Weeknotes 2022.35: Back to 2001 it is (except politics)

I went into town to get some film developed yesterday, and then I saw the new LORD OF THE RINGS. It’s like we’re back in 2001. Except in terms of politics, which seems determined to send us into a megamix of the worst of the 60s to the 90s, but I’ll talk about that in another post.

Some backstory: a family member had an old Minolta X-300 they didn’t use any more, and gave it to me. I managed to tear two rolls of film in it before realising there was a separate catch you were supposed to press before rewinding it. I’ve now fixed this self-inflicted problem.

Film, and getting it developed, is bloody expensive these days. A local lab charged me £26 to develop and scan two black-and-white reels within 7 working days—I guess we’ll see at the end if it’s worth it or not. (One of those was the torn reel, I guess we’ll see if anything comes off it.) You can get better deals if you post orders in, but still—bloody hell. I guess this is what happens when an analogue medium becomes trendy again.

THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE RINGS OF POWER episodes 1 and 2 were good fun, and I say this as a dyed-in-the-wool Tolkien nerd from a family of Tolkien nerds. True, it’s stylistically different to the films (which I also love) but I do think the speech patterns of the elves and the stagier, more flowery dialogue feels closer to the mouthfeel of Tolkien’s books while remaining accessible. I really enjoyed Lenny Henry as a proto-Hobbit elder and Morfydd Clark's Galadriel with a thousand yard stare. I know who I think [REDACTED] is and my assessment remains unchanged after watching episode 2.

(The price tag for the series, and the funding coming from Jeff Bezos’s business empire built on the exploitation of the poor, remains obscene.)

To set the mood music for the coming autumn and the Rings series, the skies were bold at sunset this week.