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One of your major complaints about "The Fellowship of the Ring" is "There are too many sequences in which the Hobbits flee from monsters when one or two chases would do. There are too many tremendous battles . . . too much of the movie is our band of heroes plodding through the woods,across streams, and through yawning fields, only to cross more woods, more streams, and more fields." Another of your complaints was "I'm tempted to award 'Fellowship' another half-star . . . but then I am reminded of how it almost became a video game: the characters need to get from Point A to Point B, they fight things along the way, they pick up Power-Ups at Point B and learn they must go on to Point C, where more vicious enemies await, and the process repeats."
Now, I've never read the books either, but isn't it possible that this is how the story goes in the novel? I know you feel that a book and movie that is based on that book should be judged separately from each other, but I feel there are some circumstances where this might not apply. I know that Peter Jackson wanted to make this film as true to the book as possible. It's quite possible that this is what happens in the book and he wants to be true to the book. Tolkien is known for inventing the modern adventure, (I stress modern because other authors like Chaucer with his Canterbury Tales come to mind as precursors to modern adventure tales) which is probably why it feels like a video game at some points. Jackson may have also felt some outside pressure from fans and critics to include these scenes. From what I understand, he actually cut quite a bit out of the movie that will be appearing on the DVD. Most directors, though not all, don't have the means (power, money, respect) to ignore public or corporate pressure about film content like Kubrick did or Lucas does.
I do not believe that the presence of an event, character, thought, opinion, etc. in a book automatically warrants its inclusion in a film based on it. Movies and books may share similar elements but this overlapping is not total (if it were then we would not have separate words for them). Like man and woman, film and literature may be similar but their needs are different; what succeeds in writing may not translate to the screen, and vise versa. We tend to think of films, all films, as novels put to celluloid, because of all of film's myriad ancestors, novels are still the most familiar to us today. But when we take into account film's other parents and grandparents, such as opera, painting, poetry, and ballet (I contend that several portions of "2001: A Space Odyssey" can be considered ballet), we realize that what is good for the page is not always good for the screen.
As for director Peter Jackson being pressured by legions of Ring fans to include every nook and cranny of Tolkien's story--I have always been wary of enthusiasts who feel their tastes should be catered to, as if their twenty dollar purchase of a few paperbacks entitles them to influence the artist. Everyone who reads a book, looks at a painting, hears a poem, etc., has a different interpretation of what he or she hears. Those differences should be cherished. I hope that Jackson's goal was to bring his interpretation of Tolkien's work--as well as the interpretations of his fellow screenwriters--to the screen, and not an amalgamation of the lowest common denominators of the interpretations of a million other readers over the last half-century or, worse yet, what Jackson suspected that LCD to be.
The artist-enthusiast relationship is open to much debate. The artist likes to create what she creates without any external pressure whatsoever, while the enthusiast feels his every whim and desire should be catered to exactly. Both may function under the mistaken notion that "I know what's best for me!" But each cannot exist without the other: with no one to appreciate her art, the artist will be forgotten, and without his artist, the enthusiast has nothing to be enthusiastic about. What we're left with is, as the name suggests, a relationship, and just like any relationship there is give and there is take. Oddly enough, erudite critics like artists who take a lot, who make personal films without much concern for popular pressure, while masscult filmgoers prefer artists who do nothing but give. The romantic parallel here is obvious and may help to explain why "artsy," more personal movies are relatively unpopular.
Artists are usually portrayed as making what they make out of a throbbing internal necessity: I must paint, I must write, I must film, I must create, whether it makes money or not. But if the result is of no use to the consumer, why should he bother to meet the artist's needs by having anything to do with it? We don't want to meet someone else's needs, we would rather just meet our own need to be satisfied (entertained), and not the different, more complex need of actually forming a relationship with this stranger via her images put to film.