There’s Always One.

In the interests of equal time, a dissenting opinion on RotK: “The final entry in the ‘Lord of the Rings’ trilogy reveals once more that what the chick flick is to men, this trilogy is to women…The well-calculated hype and exaggerated praise…has obscured what the series really is: an FX extravaganza tailored to an adolescent male’s fear of sentiment and love of high-tech wizardry…Who would have thought that Peter Jackson would direct such soulless films?” Sigh…I figured somebody would write a piece like this, but I didn’t expect it to show up in the Times, of all places. Just goes to show, there’s no accounting for taste. Update: Stephanie Zacharek responds.

6 thoughts on “There’s Always One.”

  1. All my female friends have seen and love the film/trilogy, so are we just men in disguise then?

    I mean, really: “The characterizations are so haphazard that the most touching figure is not the heroic hobbit Frodo or even Aragorn… It is Frodo’s sidekick, Sam, who will literally follow Frodo into fire.”

    It was hard to take anything she said seriously after reading that. Sam and his devotion to Frodo has always been the heart and soul of the story, be it book or movie.

  2. “Fear of sentiment.” That’s telling. This is a woman who reads Oprah books, if she reads at all, I betcha, and goes to see everything with Renee Zellwegger. Forsooth! to judge a movie by its “soul” (read “number of romantic subplots”) and the conventional studliness of its leads!

    I should apply for her job. If she’s qualified to review movies for the New York Times — as you say, “of all places”, then any monkey could do it. Goodness knows I’d like to earn the big bucks!

    Lovely link. I like to get all steamy and indignant over my morning brew.

  3. Interesting comment by Lotta because when I finished read the the trilogy (only recently) my comment was that it was not the story of Frodo, but of Sam.

    I can’t wait until the 25th when I will park my ass at the Uptown and watch the installment of the trilogy that I have looked forward to most.

  4. “Yet true emotions are still hard to find…” Grrr… and “or as those of us with our priorities straight like to think of it, ‘The Return of Viggo'”. If she couldn’t follow the plot or find merit in anything but Viggo, then she is both callous and simple. Fine. However, she shouldn’t turn her own backward opinion into a gender-based generalization, much less in the Times.

  5. “All my female friends have seen and love the film/trilogy, so are we just men in disguise then?”

    My thoughts exactly, Lotta! In fact, at the showing I went to, the people bawling their eyes out were mostly men.

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