Explaining "The Lord of the Rings" in Fifteen Seconds

My mother-in-law is in an assisted living place and I visited her yesterday.  The day before they were going to be playing a movie at 3, so I suggested to her that she should go over to the room and watch it.  I figured it would be an older type movie that she would like.

She told me that the movie was "The Lord of the Rings," which I found hard to believe.  It would not be on my list of 100 movies(or 300) to show at an assisted living place.  So I asked her what it was about and she said, "there was a village with a lot of kids and a very old man who rode in on a carriage and a guy with a long, white beard." The white beard tipped me off that it had to be "The Lord of the Rings."  She only watched about ten minutes which was probably a good thing.  I don't think there's any way she would have enjoyed it.

I had to tell her what the movie was about, so I gave he condensed version-about thirty seconds.  I said, "There's this Hobbit who finds this powerful ring that he has to destroy by getting it to a mountain and throwing it into the fire inside.  If he doesn't destroy it, the evil guy will get it and destroy mankind and rule the world." 

I skipped the other seven or eight hours of the trilogy. I'll save that for another day-not.