Richard Fernandez asks a question not many have before — regarding a topic that, once broached, couldn't help but make us curious. Just what type of biplane, Fernandez wonders, encircled and doomed King Kong in American cinema's essential tableau? He has two guesses: the Boeing F4B-4 and the Curtiss O-1 Falcon.

Examining the famous still (above, with inset detail), I would say the planes can't be F4B-4s for three reasons. First, the planes in the still have four vertical struts between the wings, and the F4B-4 has only two. Second, the F4B-4's fuselage is stubbier than those of the film planes' and the former contains a hump behind the cockpit that the latter lack. Third, the pictured wheel struts are triangularly arranged, with oblique struts fore and aft, whereas the F4B-4's assembly lacks a fore oblique.

The Curtiss is a closer match, but has only one pair of wing struts and central wheel struts that are oblique to the fuselage — not perpendicular, as in the film still.

One interwar plane in particular possesses the ellipsoidal nose, triangular wheel struts and number of wing struts of the depicted planes: the Packard Le Pere LUSAC-11.

I sent my conjecture along; Richard responded, thanking me, and confirming that the identity has him "stumped." One commenter on his weblog insists that the instrument tipping man versus nature in our favor is the F4B-4, and has promised to write an evidentiary book.

Are we all wrong? All right? Perhaps the squadron is mixed.

POSTSCRIPT: The same still at a wider angle reveals a close look at a plane — only a single pair of wing struts. Still, I swear I see two on (decidedly longer) craft in the distance. And the fore wheel strut in the detail cannot be an axle. If it is a mixed squadron, how many kinds?

What is funny here, whomever may be right, is that the planes were models — a fact to which our suspension of disbelief remains impervious.

SELF-IMPOSED LIMITS: In a supplementary thread, two commenters quote a source identifying the planes as the Curtiss O2C-2 Helldivers and a third reminds interested parties that if we want to know about the movie, strictly speaking, and not the broader Kong mythos, one photograph won't do. In these two frames, plainly from the movie, the airplane in question looks much like the Curtiss.

James Doohan, best known as Lieutenant Commander Montgomery Scott on the original series of late-blooming television science fiction phenomenon Star Trek, has died. An endearing obituary closes with this anecdote from Doohan:

In a 1998 interview, Doohan was asked if he ever got tired of hearing the line "Beam me up, Scotty" — a line that, reportedly, was never actually spoken on the TV show.

"I'm not tired of it at all," he replied. "Good gracious, it's been said to me for just about 31 years. It's been said to me at 70 miles an hour across four lanes on the freeway. I hear it from just about everybody. It's been fun."

From the engine room of the Enterprise to an entertainment franchise virtually unparalleled in longevity or influence, he gave us all she got. Cap'n.

Not long after declaring my abstention from the film adaptation of Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, I received a phone call from an acquaintance wondering if I'd join his group planning to see the movie — whereupon my flimsy pulp-satire purism gave way to a not-unhealthy interest in walking the town on a Friday night. Tony and I shared a refreshing exchange on crossing mediums: no book can ever be carried verbatim to a screen, and even if it could, why would anyone want to try? Our strongest example of variations on a theme sprang from Charles Dickens. Tony's favorite moving picture of A Christmas Carol is Alastair Sims' 1951 production, while my family has faithfully sat down in front of George C. Scott's 1984 television special on many Christmas Eves. Neither screenplay is completely faithful to the book, Scott's in fact taking quite a few liberties — but one is dear to each of us, and coexists happily with the 1843 novella.

More aptly, Tony pointed out that between the BBC series and the radio drama, plot points and characters for Hitchhiker's have been shuffled around like so many musical chairs. It isn't virgin ground.

So I'll accompany a small outfit to a viewing tonight. What to expect? Planet Magrathea, you might recall, hated it — but in light of the phone conversation, I've made a stronger note of the author's self-described intimacy with everything Adams. In the mainstream press, opinions seem to be in two camps about three thousand miles apart — depending on which end of the Atlantic a journalist resides. Stateside, consensus holds that the movie is too little for fans, too much for neophyte walk-ins; reviewers differ on how deleterious the compromise is. The Toledo Blade concludes that nobody will be satisfied; the Virginian-Pilot goes one further and promises that everyone, including Adams' own biographer, has reason enough to fling their buttered popcorn and exit, stage insulted.

