Boviosity!

Roger Ebert, on Return Of The King:

It is a melancholy fact that while the visionaries of a generation ago, like Coppola with "Apocalypse Now," tried frankly to make films of great consequence, an equally ambitious director like Peter Jackson is aiming more for popular success. The epic fantasy has displaced real contemporary concerns, and audiences are much more interested in Middle Earth than in the world they inhabit.

Wow, a sociologist AND a fat puling hack film critic! Who knew?

I suppose when a movie doesn't support your particular worldview, it must be airily dismissed as "archetypes" lacking in "psychological depth." You keep saying that movies aren't about what they're about, they're about how they're about what they're about. I've always admired that stance and I guess it's true, unless they're about the reality of Good and Evil and the need for Good to sacrifice some of its easy complacency when Evil is determined to kill it. Then they just need to be dismissed as "for adolescents (of all ages)."

Even adolescents know a shite-spewing poser when they see one, Rog, and I'm looking at one right now. If you'd had the ring, you'd still be using it to sneak through Bill Clinton's secret service coterie and give him big sweaty bear hugs...right up until you got run through with a rusty Nazgul sword, of course.