On a less serious note

I went to see the Simpsons Movie today. I got a free ticket when I purchased the season 8 DVDs. It was definitely worth it. Very funny. I also got to see some interesting trailers. (By the way, "trailers" seems like a misnomer since they don't trail behind the movie but actually precede it. Perhaps they should be called trawlers as they are trawling for viewers. But I digress.) One was for a movie in the Resident Evil series, which I know nothing about, but involved a virus that turns almost all of humanity into zombies. (It wasn't specified whether they were flesh-eating.) I'll bet I would hate the movie, but seeing the sketch in the trawler was definitely interesting. I'm not really into the horror/scifi genre. I am however a huge fan of intelligent scifi and fantasy. This is almost universally absent among movies, although there are exceptions, but I have read a large number of really good science fiction and fantasy books. (Disclaimer: I have never read, nor do I plan to read, Harry Potter.) I read the Lord of the Rings trilogy when I was younger and absolutely loved the books, but I actually never read the last 30 pages because, subconsciously I think, I didn't want the books to end. I later reread the series, including the last 30 pages, in time to see the Peter Jackson epics. This positioned me uniquely to nitpick every deviation from the book. Something that really bothered me, but apparently no-one else, was the scene in the first movie where the troupe is attempting to cross the mountains through a dangerous pass. They are forced to turn back because the evil wizard Saruman is creating a storm to block the pass. All very well and good, except that in the book, it is the mountain itself, Caradhas, that turns them back. Gandalf uses the incident to explicitly caution against the view that there is only one enemy. In an age when George Bush says "You're either with us or against us," giving voice to a simplistic view of the world where things are divided neatly into two categories, good and evil, I thought that this parable of Tolkien's was very apt. Things are more complicated. Even though the mountain spirit had no stake in the war, no alliance with Saruman, it was being independently belligerent. That's the way things go. I therefore was very unhappy to see Jackson bulldoze over that nuance and recast the incident more toward the George Bush worldview. But in any event, I digress yet again.