You know, I would have paid attention to her argument, but then she went on to claim that the 2002 Count of Monte Cristo film was better than the book because less sexist (!).

While I'm squawking, she missed the entire point of much of the book. One bit, of course, is that this is a book where the women do have agency -- even the Greek slave Haydee, arguably the most questionable woman in the book from a feminist perspective, has her moment where she gets to take down her enemy. Two of the women come to terrible ends not because they are women, but because they are not very good people. And they are in the book because two of the four original bad guys married them. I don't think we're supposed to be surprised thatD Danglars and Villefort would end up marrying women of questionable morality-- well, that's an understatement with Madame de Villefort. And I'm pretty sure in the end Madame Danglars will be just fine; as her lover notes, she's not dead and has plenty of money and if the book teaches us anything, it's that as long as you have money, you can always reinvent yourself.

So, grr. Sorry for the rant.

Please don't be. Loved it.

More than one, if you read the comments.

Still, truth is truth, and people like what they like. I'm amazed at people who find Tolkien's prose difficult, and I want to impose E.R. Edison on them.

At least one person found the movie to be a pathway into the book.

sartorias linked to an interesting post on how Terry Brooks's great triumph was translating Tolkien's difficult High Classical into Bestseller.

I'm supposed to be this great hater of the LOTR movies, but it doesn't bother me at all if people like them, or even if they like them better than the book, so long as they realize, as this writer goes to great pains to emphasize, that this is their personal taste. It's ones who declare that the book is inherently boring and tedious, and that Jackson rescued it from obscurity, who are only making fools of themselves.

Actually her comments on the book are very interesting, and her reasons for preferring The Hobbit to LOTR are exactly the reasons that other people have told me they prefer LOTR to The Hobbit, so it takes all kinds.

Each to their own, David: Tolkien left me cold, but Ann read the trilogy at least once every year. I somehow managed to miss The Hobbit at my local cinema, something I certainly wouldn't have done if she was still around.

Well, I was never able to get past the first page of LotR, but I did manage to sit through all nine hours of the movies.