Actually funny! [b:The Lord of the Rings|34|The Fellowship of the Ring (The Lord of the Rings, Part 1)|J.R.R. Tolkien|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1156043001s/34.jpg|3204327] trilogy was the best by far. ( )

I've long been a fan of the original Movies in Fifteen Minutes blog, as well as Cleolinda's writing in general, so I sort of expected to enjoy this. That said, I was giggling almost nonstop through this book. I don't know how much I would have appreciated had I not seen all the films being condensed, but now I want to go back and re-watch all these movies just so I can then go back and appreciate the m15m versions all the more. I loved the endless footnotes and the jokes that repeated through multiple films. And like most books I really enjoyed, I have basically nothing to say about it. Pick up a copy if you can find one - it's a gem. ( )

If you haven’t heard of Cleolinda Jones, do yourself a favor and check out the Movies in Fifteen Minutes sitehref>. (I recommend all four parts of the Twilight Saga, personally.) This collection is no exception to her sharp wit and eye for comedy, covering ten movies between 1993-2003. My only issue is that the print version isn’t as fully linkomatic as the online parodies, so some of the jokes fly over my head. However, this collection is still one of the funniest things I have ever read. ( )

THE READER: Is late to the party

CLEOLINDA JONES: Is funny like a fox

THE READER: Will stop this at once because it’s obvious and annoying

It’s been a long, long time since I told myself ‘hey, I really must get a copy of M15M so that I can read the first Harry Potter film parody and whatallever else she’s got hidden away for paying eyes only *mutter*'. Then the book sort of fell off my reading radar. Okay, I don’t have one of those. I forgot. But when I remembered again I was right on it. And, even though it had waited around for a long time for me to get to it, it was still eye-scrinchingly funny. So, let this be a lesson to you; if you’ve forgotten to buy this book, GET ON IT.

[disclosure: for some odd reason, these things come across as very slightly more hilarious online. Maybe it’s the screencaps and links, maybe it’s the 600+ commenting fans all leaving ‘BWAHAHAHA’ messages, making it a sort of communal movie-lovers love-in, but I find it helps to hum like a gently overheating CPU while reading].

[disclosure the second: despite the sub-title ‘for people who can’t be bothered’, these things are also very slightly more hilarious if you’ve seen the films. Even once, ages ago. So you might want to check the index and weigh your ratio of seen/unseen blockbusters. Or not]. ( )

I’m rather fond of online-to-real-life publishing successes such as two of those previously featured in this column. Sharing origins with Everything Matters and RealLivePreacher.com, Movies in Fifteen Minutes (M15M) hails from one user on LiveJournal.com (LJ), who came back from watching Van Helsing and wrote an entry that somehow became a 2500-word parody.

Her friends loved it, linked to it in their own LJs and emailed it to their friends. This LJ user, who goes by the name Cleolinda Jones, saw Troy the following week and “Troy in Fifteen Minutes” followed.

Through the very viral nature of the online community, the M15M phenomena hit nearly every corner of the Internet and Jones was approached for book deal.

This resulting tome, aptly subtitled “Hollywood Blockbusters for people who can’t be bothered”, contain the parodies of 10 movies (12, if you want to count all LotR movies individually) - Braveheart, Gladiator, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, Independence Day, Jurassic Park, The Matrix, Spider-Man, Star Wars II, Titanic and of course, all three Lord of the Rings… which may run a little over 15 minutes.

To the uninitiated, the book looks like a collection of bizarre scripts at first glance. If you’ve never ventured into that side of the internet chat language, I have no room to explain the lingo to you here.

But once you get into it, you realize that Jones has it nailed. Take a movie, whit it down to its barest minimum and rewrite the script with appropriate amounts of irreverence, sarcasm and wit. Instant quotables.

Now she doesn’t hate the movies here. In her Acknowledgements in front of the book, she states that this book is for everyone who loves movies so much they can laugh at them anyway. Laugh they did.

Picture this: Harry Potter asking a muggle porter how to get to Platform Nine and Three-Quarters, and the porter retorting with, “God, I hate this time of the year.”

There were jokes that reoccurred throughout the chapter, like Legolas and his habit of staring the obvious. There were jokes that crossed over into other movies, like Darth Saruman. There are section titles like “The Cliff of Manly Weeping” in the Fellowship of the Rings chapter (I’ll leave you to guess what scene that is!).

Van Helsing, Troy, Phantom of the Opera and a slew of other M15M parodies do not appear in the print version. Thanks to the fact that M15M was first seen on the Internet, you can still read them at http://community.livejournal.com/m15m if you poke around a little for them.

Read it, laugh and share it with a friend. And no, you can’t borrow my book.

(2006)