The Modesto Bee's reviewer seems to have considered what a culture with a stiff upper lip might make of the film, and posits Hitchhiker's as a gauge of one's taste for British humor. Sure enough, the UK Register thought it was worth an evening show; the Telegraph is showing unqualified love; and though the Guardian didn't take to it, the reviewer gives us more perspective than a combination of thumbs up or down.

Will I write a brief on it? Maybe. Sometimes I examine movies on the first watch; sometimes I sit back and enjoy them. Should I, I promise to keep my obligatory movie-themed cliché confined to the title.

I've been tipped off to the strong possibility that The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, a film adaptation of British humorist Douglas Adams' legendary "four-book trilogy," is rock-bottom bad. Website Planet Magrathea attended a press screening and is, unfortunately, painfully objective in its crucifixion: either scores of classic dialogue lines, gags, narratives, curios and other bits of Adams' brilliance are in the movie or they aren't. In this case, they aren't. Watching this movie as a Hitchhiker's fan, apparently, is akin to diving into an empty swimming pool.

As with Berke Breathed's lousy strip Opus, poor imitation isn't a total defeat for quality: we just need to return to the original.

COMIC RELIEF: I'd forgotten about this wonderful little confluence of art and life.

Heard the news? Star Trek: Enterprise will be scuttled in May.

Enterprise was not a favorite. From a promising start it quickly and inexplicably lost direction, running contrived plots with an unbalanced cast. The show came off like a pulp comic book, much more about action and sci-fi esoterica than characterization and familiar faces. Leads were rarely developed, let alone their support — after four years, some actors will have received most of their screen time during the opening credits. Production evened out by the end of the second season, the show's third year offering an interesting serial arc; the fourth (and last) season a succession of very attractive, three-episode story arcs. Not enough.

But Enterprise was better than Star Trek: Voyager, the weakling, third spinoff that wasted seven seasons' worth of a one-hour Wednesday night time slot. And Enterprise appealed to a broader audience than traditional Trek — which is how Star Trek: First Contact took the 1996 box office by storm. Ratings aside, Enterprise is hardly the worst thing the United Paramount Network has to offer. As my buddy Ed asked: what is UPN going to do now, run Veronica Mars twice? Bring that old Sinbad pilot out of cold storage? It's reasonable to quietly cut funding and drop slot priority, and try for a profit from DVD sales. Cancellation be damned, Enterprise's first season should be out by early summer. But to take a successful franchise with three full television series runs in a row — nearly a dozen movies — and let fans and critics alike know just how little you think of it all by cutting off three seasons early?

Paramount's reasons probably have more to do with Voyager and the twin yawns of movies Star Trek: Insurrection and Star Trek: Nemesis. Still, cancellation is a rash move. The only benefit would be Trek's worn-out producers taking the hint, moving on and handing the reins to somebody who can rediscover Roddenberry's character-based style that so propelled Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.

Speaking of which, I'm borrowing a library copy of Deep Space Nine's fifth season. The end of Enterprise isn't such a tragedy when there's always Trek to be found.

I've typed up what pass for movie reviews in this space before; though the movies have been playing regularly, it's been awhile since my last film footnote. This weekend was cold but beautiful - sunny, blue skies - and three days long. How did I spend a good chunk of it? Trying to complete a computer upgrade four times. Why four times, you ask? Well, each successive attempt was different, quicker and more comically agonizing than the last. Three very colorful disasters. Number Four is a charm, it seems; it's holding up.

How did this all happen, you insist? Did I ever tell you about the time I walked into my college dormitory lobby late one Friday night just as a drunk began to shake 20-ounce, glass juice bottles out of a vending machine? A crowd gathered as he rocked the unit back and forth, then rushed the half-broken pile of swag in the kind of snatch-and-scatter bread line mania that nobody talks about afterward. I gingerly picked up Cran-Raspberry - sticky outside and room-temperature inside, but good at one in the morning. The next day, I passed through the lobby again and decided to make a proper transaction.

In went my dollar twenty-five. Out came nothing. I backed away, taking the hint.

I don't believe in karmic retribution, but early on God relayed to me the fact that whenever I cut corners a bit, he extracts his pound of flesh and we're even again. And then this weekend's adventure in computer twiddlings that go awry in ways so unlikely that even a compulsive gambler wouldn't touch the odds. Do the math.

