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Mortensen Defends Bush Criticism The Lord Of The Rings star Viggo Mortensen refuses to apologize for his recent attack on President George W. Bush - maintaining the political leader is a "beast." The outspoken actor hit out at Bush after his controversial handling of Hurricane Katrina, but also disagrees with the President's Iraq policies, gossip site The Scoop reports. He fumes, "I'm not anti-Bush; I'm anti-Bush behavior. In other words, I'm against cheating, greed, cruelty, racism, imperialism, religious fundamentalism, treason, and the seemingly limitless capacity for hypocrisy shown by Bush and his administration. Cindy Sheehan (peace activist whose son was...

Viggo Mortensen isn't backing off his stinging critique of George W. Bush.The Lord of the Rings hottie took some heat from criticizing some of the president's policies, and in a recent interview Mortensen was unrepentant.'Im not anti-Bush, I'm anti Bush behavior,' Mortensen told Progressive Magazine. 'In other words, I'm against cheating, greed, cruelty, racism, imperialism, religious fundamentalism, treason, and the seemingly limitless capacity for hypocrisy shown by the Bush Adminsitration.'Mortensen also blasted the adminsitrations handing of Hurrican Katrina and discussed why he supported anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan.'Cindy Sheehan and how badly Katrina was bungled are two shots to the heart,'...

I just saw the Chronicles of Narnia. I have only one thing to say: don't listen to the media critics!!! It is easily one of the best fantasy/mythology movies that I've ever seen. I expected to have wasted good money on a ticket, but it actually turned out to be a clean and decent movie that still managed to be extremely entertaining. I would have to say that this movie is better than LOTR Fellowship and Two towers.

That’s what Barbara Nicolosi, who teaches Christians the art of screenwriting, told Godspy, an online magazine, in a recent interview. “A Christian project saved the global box office from 2001 to 2003 with Tolkien’s trilogy, The Lord of the Rings. Then another Christian project, The Passion of the Christ, saved the global cineplexes in 2004. And yet another Christian story is going to save the entertainment industry this year with C.S. Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.” That’s the movie that opens Dec. 9 and is based on the novel by Christian apologist C.S. Lewis, the 20th-century Anglican...

To judge from the way the weekend's box office is breathlessly reported in the news bulletins on Monday morning, more people seem to be interested in movie grosses than in the movies. Evidently, Hollywood's now recovered from this summer's all-time record "box office slump." Or at any rate news stories about the box office slump have themselves slumped. In a breathless dispatch on the opening weekend of ''Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire,'' the Associated Press reported that ''the latest Potter movie led a lineup that helped reverse the Hollywood box-office slump." I wouldn't say the boy wizard and...

• This essay is an excerpt from Peter J. Kreeft's new book, The Philosophy of Tolkien: The Worldview Behind The Lord of the Ring. Can any one man incarnate every truth and virtue? Throughout the New Testament we find a shocking simplicity: Christ does not merely teach the truth, He is the truth; He does not merely show us the way, He is the way; He does not merely give us eternal life, He is that life. He does not merely teach or purchase our wisdom, our righteousness and sanctification and redemption, but "God made [Him] our wisdom, our righteousness...

Is anyone else watching this hollywierdo make a complete ass of himself? Probably the most ignorant psuedo-intellectual lib I've ever seen.

Correction AppendedCRAWFORD, Tex., Aug. 12 - This is not the place to expect a sighting of Viggo Mortensen, the star of "The Lord of the Rings." Or at least it wasn't when President Bush began his annual vacation here earlier this month.But something has happened to Crawford over the last week. The sleepy summer air has been punctured by a blast of antiwar energy, with carloads of activists appearing every afternoon to join a vigil begun by the mother of a soldier who died in Iraq. Flowers are delivered by the dozen at Camp Casey, as the muddy outpost established...

The always eminent writer and historian Victor Davis Hanson compares modern Europe to the Middle Earth of J.R.R. Tolkien’s epic “The Lord of the Rings”, recently turned into one of the most successful movie trilogies in history by New Zealand director Peter Jackson. Like the inhabitants of Tolkien’s imaginary world, Europeans are accustomed to living in peace and prosperity. But their sedate way of life is starting to come under threat, although not all of them have noticed it yet. The shadow of an ancient foe is rising in the East, an enemy that has not threatened us for so...

J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings triology is about the epic struggle of "the free folk of the West" to ward off and defeat the temptations and the enemies that would destroy them. As such, the movie version has had a powerful cultural resonance for the free folk undergoing the war on terrorism. Now all three movies are available in extended DVD versions, forming a single 12-hour saga that sheds light on one of the strangest phenomena of our current war: the alliance between our left-wing intellectual establishment and radical Islam. In Tolkien's epic, all of Middle Earth is under...

