681 minutes

That would be 11 hours and 21 minutes of special-extendo, Platinum-edition Lord of the Rings goodness.

I bought the Director's cut of the Fellowship of the Ring when it was first released, but realized that I didn't want to watch it until I could watch all three films in all their extended glory. So it sat, unopened, until they finally released the extended edition of the Return of the King last December.

But then it became an issue of finding time to watch them all, because somewhere down the line, I decided that I needed to watch them all consecutively on the same day. Weekends are always busy, and while I didn't have silly things like work getting in the way for me during the week, I still had to make time for my training workouts, not to mention studying and going to class. And the SOOTTAD was still working and had suddenly become significantly (and rather inconveniently) busier, not even counting the hate-my-job-looking-to-escape activity going on around the same time. So we kept putting it off until this week, with her finally done with the old job, and her imminent departure just a few days away.

Our friend V (who is also currently employment-deficient) came over around noon, Doritos and vanilla frappaccinos and the Two Towers* in hand, and we got rolling soon after. We took a brief break at every disc change (each film was split onto two DVDs), ordering pizza at the halfway mark of disc 2 of the Two Towers and ended up finishing a little before 1am this morning.

I'll make no attempt at writing an actual review and just say that I thought the platinum series rocked. I really liked the way it fleshed out a lot of the backstory that was missing from the theatrical releases -- I thought it allowed the story to flow much better. It was also interesting to see how an extra few seconds in a scene could drive home a point about industrialization or war that hadn't been present in the theatrical release, without feeling out of place.

Highly recommended if you've got a free half-day in your calendar.

No foolin'.

* A minor glitch in our nefarious plan -- our copy of the Two Towers was nowhere to be found. Our only guess is that we loaned it to somebody, but at this point, we haven't a clue as to who we lent it to. Fortunately, V had his own copy, so we were good to go.