Muster the Rohirrim!

It’s time for our first movie review! Or shall I say movies review? As Kelsey mentioned in our Welcome post, our starting point is the Lord of the Rings trilogy. And yes, we watched all three of them in one day. J

To refresh, I’ll run down our respective characters again. Hannah (me) is Samwise Gamgee and Peregrin Took, better known as Sam and Pippin. These are played by Sean Astin and Billy Boyd. Kelsey is Frodo Baggins and Meriadoc Brandybuck (Merry) played by Elijah Wood and Dominic Monaghan. And finally, dear Febbie (Hillary) is Bilbo Baggins and Gollum/Smeagol, played by Ian Holm and Andy Serkis.

Now, an intriguing synopsis of these lovely movies.

The Lord of the Rings is set in the mythical world called Middle Earth. A powerful ring comes into the hands of one Frodo Baggins, a non-adventurous hobbit. He and his friends (Sam, Pippin, and Merry) must embark on a quest to destroy the ring and save Middle Earth. Along the way they join up with a fellowship made up of two men, a wizard, a dwarf, and an elf. Facing perils and war throughout their trek, Frodo must endure the weight of bearing the One Ring and journey further and further into the ranks of evil in order to save the world.

Sounds epic, huh?

Since Febbie’s characters don’t exactly play the largest part in the whole scheme of things, and therefore were left out of my synopsis, I’ll describe them quickly. Bilbo is Frodo’s uncle, and he was the one to pass down the ring to Frodo. Gollum is a creature that owned the ring for most of his life and was corrupted by it. He appears to be helping Frodo and Sam through their quest while he really just wants to regain possession of his precious (that’s the ring).

So, in case you haven’t noticed, The Phalanx is a very obsessive group. We know how to take something and run with it. The Lord of the Rings is no exception. For the weeks following watching these movies, Kelsey and I tried to stick to a hobbit diet. It consists of seven meals a day (breakfast, second breakfast, elevensies, luncheon, afternoon tea, dinner, and supper), and most of the food is fresh produce and grains. So we didn’t gain weight through our “diet,” we made each of our meals smaller.

Unfortunately, we haven’t been able to determine yet how well this diet works, as it is difficult to stick to such frequent eating when one of us is at work all day (Kelsey) and the other, at the time, was sleeping in until noon.

But, eating wasn’t the only activity that was affected by our obsession. Kelsey and I both altered our vocabulary for a bit following the movies. We’ve actually compiled a list of the most interesting words and phrases we picked up from Lord of the Rings. And here they are:

“But you’ve only just arrived!” –for when your friends are leaving your house too soon and you want them to stay.

“Steady on!” –for when your cousin is pushing you and you are on a bar stool and about to fall over.

“Make haste!” or “Show me the meaning of haste!” –for when you want someone to hurry up.

“…from whence it came.” –for when you must return something and you want to sound sophisticated.

“Hearken!” –for when you want people to listen to you.

“I warrant…” –for instances when you would say ‘I think,’ ‘I reckon,’ ‘I suppose,’ etc,…

“Muster the Rohirrim!” –for anything. Anything.

So that is what we got out of Lord of the Rings. We hope you will watch or re-watch the movies now and enjoy them as much as we have. And we shall continue our quest with another movie! J

Welcome!

Hey Everyone! Welcome to our blog J

For starters, let’s introduce ourselves. This blog is written by the Phalanx, which consists of three best friends: Kelsey (that’s me J), Hillary (who is frequently referred to as Febbie) and Hannah. We’re all college students. And our absolute favorite social activity is going to a local bookstore and drinking coffee beverages in the café. And whenever we go, the baristas ask for a name to call when our drinks are ready, but we NEVER use our actual first names. We’ll be characters from books, movies, people we actually know, you name it…but never ourselves. And since we insist on using such false names, we select characters from almost everything we read or watch.

And now a little background about our quest. It’s essentially a bunch of movie reviews that we’re writing. But these aren’t just any old movies that we’re choosing to watch. It all started when I randomly decided to start watching the tv show Lost online. One of my favorite Lost characters (Charlie) is played by Dominic Monaghan, who is also in The Lord of the Rings trilogy. So, naturally, I decided I wanted to watch those movies. I talked to Hannah about it, because she is also a LOTR fan (Febbie is too, but not as much). When we got around to watching the trilogy (in one day, of course), we picked our characters, like always. We wanted to be Merry and Pippin, but Pippin couldn’t exactly pass for a normal name in the café, so we each chose one character with a weird name (Frodo for me and Pippin for Hannah), and one with a normal name (Merry for me and Sam for Hannah). We also thought that Febbie deserved some characters, and we wanted to stick with our theme of hobbits, so she became Bilbo and Gollum (sorry Febs). At work the following week, one of my coworkers, Kyle, told me that Billy Boyd, who plays Pippin, is also in the movie Master and Commander, and that he (Kyle) loves The Goonies, which stars Sean Astin, who plays Sam. And this gave The Phalanx an idea, and thus our quest was born.

Since then, we’ve begun to watch movies starring the actors who play each of the characters that we’ve chosen for ourselves in the previous movie. To further explain, here’s an example chain. From The Lord of The Rings, I am Merry. So we chose X-Men Origins: Wolverine as our movie starring Dominic Monaghan. In that movie, I’m Wolverine, and now we’re going to watch Australia as our Hugh Jackman movie. But that can only happen now that we’ve watched one movie for each of our LOTR characters, and therefore chosen five more characters each to choose movies for. Alright, I hope that’s a sufficient explanation. Here we go!