J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings triology is about the epic struggle of "the free folk of the West" to ward off and defeat the temptations and the enemies that would destroy them. As such, the movie version has had a powerful cultural resonance for the free folk undergoing the war on terrorism. Now all three movies are available in extended DVD versions, forming a single 12-hour saga that sheds light on one of the strangest phenomena of our current war: the alliance between our left-wing intellectual establishment and radical Islam. In Tolkien's epic, all of Middle Earth is under...

The Real Atrocity in Tolkien's Middle Earth By Jeff Alexander and Tom BissellMcSweeney's Internet Tendency | January 7, 2005Part I: Chomsky: The film opens with Galadriel speaking. "The world has changed," she tells us, "I can feel it in the water." She's actually stealing a line from the non-human Treebeard. He says this to Merry and Pippin in The Two Towers, the novel. Already we can see who is going to be privileged by this narrative and who is not. Zinn: Of course. "The world has changed." I would argue that the main thing one learns when one watches this...

For education and discussion only. Not for commercial use. Peter Jackson´s JRR Tolkien-inspired film trilogy Lord of the Rings features enormous eagles swooping down to rescue Sam and Frodo from a desolate New Zealand landscape masquerading as Mordor. The image of giant eagles flying around New Zealand, while fanciful, is not so far-fetched as it might appear. New genetic data published in the freely-available online journal PLoS Biology this week from researchers at Oxford and Canterbury Universities shed new light on the evolution of the extinct giant eagle that once ruled the skies in New Zealand. Before human settlement 700...

Pied Piper Pitt, aka William RIVERS Pitt, after having his promise of something WONDERFUL happening on Monday (after the snow dog ate his homework last week) go up in smoke, is now trying to change the subject and cheer on the DUmmies with a dopey pep talk as we can see in this Dummie THREAD titled, “This is a great time to be alive.” This posting follows on the heels of a dopey story that Pied Piper Pitt posted yesterday about some guy who is a milkman who tries to be a dogcatcher (or was it the other way...

With the release this week of the Extended Edition DVD of Return of the King, here are some LOTR resources: A Triumphant Return http://www.pfm.org/Content/ContentGroups/BreakPoint/BreakPoint_Commentaries/20031/December_2003/A_Triumphant_Return.htm In J. R. R. Tolkien's Sanctifying Myth: Understanding Middle-earth http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1882926846/terraspacedock J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis, a Legendary Friendship http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2003/134/52.0.html Myth Meets Real Life http://www.pfm.org/Content/ContentGroups/BreakPoint/BreakPoint_Commentaries/20031/December_2003/Myth_Meets_Real_Life.htm Escape into Reality http://www.pfm.org/Content/ContentGroups/BreakPoint/BreakPoint_Commentaries/20031/December_2003/Escape_into_Reality.htm Saint J. R. R. the Evangelist http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2003/110/54.0.html Tolkien, Transformer of Culture http://www.pfm.org/Content/ContentGroups/BreakPoint/Columns/At_the_Movies/200212/Tolkien__Transformer_of_Culture.htm

Gollum gets a health check LONDON (Reuters) - Gollum, the creepy character in "Lord of the Rings" with the dual personality and eerie voice, suffered from a schizoid personality disorder, according to a group of medical students. Thirty students at University College London were asked to explain the odd behaviour the character displayed in the films based on the J.R.R. Tolkien trilogy. The students noted his solitary habits, spiteful behaviour, odd interests, difficulty in forming friendships, emotional changeability, nervousness and paranoia. "He fulfils seven of the nine criteria for schizoid personality disorder, and, if we must label Gollum's problems, we...

Poor diet, inherited disease made Gollum mad Fri Dec 17, 1:50 PM ET Offbeat - AFP PARIS (AFP) - The "Lord of the Rings" character Gollum was paranoid and had a split personality but this was because he probably suffered from vitamin deficiency, anaemia, hyperthyroidism and a metabolic disease called porphyria. That's the conclusion of a group of British doctors who sift through Gollum's symptoms in a tongue-in-cheek diagnosis published this Saturday in the British Medical Journal (BMJ). "Gollum's diet is extremely limited, consisting only of raw fish. Vitamin B-12 deficiency may cause irritability, delusions and paranoia," they say. "His...

For those who've seen the Extended Edition of the final movie of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, "The Return of the King."If you haven't seen it and just want to mention how superior you are to everyone else and, though you've never created anything in your life that anyone would want to see, you're sure you'd have done a better job and the pictures are total irredeemable trash... please start your own thread with that as the title.Otherwise, this is the place to discuss what you loved, what you loathed, what you found baffling, and basically other of the...

New Line Entertainment released the definitive "Extended Edition" of The Return Of The King . Peter Jackson worked over a year to bring this out for the fans. New and extended scenes have brought the total running length to over 200 minutes. Plus extras on the supplemental discs.