> The fourth and final final reason is that the director is a geeky looking guy with a beard. Any guy that looks like a UNIX system administrator automatically has the frame of mind necessary to adapt LotR. Even better, he's a complete nutcase. Peter Jackson is allegedly from New Zealand but more likely from some planet with a comical name like "Zoink." So not only is he working outside the Hollywood Studio of Bland Lowest Common Denominator Films, he's sure not to bore us with the same old cliches and artifice that overruns terrestrial entertainment.

This has always been my view. When I first heard he was going to make these movies, my immediate reaction was "I doubt anybody can make the right movie of LotR, but if anybody can, it would be Peter Jackson." I am 100% certain that, even if it does *not* end up being the perfect LotR movie, it *will* be a terrific movie. If Jackson gets this right I'm picking it to be the Star Wars of our time.

Another thing in Jackson's favour is that he is fully aware that if he takes too many liberties with the story, millions of crazed fangeeks will probably have his head on a spike by the end of the first screening. This is why I'm trying to keep an open mind about disturbing rumours like the inclusion of a black Amazonian warrior-babe in the Fellowship of the Ring, or making Arwen into some sort of Xena/Eowyn cross. Time will tell, but I'll be interested to see how well any changes sit with the original feel and intent of the books.

My main reason for looking forward to these films, though, is simply because I've seen Middle-Earth in our landscape here since I discovered Tolkein as a child. When I first read LotR, the descriptive passages only added different people and action to the scenery I could already see around me. I wanted to see Riders of Rohan galloping across the Canterbury Plains. I've *been* to Mirrormere and the Shire and that hideout of Faramir's at the waterfall pool, even if they had different names. Every time I climbed the track to the summit of Rangitoto, through all the black twisted lava rock, I imagined what it must have been like in eruption, with Frodo and Gollum fighting desperately on the edge of the crater. I can take you to so many forests where surely the elves have only just left. I don't know the specific locations Jackson has chosen, but I don't care - they will be right, and best of all, they will be REAL. Oh, he'll add castles and towns, and special effects from wall to wall, but no matter how the rest of it turns out, this movie will at least give LotR the landscape it always had in my mind.