I've tried to avoid joining in the fray, but ... I ... can't ... resist ... the ... overwhelming ... power... drawing me ...

Anyway, I've read the books and enjoyed them and have respect for Tolkein as a scholar and a writer. Having said that, I've enjoyed the movies immensely, too. They're just different things.

I went to Gallaudet College, a 4-year liberal-arts school for the deaf in Washington, and when I wrote papers for classes, I wrote them in the best English I could. But when I had to get up and read those papers to the class, I would never sign what I had written (as most students did); instead, I would re-conceive of them in American Sign Language and sign that, which meant that the two versions were not very like each other--yet I considered them to be the same paper. In the same way, movies are too different from books to expect to see a book filmed. Jackson's achievment here was to take the Ring material and from them create some dazzling films.

Not that the movies are consistently good. As others have pointed out, the casting of Frodo was a mistake (and I like Elijah Wood in other roles he's been in). (It could've been worse--they might've picked Marlon Brando as Gandalf....) I wasn't as bothered by the "Let's hunt some orc" as others were--to me, it's the dwarf-tossing jokes that were inexcusable. (BTW, the "let's hunt" line was at the end of the first movie, not the second.)

I see nothing wrong with the addition and simplification of dialogue. The death scene of Boromir was nothing like the book at all, but much better; the dialog between Aragorn and Boromir moved me very much. The addition of a song sung by Merry during the last cavalry charge raised the hair on my arms. The scene with the hobbits in the tavern at the end, as Animaterra points out, covers so much emotional ground. So I think that most if not all of Jackson's choices were really good ones.

must... stop ... driveling ...
now