I rented two movies. Shrek was the first. Funny, in a comfortingly mild way; but ever so happy. Lighthearted beginning; happy ending. The DVD included a three-minute musical with all the characters trying their hand at karaoke - even the bad guys who are, of course, just animated actors. Three minutes. It was not unlike mainlining good times and great laughs. Nearly too much happiness at once. But for Pete's sake, one damned happy sitting. That was Saturday.

Tonight I watched Seabiscuit, a movie one enjoys for exactly the same reasons as Star Wars: it's heroic fiction following the exploits of a delightfully stock cast, steeped in its own airtight mythology. Even the leads are close parallels, an obscure prodigy played by Toby Maguire and his eccentric mentor - in this case split into Jeff Bridges and Chris Cooper. There's the "thing" they do, around which three-quarters of the dialogue is wrapped: swinging lightsabers for Star Wars, racing horses for Seabiscuit. Technique, focus, discipline, and faith are what Maguire is taught. Quite the Zen appeal, especially when he's made to run a lap in pitch darkness. What's that, Mr. Cooper? He's supposed to "trust his feelings"?

Before the defining match race, our hero Maguire is incapacitated and a fellow jockey steps in to ride the horse. But as Maguire coaches his surrogate from a hospital bed, it's obvious that victory has nothing to do with whose behind is planted in the saddle. The ending is full of happiness and redemption, and considering the movie's Great Depression backdrop, we rise from our seats having been shown that America's deliverance came from Franklin Roosevelt, the New Deal, and Seabiscuit. May the horse be with you.

Happy and heartfelt works. I keep passing Ran in the video store but I've seen it before, and it's artful precisely in its bleakness. Noir and cynicism is for warmer weather. What will my next encounter from happy cinema entail? Provided I can find it: The Tuskegee Airmen.

Under normal circumstances I'd file this under trivia, but after having forced myself to watch the universally disappointing Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom Saturday night, it's strictly cathartic: Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz, screenwriters for Temple, were responsible for coma-inducing bomb Howard the Duck, as well as George Lucas stinkers Radioland Murders and More American Graffiti (they made a sequel?). I've learned two things. First, after American Graffiti, Huyck and Katz have written consistently bad scripts. Second - and thankfully - they seem to have come nowhere near major productions since Radioland.

Saturday was the first time I'd ever seen the movie in its entirety. All these years, I thought my parents kept me away from Temple because of its violence. Now I realize they wisely protected me from the fact that the film goes south less than thirty seconds after the Spiderman-red opening credits have ended. I want my one hundred and eighteen minutes back!

PUTTING "BAD INDY" IN HIS PLACE, LILEKS STYLE: Danny O'Brien e-mailed a link to the Bleatster's own evisceration of Spielberg's inferior-quel. About the only flaw Lileks passed up was the first scene's complete violation of the Indiana Jones character painstakingly established in Raiders. Excuse me, but wasn't it the plump sadist Nazi with the steampress-printed hand who held girls hostage and killed on a whim - let alone with a flaming shish-kabob? Why would anyone be foolish enough to eat or drink anything set in front of them by a bunch of thugs who've already made their intentions to kill you clear? Who cares - Indy drinks poisoned champagne. That should be a cardinal rule of writing, one that Mark Twain stressed in his merciless deconstruction of the Leatherstocking Tales: if your characters need to bumble their way into a plot device, stop writing fiction.

And what is with the jazz band continuing to play while screaming patrons run in every direction but the exits, Shanghai mobsters fire tommy guns and balloons drop like it's New Year's? You can bet a couple feet of film depicting Jones stuffing a ninja into a tuba lies somewhere on a Paramount cutting room floor. Thank the Lord for sweet mercies.

Saw it. Loved it. Goodnight.

SINCE YOU'VE READ THE REVIEWS BY NOW: I'll be brief. The most poignant scene - amidst the gigantic battles in defense of men, the final struggle against Sauron - was one during the extended epilogue when the hobbits return to the Shire. They're on ponies, purple-robed: heroes. A jowled halfling, sweeping his front walk, watches the group as they trot past. He scowled at Gandalf in the very beginning of the first movie; he scowls now. The beautiful, peaceful Shire is never lost - it never changes. [That's not as Tolkien wrote it, but then, if fidelity to literature were the benchmark for movies, no one would watch The Wizard of Oz ever again.]

