and Sean Astin seemed way too American Gung-ho in the last film. But I still love everything about Minas Tirith, Shelob, Gandalf, and all kinds of other things . . .
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