The Lord of the Rings marathon

Tonight's marathon is about going back to relive the journey of two great heroes, Frodo Baggins and Samwise The Brave in what is arguably the greatest pop culture phenomenon since the original Star Wars trilogy. Tonight's marathon is completely dedicated to the majesty and grand epic scope of The Lord of the Rings.

    The Fellowship of the Ring 2001, The Two Towers 2002, and Return of the King 2003

Lord of the Rings is a cinematic blessing and a miracle in an era where it's all about style over substance and the overuse of special effects. What Peter Jackson did with these three movies is he combined groundbreaking technology with masterful storytelling, and hiring fairly unknown actors at the time to bring such memorable characters to life like the characters of Frodo, Sam, Gandalf, Gollum, Aragorn, Arwen, Legolas, Gimli, etc. No one could've pulled off Gandalf better than Ian Mckellen did and Elijah Wood was brilliant as Frodo Baggins. He is what Anakin Skywalker should've been in the star wars prequels. Andy Serkis was robbed of an oscar nominaton for Gollum in The Two Towers, he was absolutely stunning. The best cgi character created on film since Yoda in Empire Strikes Back. Sean Astin was remarkable as Sam and gave probably the best performance in Return of the King. He is what great characters are all about. It will always be argued on whether A Beautiful Mind and Chicago deserved the Oscars for best picture over Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers. In my humble opinion, they didn't but that's not to say those movies weren't good. They just didn't have the technological breakthrough and the emotional punch in the story that these movies had. The best was definitely Return of the King followed by The Two Towers and Fellowship of the Ring. This was the rare trilogy where each film got better as they went and broke the curse of the second film being the best one and the third being the weakest link.

Lord of the Rings will always remain a purified trilogy which rarely had any flaws and didn't abuse it's tools of film-making such as overusing special effects like the new Hobbit trilogy has successfully fallen victim to. When generations pass, people will look back and realize how great these films were for their time.