Wait... where the hell is Harry Potter?

December 30, 2003 11:37 AM

What not to do at a showing of Return of the King...
posted by bluedaniel (31 comments total)

Zero point seven chuckles.
posted by squirrel at 11:59 AM on December 30, 2003

That's point seven chuckles more than it got from me, squirrel.
posted by jdroth at 12:02 PM on December 30, 2003

Weird. I thought the Maddox thing was a hoot, but I found this really tedious and unfunny.
posted by psmealey at 12:07 PM on December 30, 2003

I found #'s 1, 11, and 20, funny.
posted by wsg at 12:10 PM on December 30, 2003

That's 3 more than me. Man was that obvious & unamusing.
posted by jonson at 12:17 PM on December 30, 2003

Obviously they're not all going to be funny, and I'll take what pride I have remaining and say I didn't write it, 'only pointed to it.

But some of them are rather clever (agreed on 1, 11 and 20), depends on one's humor I suppose, few share the same.
posted by bluedaniel at 12:18 PM on December 30, 2003

I quite liked the Monty Python one. Somebody should do it :)
posted by kaemaril at 12:25 PM on December 30, 2003

jonson, good to have you back!
posted by widdershins at 12:42 PM on December 30, 2003

Don't feel bad, bluedaniel. I've had more FPPs axed than I've had run. You have a nice animation on your user page, btw, but your linked dot-com shows only a white box in Safari (OSX) in case that matters. (/derail)
posted by squirrel at 12:42 PM on December 30, 2003

Nah, reasonably funny. Probably not intended to be the funniest thing ever. It's a blog entry.
posted by Hildago at 12:43 PM on December 30, 2003

Maybe it's just me, but I thought #11 was hilarious & I do #8 all day. But the rest - feh.
posted by volk at 12:50 PM on December 30, 2003

Volk, it's not you. And good point Hildago, matter of fact I thought twice if I should even post a bog entry, but some of the listings were too good to pass up.

Squirrel, it was only recently that I discovered that rather nasty little bug of the site showing nadda, but only when I checked the site from a MAC OS here at work (not sure at this moment what specific OS it is, I'm on-air).

But it appears to be the result of the Macromedia Plug-In Detector I installed on the server, which doesn't quite get along with Mac and other OS.

Hence, only last night did I dump the sniffer (plug in detector), yet still it displayed nothing but white on your system.

Squirrel, check your email and thanks for pointing that out. Cheers.
posted by bluedaniel at 12:54 PM on December 30, 2003

#23: Don't yell "Don't touch me there, touch me here" during the movie.
posted by bluedaniel at 1:33 PM on December 30, 2003

#24: Kill everyone with an uzi and then blow yourself up with explosives.

#25: Leap infront of the screen, pull down your pants and do a big poop.

The list of things not to do is endless and pointless.
posted by Blue Stone at 2:24 PM on December 30, 2003

Hm. It was laugh riot when, on opening night, I yelled, "Oh, Saddam, even a hobbit can make it out of a spider hole!"
posted by kaibutsu at 2:48 PM on December 30, 2003

my precious . . . love you like texas
posted by nyoki at 2:53 PM on December 30, 2003

For my money, the climactic installment of the Lord of the Rings couldn't have come at a better time. Its arrival in our entertainment- and war-driven culture is like that much-anticipated, full, firm breast-grab right before orgasm. Maybe it's just me, but if ever America needed a fat syringe-full of essentialist, polarizing xenophobia with religious delusion and a haste to violence we need it now. Gobbled up at the multiplexes by doughy suburbanites who hoot during the pre-movie Army commercial. What NOT to do in Return of the King? Dissent.
posted by squirrel at 3:16 PM on December 30, 2003

11 is indeed funny. I laughed so loud when I read this yesterday my wife gave me that "What are you doing" look.
posted by Mitheral at 3:35 PM on December 30, 2003

The only time I stifled an unintentional smirk during the film was as Gandalf and the gang approached the gates of Mount Doom. I willed the Frenchie Cleese from Holy Grail to be there: "'Eees not 'ere."
posted by feelinglistless at 3:43 PM on December 30, 2003

How about shining a flashlight around the theater, claiming that you are holding the Light of Earendil, our most beloved Star?
posted by Venux at 3:57 PM on December 30, 2003

i don't get it -- was the blatant slashy content too obvious to comment on (apart from here, of course, where our middle name is "obvious")?
posted by pxe2000 at 4:23 PM on December 30, 2003