YOU LEARN SOMETHING EVERY DAY: Someone who doesn't consider himself an easy sell makes a powerful point about retelling the story to your audience, not necessarily the author's. Tolkien's near-Luddite paranoia with industrial modernity is the most off-putting aspect of his biography; if anything, it brings the genius back down to earth. But not much more. He held sullen, stubborn, irrational fears, and we should consider ourselves fortunate Tolkien happened to dislike allegories, too.

Before the movie trilogy was even a twinkle in Peter Jackson's eye, I had read the first two books. I'll admit that plot discrepancies did distract me throughout the first viewing of each film. Return of the King, I knew nothing about; I assumed Sauron would fall, Aragorn would assume his place as Isildur's heir, and some measure of happiness would be enjoyed by the cast of good. Last night, then, was a far less encumbered experience than 2002 and 2001 - there were, of course, scenes I couldn't imagine Tolkien had written. But I took the movie in its own entirity, rather than an exercise in grading Jackson's skills in antiphony.

When I first began this post, late last night, I ran a Google search for "Lord of the Rings" images; I found myself staring at a video capture from a LOTR cartoon produced some years ago. Could that release have managed to capture all of Tolkien's spirit, history and dialogue? The obvious answer is "no," and that should be telling for those of us most familiar with Tolkien to separate book from movie - whether or not we're resigned to accepting Jackson's films as the definitive version. Even though it's a natural and reasonable request, the better the typewritten original, seeing a complete translation is a silly and impossible proposition. It is said that perfectionists never finish anything; Jackson isn't one, and he should be rewarded for his creation. Jonah Goldberg:

Ultimately, these movies are a love letter to Tolkien. You can get into a huge argument about what's left out from the book — and why. But at the end of the day, it is inconceivable that any other movie of any commercially viable length would have elicited similar objections.

Two things are important from my perspective: Is it a good movie? You're damn right it is. And: Is it loyal to the most important and largest themes of the book? I think so. Friendship, loyalty, duty, honor, sacrifice, regret, change, memory, and remorseless Orc-smashing are all there. I still need time to digest the whole epic and see it a few more times. But, I think it's fair to say even now that this really is the greatest trilogy in the history of movie-making. And, much more impressive, it's one of the greatest movies in the history of movie-making, too.

Sit back and enjoy.

The judges' decision is in: Return of the King has everything the box office could ever want in a film, succeeds with it all, and is worthy of classic status. Josh Chafetz rounds up the many ways in which this is being explained. (Via Instapundit.)

Reading a few of the reviews, coupled with my friend's brief account, has left me with the expectation of tugged heartstrings when I go to the movie theater - a strangely enjoyable heaviness of the moment most of us know as an epic's end. I know I'll love Return of the King, and will appreciate the first two episodes more; I've been holding back framing the story, as told by Jackson, in my mind, understanding how the third movie will add a different perspective to both the plot and actors' performances that came before.

Bittersweet as the close is, we all have something to look forward to: when, and by whom, will the next timeless classic hit the screen?

THERE'S ALWAYS ONE: Fellows at the Weekly Standard are apparently too tight for Jackson's finale. Jonathan Last plays curmudgeon and dismisses King. I disagree with several points of his internal logic - particularly a theory of trilogies ending weakly. Return of the Jedi faces far too much charm bursting from Star Wars and Empire to come out on top; still, it's the farthest thing from a dud. Back to the Future: III I tend to find rivaling the first, and though I'll always love Raiders the most (and despise the insipid Temple of Doom), Last Crusade has something that its predecessors don't: Sean Connery. In time, Last may be right. Until then, I'll decide for myself.

One final thought, brought on by discussing the Star Wars trilogy: a few days ago, I realized that the original cuts will become more and more difficult to find, and a digital bootleg of the THX release may be our - forgive the pun - only hope. No one takes away my "Lapti Nek."

"That time of year" has carried a double-meaning over the last two years, and this December is no different. In less than a week, Peter Jackson's Return of the King makes general release. I'll undoubtedly be wedged - Row Eight, Middle - inside a packed theater some time before next weekend. I may even offer a few words of review. For the time being, I've got an advance, inside glance at not only the movie but Peter Jackson himself. My friend OX, in Los Angeles, accepted a general invite to members of the [Directors] Guild that was sent over e-mail and, in turn, found himself at a closed screening with none other than Peter Jackson. He sent a brief recounting of the experience:

So I saw Return of the King. Wow. I'm an average fan of the trilogy and not a fan of the genre in general. Fantasy has always been something I've left up to you and Ed.

