So, in preparation for this project where I write randomly about one movie that I own, I thought about some of the hardships I might come across while writing - one of those hardships was finding something to write on movies that I had seen numerous times. Some of these movies, like Star Trek Into Darkness and Mixed Nuts, I rarely watch, but others? Others I watch quite a bit. With those movies, I knew I had to rethink what I had once thought of a film during my viewing, digging harder to find deeper and more interesting meanings than I had done before.
Yeah - that didn't happen when I rewatched Lord Of The Rings - The Fellowship of the Rings.
I tried. I tried really hard. I kept coming across talking points that had been covered time and time before. The symbolism of the races and how they related to various world wars. I tried with some of my personal experiences, which amounted to 'I watched this movie in the theater when it first came out with my mom and brother, my mom fell asleep and I wished there was an intermission.' Mind you, there was also, 'We bought the extended edition and had people over to the house to watch it in preparation for The Two Towers.' While those experiences were some that I've cherished over the years, the personal memories for Fellowship have been overshadowed by better ones, specifically in the buildup to Return of the King. THOSE memories are great ones - they involve late night sushi, standing in line for quite a long time and sleep deprivation that accounted for some interesting and memorable one-liners from the friends I was with.
But what was I going to talk about with Fellowship of the Ring? While a great movie, it becomes the first part to a greater story and - in my case - a first part to greater personal stories to come. So I rewatched this hoping to come up with at least one insight that I hadn't seen before, something that could transform the way I think of this movie as it relates to the whole story along with it standing on it's own.
Nothing truly insightful came up....except for one minor detail that I never really looked into before:
Hobbits own pets.
Saying it out loud, it makes sense - the whole opening scene 'concerning hobbits' show them going about their daily lives, and in those scene you see them utilize animals, such as pigs, to tend to their crops. Because of the personal allusion that we make to the hobbits as the main characters (they look and talk like us, they enjoy the same things we enjoy, we see qualities we strive for in ourselves like bravery and commitment in them), we think of them as us. But seriously - have you ever seen a pig wearing a yoke tilling earth? It's not that feasible of a task. Sure, in the sense of Middle Earth animal 'equal opportunity', they CAN perform the task, but - for the same reason us humans do not use pigs for plow our earth - the task isn't suited for them. This may be an imaginary world, but I'm sure the strength needed to complete that task without the animal getting tired is why pigs aren't suited for this line of work.
Later in the film, the Ring Wraiths come looking for hobbits with the last name of Baggins - they approach a hobbit who tells them that the only Baggins around live at The Shire. But did you ever notice what was behind the hobbit in that scene?
A dog. A good sized dog, by the looks of it. HOWEVER, keep in mind that hobbits are on average three feet tall. That dog, which looks like a Gerrman Shepard mix, looks to stand to the hobbits waist line. That makes sense for regular humans - waist height is the normal size for a dog like that - but on a hobbit their waist line is at around the height of 1 1/2 feet to two feet. That dog that you see in the movie is a full-grown miniature dog that - at full grown height - is about half the size of what we would consider a normal dog.
That got me thinking - if hobbits breed their dogs smaller, could they essentially breed specific traits into animals, like the strength needed to plow into pigs? While considered by much of Middle Earth to be 'simple, earth loving creatures', were hobbits actually utilizing genetic manipulation through breeding to bring out unseen traits in animals so they can use them in their daily routines? The answer is yes - they did take part in this manipulation through breeding because.....wait for it....hobbits had done it before and have been doing that for years with their growing of 'pipe weed'. Their 'pipe weed', known throughout Middle Earth as some of the best, was developed by them through years of cross-breeding and genetic manipulation to bring out certain qualities in the strand. By using this simple concept of genetics that they were already prone to do, they could easily apply this to animals. It's just like growing corn - through this type of genetic breeding, you can phase out small corn and grow much larger corn.
Hobbits are the Monsanto of Middle Earth.
Alright! Now that we got that done, onto another movie! What number comes up this time.....
Now to find number 384 on the list.....
It's remake time! True Grit, by the Coen Brothers, made in 2010....
Now that I think about it, I'm not sure if I've ever seen this film all the way through....this is going to be exciting.
- Z
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