Weird Movie Connections

I've been sick since getting home. The cold I picked up over Christmas seems to have slid into being the flu (aches, exhaustion), so I stayed home from work on Friday. I'm actually starting to feel a little better today.

Anyway, when I get sick, I tend to watch movies, as my concentration isn't generally good enough to read books. I'm not sure if this makes any sense or not, but as I was watching Witness yesterday, I found some weird connections between it and the Lord of the Rings movies.

True, there's the obvious connection - Viggo is in both. He plays Moses Hochleitner, Daniel's (Alexander Gudonov) brother. He has few lines (except for part of the "horse with one ball" story after the funeral and "hello" at the beginning of the barn-raising), is always smiling and wears a very light blue shirt. If you want to spot him, you see him most of all in the barn-raising sequence - he's the first person Daniel introduces to John Book.

Now that's a tad tenuous, so there are more odd little connections. There's little Lukas Haas, a fine actor a few years older than Elijah Wood. The sensative little boy roles Lukas got in the early-mid '80s, Elijah got in the early '90s. They even look quite a bit alike. If you check out a current picture of him in IMDB, you'll see that Lukas still has a hobbit-like face.

If some visionary director had made LOTR in the '80s, you can see Harrison Ford would have been a natural for Strider. Luckily, this didn't happen; while I like Harrison, and while he's a pretty good actor, I'm not sure he would have been up to it.

Finally, there's the "stranger in a strange land" theme, which is pretty obvious in both films.