But I tell you, I was blown away by this third movie. Almost brought to tears in the final 20 minutes. I don't know how this doesn't win best picture.

Then Peter Jackson came out at the end for a Q&A.

He was wearing a wrinkled black sports coat and black pants with stains on the knees. He had on a collared striped shirt that was way too tight for him. He looked fatter than I have ever seen him. And his beard looked like a lion's mane. I loved it!

Jackson talked about the specifics of the book to movie adaptation in the Q&A. I haven't read the book so most of it went over my head.

The most interesting thing he was saying was how he came to the project.

He had just finished this movie Frighteners and had bought hundreds of thousands of dollars in CGI and computer technology. He wanted to use his new computers on his next movie so he started brainstorming potential ideas with his wife (and long time screenwriter/producer/creative collaborator) that could utilize special effects. They kept referring back to LOTR. "We need a story with the fantasy of LOTR, we need a story with an alliance like LOTR, we need to have the depth of LOTR." Jackson said it finally got to the point where he was wondering what was happening with the actual rights to LOTR and he placed his first call to his agent about acquiring the rights in 1995. The rest is history.

He's making $20 million off the top on his next film, King Kong, and 20% of the gross (the highest paid director ever).

Jackson seemed like the nicest man in the room, totally accommodating every question and as enthusiastic as a kid. I've become a big fan of his overnight.

Demski saw him at another screening the following night and he was wearing the same clothes and was as equally gracious.

Well, I'm impressed. Nearly everyone has a few niggling issues with the movie; for me, departures from the first two books are distracting, and I wish Jackson's sequences could have been acted and edited to reflect Spielbergian rhythm, a certain seamlessness. But between what looks to be a powerfully successful finale and a creator of the series who shows more than a little promise and vision beyond, we might all do well to set our most demanding expectations aside.

Continuing my journey into foreign film, I rented from Blockbuster Vive L'Amour and Amelie, and watched them this past Friday and Saturday.

Vive L'Amour was filmed in 1994. It won the Venice Film Festival - I can see why. It'd fit perfectly with the drab, bitter irony popular in the Nineties. Apart from bringing me back to days when I'd go with friends to the trendy Cedar Lee art theater in Cleveland - a double-feature of Pi and Your Friends and Neighbors comes to mind - the movie drew out of me a grand total of two chuckles, zero pulled heartstrings and one ejection of the DVD long before credits rolled. Live by PoMo, die by PoMo.

Amelie was much better, the work of French visual genius Jean-Pierre Jeunet. His latest American flick was horror but he's probably best known for powerfully constructed, grotesque whimsy, City of Lost Children the most popular. The premise? Parisian girl with odd childhood grows up into eccentric young woman who, by sheer coincidence, dedicates several weeks of her life to benevolence towards city regulars. Her philanthropic exploits are staggered with a romance arc: she finds love, loses love, tracks love into a smut shop, loses love in near-misses several times before finally bumping into love, making love to love, and leaving the audience with a saccharine Happily Ever After.

Jean-Pierre Jeunet proved two points with Amelie: first, the French are worth their weight in artistic achievement (if not for responsible world leadership). Second, too much artistic achivement - the whimsy Jeunet is famous for, the fun - can spoil everything. I happened to find a film reviewer who understood. He enjoyed the movie, but didn't labor under any delusions as to what it was:

Although Jeunet has largely retreated from the grotesqueries of "Delicatessen" and "City of Lost Children" (both of which he co-directed with Marc Caro), "Amelie" remains a highlight reel of gorgeous production design and out-there photographic effects. Its whimsical, free-ranging nature is often enchanting; the first hour, in particular, is brimming with amiable, sardonic laughs. But there comes a point where you feel like Jeunet is forcing whimsy down your throat with a plunger. Like Terry Gilliam - who helped get "Delicatessen" released in America - he's almost too imaginative for his own good.

That point was about ninety minutes into the movie - kind of like the celebrated twelfth generous portion of cake. Your demeanor goes from amused to confused, to impatient to claustrophobic. Put down. The magic. Wand.

If Jeunet were a lot more judicious with his camera theatrics and could occasionally stop being so damned oblique, "Amelie" would be a cockeyed masterpiece, something on the order of Jaco van Dormael's lovely "Toto le Hero." But the obvious amount of work that went into every single sound and image makes this an absurdly labor-intensive piece of fluff.

