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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 539142" data-attributes="member: 4937">Henry: I don't take that as a slam at all.  I have that experience all the time.  I am a perfectionist and am rightly at times accused of being hypercritical.   Among my geek friends, the general rule is if 'Celebrim' says the X is ok, then its good.  If 'Celebrim' says that X is 'good', then you should stop what you are doing and immediately go see or do X.Someone asked me to find a better fantasy movie.  I do consider Star Wars a fantasy movie, and I would have to propose Star Wars.  I think ,however, that alot of the reason that LotR is being so well recieved is not because it is particularly well done, but because there is a huge population out there that is literally starving for a good epic fantasy movie and will cling to anything that comes close to satisfying that need.I also think that the critics are afraid to criticize the movies openly for fear of being lumped with the critics that now sound so foolish for snidely dismissing Tolkien's books and the Star Wars movies as juvenelia simply because they were fantasy.   Would you want to take the risk of being the only critic who just doesn't 'get it', especially when there are many things you can justifiably praise - the massive scale, the attention to detail, the wonderful costuming with the riders of rohan, etc.I too found Gladiator to be highly overrated (though I happen to love the costuming), and Braveheart even more so (though I liked some of the battle footage).  The comparison to the two was meant to be a slam.  That these two cheesy movies with all thier writing flaws would be so well recieved only reinforces my opinion that people really desparately want a good rousing swords epic.It would be great if PJ had managed to make an approachable version of LotR for the masses.  That would have been a termendous accomplishment.  I do think it is possible, but the time has not yet come.  Unfortunately, PJ wasn't able to achieve this lofty goal.  The best the movies can come to explaining why the fans of the books consider them to be so excellent is by attempting to explain just how and why they books have been so influential.</blockquote>

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