I may be crazy, but it's worth $60

Much to my surprise, there is yet another version of Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings. Howard Shore has released:The Fellowship of the Ring - The Complete Soundtrack.

This is truly a complete soundtrack - not just excerpts from the theatrical release, but all three hours of music that was composed for the film. I find this incredibly amazing, when the extended version of the movie ran just shy of three and a half hours. Which, if my math is correct, means that there was only twenty minutes in the entire movie without music.

One of the things that I loved about the entire soundtrack for the LoTR trilogy is the use of musical oxymorons to heighten the emotional impact of the story. A great example of this is the music for the Arwen's race against the Nazgûl ("Flight to the Ford" in the original soundtrack release, now part of "Give up the Halfling"). The scene is clearly very tense and action-filled, but the music is gentle and soaring. This juxtaposition only heightens our horror of what would happen if the Black Riders caught Arwen and Frodo.

I remember thinking, when I first saw the extended version of the entire Lord of the Rings that it was a real pity that some of the best parts of a truly excellent soundtrack were not included on the released CD - the dirge that Eowyn sings at her brother's funeral in The Two Towers, and the song that accompanied the scene, The Healing of Eowyn, in The Return of the King (come to think of it, a great many of Eowyn's scenes were cut from the theatrical releases - the Dream, her conversation with Aragorn on the way to Helm's Deep, a significant part of her battle scenes on the Fields of Pelennor). Now, I'll just have to wait about two years for the rest of the music - a recent Newsday article noted that the complete soundtracks for the other two movies will be available by the end of 2007.

It is amazing how much I've spent on these movies - $27 total for movie tickets, $20 for the theatrical release DVD of FoTR, $20 for the theatrical release DVD of The Return of The King (I didn't get the one for The Two Towers), $9.99 for the downloaded version of the soundtrack to RoTK from iTunes, $50 for the boxed set of the three theatrical release soundtracks, $75 for the boxed set of the platinum versions of the films, and now $60 for the FoTR complete sound track. That's $262 without including the $120 I will spend for the other two complete soundtracks to be released.

What am I, NUTS????????