Watching French art cinema is like catching a man, colorfully dressed as a jester, just before he tosses a dozen juggling objects into the air. Up they go; down they fall, and tumble everywhere in a mess. The guy can’t even juggle. But what a spectacle, huh? Credits.

Though playful, "Amelie" contains more than a few dark moments. There's also a couple of overt sex scenes and several instances of nudity.

Another observation. Ever notice how European film operates under the assumption that explicit representation of sex and/or use of the restroom qualifies them to certain artistic values - that somehow the movies are made more real, or gritty, or honest? It seems the more independent the movie, the more one can expect the director to concentrate on depictions of sex and/or use of the restroom. Somewhere along the way, of course, is the line between authentic and bizarre. Do European audiences enjoy this? - discovering a cinematic touch to relieving oneself, I mean. Realism is one thing, obsessions are another (and we wonder why the Continent no longer leads the world).

Thankfully, only one of the three Jeunet movies I've seen only slightly followed this trend. Alien: Resurrection is too Americanized to be of any controversy (other than enough violence to actually blur into tedium); City of Lost Children is so much a children's movie that it couldn't afford to; and Amelie's one-liner treatments of sex are about as brash as they are brief. With a laissez-faire smirk patented in Paris, Jeunet uses one shot to establish Amelie's bad luck with love, and a short sequence to satisfy the European audience niche I've just described. Who cares how many couples are experiencing epiphany in Jeunet's constructed Paris? Those people do. But then we're back to the plot.

Idiosyncracies aside, Jeunet is brilliant with a masterful crew beside him:

Note that cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel is dabbling in genius territory. At the very least, he deserves an Oscar nomination.

The movie had barely begun, and I was already marveling at the camera's mastery. A straight shot here, jiggling a bit there, film sped up and pulled back with the perfect touch of rhythm that Busta Rhymes’ videos always chased after - but sadly, fisheye lens notwithstanding, never found. With such a millimeter-thin line between cinematography that attracts your attention because it's brilliant and cinematography that's distracting because it's pretentious, Bruno Delbonnel deserves a round of applause even today - and a survey of the other work he's done. Second only to technique was craftsmanship of the film itself; I can't recall watching a recent movie with a crisper picture that still held such driven color saturation.

Another observation: can you find me a recent Jeunet movie without actor Dominique Pinon? You might as well find a recent Lucas movie without Warwick Davis. Speaking of the Hughes-like rancher, if you can find a decent Lucas production made since Jedi with Warwick Davis, you win a blue ribbon. Or, I suppose, a movie to watch.

You can't blame the French for being self-indulgent, especially when the result is worth the effort. Amelie is good work by Jeunet who, along with Sabine Herold, helps keep the poor, aimless Gauls relevant. (And Paris attractive. If that aging city looked anything like it did in Jeunet's fairy tale, Jacques Chirac would be one happy, boycott-free bum.)

The Lord of the Rings trilogy is excellent filmmaking, but I've been hoping for more than one assuredly enjoyable feature per year. I seem to have found one. Two days after I'd responded to a television commercial for Master and Commander with "I'm there," William F. Buckley gives the movie a powerful recommendation:

The sweep of the film is especially engrossing, one assumes, for those who find the sea alluring, but Master and Commander is studded with enough drama, poignancy, and excitement to overwhelm even the tumultuous oceans. There is a child midshipman, beautifully played, who is an aspirant naturalist. Together with Dr. Maturin, the fabled aide and friend of the captain, the kid is captivated by the sight of the least insect or lizard. These are plentifully there when the ship dallies in the Galapagos Islands. Dr. Maturin is hit by a bullet gone astray and takes over the surgical challenge of removing it, using a mirror to guide him.

From time to time the two men, the captain and the surgeon, meet in the great cabin of the master and commander to play music, a cello and violin. In a final scene of galvanizing charm, Maturin takes his cello athwartwise and strums it like a guitar, bringing to a close a film which everyone must see who has any eye for cinematic art and great adventure.

Did I already say I'm there?

