Personally, I didn't mind Sauron appearing at the start of the first film at all (although I am glad Jackson refrained from having him take shape again and battle Aragorn in ROTK -- that would've been a collosal mistake). But I think showing Sauron in the opening prologue of The Fellowship of the Ring really had to be done from a cinematic perspective. The scene works well to quickly communicate to the audience not only how formidable Sauron is in the best possible cinematic way (i.e. show us, don't tell us), but it also communicates things like how dreadful the War of the Last Alliance was, how Narsil got broken, that Elrond -- and therefore all Elves -- are immortal, and how Isildur ended up with the Ring and how quickly it can corrupt the hearts of mortal men.

I also didn't mind how Sauron looked in the film. Maybe it was because I was such a Star Wars nut back when I first encountered Tolkien's Middle-earth, but on some level I think I always imagined Sauron as some big Darth Vader type dude.

I re-read the chapter "The Old Forest" last night. Tolkien refers to a Hobbit legend that the trees there are somehow alive or awake, and hostile to outsiders. Certainly the trees seem to conspire to thwart the Hobbits' desired passage through the Old Forest, instead driving them southwards towards the Withywindle river where they encounter Old Man Willow. And clearly Old Man Willow is definitely alive, since he attacks the four Hobbits.

So, I got to wondering, do we think (or has it ever been confirmed) that some of the trees in the Old Forest are Huorns -- Old Man Willow especially?

That's one of the reasons I've always thought the Entwives were in the Shire, or atleast once roamed there as the trees of the old forest were, or once were, the Entwives flock.

I still pronounce Smaug sort of phonetically to this day, I just can't shake the idea that the pronunciation is like smog.

That's totally how I pronounce Celeborn too.

Nope; the only appendix we had originally at the end of LoTR was The Tale of Aragorn and Arwen; the rest of the material from the appendices was published separately (and, I suspect, later and with a lower print run) in a more expensive format. That's where I eventually learned that all Cs and Gs were hard in the Elvish languages. (I must admit that Gil-Gallad sound much better than Gilles Gallad!)

That's also where I learned that Merry's real name was Kalimac, and Sam's was Banazîr... an idea that I thought was downright silly back then. Since this is a work of fiction, why not give the characters their "real" name right from the start? I've since revised that opinion, seeing how Tolkien really wanted to drive our willing suspension of disbelief in his world building, and having "modern" names actually be based on the translation of their meaning in the original languages.