He should have collected some more and edited down the list rather than taking the first ten that appeared in his mailbox.
posted by mischief at 4:54 PM on December 30, 2003

Is it too much of a derail to add "take your five-year-old to this scary violence-fest"? There were a lot of pre-K kids running around the theater when I saw it. Kind of unsettling. Grond-the-flaming-battering-ram alone would have given me a year's worth of nightmares at that age. To say nothing of elves brutalizing elephants and people getting choked to death over jewelry.
posted by BT at 7:28 PM on December 30, 2003

that's what i'm tolkien about! heh.
posted by centrs at 8:10 PM on December 30, 2003

This list would only be funny if Joel and the bots came out of retirement. I'd want them to do all three movies. I'd buy the dvds if they included a genuine MST3K audio commentary.

Actually, saying anything during a movie will get you dirty looks, even if the criticism is constructive, unfunny and well-intentioned. And having a deep thought provoking conversation about politics or religion during a film will get you escorted out by ushers. Then the lass you took to the movie won't return your calls the next day. Or ever. Not that I know from personal experience or nuthin..
posted by ZachsMind at 8:35 PM on December 30, 2003

6. Finish off every one of Elrond's lines with "Mr. Anderson."

9. Dress up as old ladies and reenact "The Battle of Helms Deep" Monty Python style.

12. Every time someone kills an Orc, yell: "That's what I'm Tolkien about!" See how long it takes before you get kicked out of the theatre.

16. Come to the premiere dressed as Frankenfurter and wander around looking terribly confused.

17. When they go in the paths of the dead, wait for tense moment and shout, "I see dead people!"

Here - I've ruthlessly edited it.

I'm Tolkien 'bout.........


Well, after "The Fellowship of the Ring", I blundered upon a piece of web writing which caught my fancy. It observed that Tolkien's elves were - by far - the superior Middle-Earth race. The race of men were - well - men. The dwarves were mercenary, greedy, and acquisitive, while the orcs......

Well, the orcs seemed to code for [in my own terms] a crude European fetishized nightmare of buggabugga black folk. "Lower" races, and all that.

The writing was under pseudonym of "The Cat Lady".

I wrote to the webmaster of the site, to exclaim - "That was an utterly brilliant bit of searing, parodic writing !" Then, I checked out the overall site. It was run by Neo-Nazis. For real. They were serious - they saw all of their racial fantasies writ large on the silver screen, in LOTR. They loved the trillogy.
posted by troutfishing at 10:29 PM on December 30, 2003

Just because HL Mencken was an anti-semite doesn't mean you can't enjoy his writing, trout.

Or : neo-nazis ain't the only people that have picked up on that.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 1:32 AM on December 31, 2003

stavros - I love Tolkien's fantasy. It just hadn't occured to me that, where I saw a deeply nuanced Christian morality tale, others - racial supremacists in this case - could draw from that same literature an elaboration of their white supremacist fantasies.

What startled me was the figure-ground reversal whereby, at first I thought I was reading a brilliant parody of a white-supremacist outlook - but then I suddenly discovered I was merely reading a racial supremacist screed written by someone with barely any sense of humour at all. Scary.
posted by troutfishing at 7:38 AM on December 31, 2003

stavros - I love Tolkien's fantasy. It just hadn't occured to me that, where I saw a deeply nuanced Christian morality tale, others - racial supremacists in this case - could draw from that same literature an elaboration of their white supremacist fantasies.

But... all the good guys are pale skinned white men and women, often blond and/or blue-eyed whereas all the bad guys have darker skin and/or often dress in a somewhat African or Middle Eastern style.

White supremecist fantasies aside, this is a pretty obvious and unfortunate characterization of a white/European = good and dark/African/Middle Easter = bad world view. You can take that to be a bad thing if you're not a Nazi or a good thing if you are, but it's clearly there for the taking if you want to use that as a point of criticism.
posted by jennyb at 10:07 AM on December 31, 2003 [1 favorite]

My fave:

6. Finish off every one of Elrond's lines with "Mr. Anderson."

Also made me chuckle:

16. Come to the premiere dressed as Frankenfurter and wander around looking terribly confused.
posted by msacheson at 12:01 PM on December 31, 2003

I actually did #6 at the last showing I atended. People laughed.
posted by Down10 at 12:03 PM on December 31, 2003