Lots of e-mails along these lines–beats the kids watching MTV during homework:
…I attended a midnight showing of The Return of The King last night/this morning, taking my 15 year old daughter dressed in her Arwen attire. Observations: Full house, the show sold out with advance sale tickets. I bought ours over a week ago. Good, clean crowd. Lot of bookish kids and young adults. A few early teens with parental supervision, the majority were between 16 and 22, I think. Very few old, mid-40s geezers such as myself. I may have been the oldest person in the crowd. Lots of the kids doing homework and studying while on line as it’s finals week in the schools here. A significant number wearing LOTR costume including a group of about 15, each dressed as a different principle character…quite impressive! Basically it was a theater lobby full of apparently studious and intelligent students out to have a good time with a thought provoking movie. And violating all kinds of curfews (with their parents permission in most cases).
The movie itself is outstanding. Decent adjectives fail me this morning on only 3 and a half hours of sleep. I agree with Pearce that it is not true to the book in a number of places, but that, in the end, that matters little. “The Return of the King” is a master work, and its timeliness (re: Beard and Rhys-Davies) is nothing short of miraculous. We’ll probably see it a couple of times more during the holidays. Maybe my daughter and I will take the rest of the family, maybe not. We had a magical time together early this morning….