My favorite parts of Lord of the Rings used to be parts where someone died bravely. You know, Gandalf standing off the Balrog, Boromir blowing the horn like Roland as he went down, even the fight between Eowyn and the Witch-King. (Okay, so she doesn't die, but it's a close thing - and I still like the version in my head a lot more than I like the Peter Jackson version.) There's Moria, with its cavernous intersecting stairs and long drops into nothing, the ultimate dungeon crawl with thousands of rooms. Oh, and especially the Mouth of Sauron. That guy was a perfect villain - evil guy in awesome armor on a horse who'd been committed to his cause so long that he'd lost his identity altogether. I never used to "get" the Ents - I thought they were boring and couldn't wait to get back to wholesome swashbuckling fights.
Now? I "get" the Ents. I'm okay with JRRT's tendency to veer off into long discussions of the scenery while leaving the characters relatively undescribed. And my favorite scene didn't get into the movies - the Fellowship is paddling down the river when a flock of black swans flies overhead. I think this may be part of getting older.
I mention this because I've been hitting a similar realization regarding Episode IV; A New Hope. Like a lot of people it made a huge impact on me as a kid. That thing's full of cool visuals coupled with fantastic music, from the Jawas popping up behind the rocks to the Battle of Yavin, but the crowning glory of the whole darn movie has to be the Cantina scene - a whole roomful of weird creatures each with their own background and motivation!
Or was. Now that I'm older I find myself seriously liking the "Binary Sunset" sequence, where he's staring off into the distance, just quietly imagining something, anything with more of a future than being stuck on freaking Tatooine.
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