2.47 - THE TWO TOWERS (2002) & Loyalty

Our concluding franchise continues, with the film that’s a bit of a ‘difficult second album’. We get onto a theme much earlier, talking about who is loyal to whom, why the bad guys seem particularly unnatural, and links with other franchises: from K.K. Rowling to Ridley Scott.

This Week’s Media
MARS (2016—): André Bormanis, Jihae, Alberto Ammann
THE SECRET LIFE OF WALTER MITTY (2013): Ben Stiller, Kristen Wiig, Shirley MacLaine
WONDER WOMAN (2017): Patty Jenkins, Gal Gadot, Chris Pine

Recommendations
THE THIN RED LINE (1998): Terrence Malick, Jim Caviezel, Sean Penn
CHILD’S PLAY (1988): Tom Holland, Catherine Hicks, Chris Sarandon
THE AVIATOR (2004): Martin Scorsese, Leonardo DiCaprio, Cate Blanchett
KING KONG (2005): Peter Jackson, Naomi Watts, Jack Black

Footnotes
Not much in the way of footnotes this week, though trawling the Wikipedia article for TTT is an enjoyable way to waste quarter of an hour. Should you want more detail, the ‘Tolkien Gateway’ can help. On a different note, referring back to ’This Week’s Media', here are a few glowing features on WONDER WOMAN: 1, 2, and 3. And here’s one of those ‘surprising information’ articles (although, if you’ve seen the film, several of the points aren’t really that surprising…). Finally, given all this, it’s fitting that this is the week that we have the highest number of women in our list of directors/actors (above); at 8 out of 21, though (38%), it’s still not amazing...