Back in 1998, my Tolkien-aficionado college friends Dan and Jon directed me to Harry Knowles' website, Ain't It Cool News. Some upstart Aussie director named Peter Jackson was to film a definitive movie series drawn from the Lord of the Rings trilogy; yes, it was going to take place in the roughs of New Zealand and involve hundreds and hundreds of extras; no, hobbits and dwarves would not be portrayed by midgets, no offense to Warwick Davis; yes, all three movies would be filmed at the same time, so crew and cast were expected to set aside the next two years of their life; no, Jackson refused to bow to Hollywood's Attention Deficit Disorder and try to cram several thousand pages of fantasy masterpiece into about 125 pages of script:

The plan was, we tried to convince Harvey to do three movies, because there's three books and that seemed like the obvious thing. But Harvey didn't want to do it, there was too big a risk, so we agreed to do two films. Like split the story in half. We worked on that for about 18 months, wrote scripts to get up to it. Then as the scripts were being written and being finished, the budgeting was able to begin, because you can't really budget without a script.

So they got very nervous and very worried about the size of the project. Their solution was to reduce it down to one movie. I said, "Does that mean we shoot the first part, release it, and then if it's successful we get to do the second?" And Harvey said, "No, no," he didn't want that, he just wanted it all squashed into one film. So they gave us sort of this guide that they had one of their staff members do, about how you compress Lord of the Rings into one film. And they only wanted a two-hour-long film, one two-hour-long film. And they gave us this appalling list of cuts that we had to make, in combining things, losing characters, and losing stuff. The Mines of Moria wasn't going to exist. They said we could just cut to a scene afterwards where the characters talked about going through the Mines of Moria and how bad it was. They said, "That'll save all that."

They had all these ideas, anyway, and we just said, "No, no, no, we don't want to do that."

Jackson was serious (honestly, the closest analogy I can think of is five additional minutes of script in Return of the Jedi discussing what happened in an omitted The Empire Strikes Back, i.e., "Han in carbon-freeze? What a shame. And there was this guy named Yoda. Wow."). A determined, well-financed project directed by a fan of the books - who wouldn't be curious? News of casting had trickled down to the public by autumn of 1998 - and much of it was on Ain't It Cool News.

I'll admit that comic books have never really appealed to me - I don't know why, but they don't - nor do I have much patience for most film criticism, amateur or technically professional. And Ain't It Cool specializes in reviews about comic book-derived cinema for interested parties to squabble over. So Mr. Knowles' website, a staple at the time for my friends, fell out of my regular webpage rounds once I'd read all the relevant information. I came back a few times every several months or so after Lord of the Rings news reservoirs had filled up with the natural accumulation of leaks and press releases; and every now and then I'll check the website for a rumor or something eye-catching. I try to stick to news; each one of the ten or so reviews I've read over five years has been taken with a brine pit of salt. Harry, you should know, is a critic who declared Star Wars: Episode II out in front for Best of Series.

His latest, a review of The Matrix: Revolutions pinged James Lileks' relativist radar pretty loudly - which is why, if a silly chic-nihilist essay can draw the wrath of the most wicked Fisk in the Midwest, one does well to stay out of art critiques when intellectually unarmed.

Lileks himself watched the sci-farce flick and, expecting an albatross, enjoyed it for what it was. Me? One of my favorite movies is Wesley Snipes' stillborn dreamchild, Blade. I first saw it in the spring of 1999, a Saturday evening at the student union. If I'd first seen the movie on television, I wouldn't have gone through more than half of it. But my friends and I were giddy that night, and within five minutes we were giving Blade the MST3K treatment for the entire theater. We had 'em in stitches. And the experience went beyond. Humor that wasn't part of the movie before I watched it is now inseparable from it, and I'm more than happy to sit down whenever it's on - even though I only laugh out loud when Snipes delivers his timeless wisdom on the Sisyphean folly of inclined ice-skating.

Sometimes a mediocre movie is just a mediocre movie; and according to Lileks, worth at least five dollars this time around.

Andrew Sullivan on Leno:

I found myself watching Jay Leno the other night. By and large, I've given up TV, don't have cable and watch the box maybe once every couple of weeks or so (usually at the boyfriend's). But it was late, I couldn't sleep, so I found myself watching the cheesiest, crudest, lowest-common-denominator humor I've seen in a long while. It had Dolly Parton in the same joke as a couple of melons, for Pete's sake. And that was a high point. But I still watched it over Letterman. The NYT today tries to explain why Leno is now so dominant. It's relatively easy, I think: Leno is a conservative voice in an unsettled time. His hackneyed humor and old-as-the-hills jokes, and non-confrontational suck-ups with Hollywood-approved celebs are more comforting than Letterman's snarling irony. More to the point: IRONY IS DEAD. It died years ago - even before 9/11. Letterman, much as I admire him, is a relic. It's over, Dave. Over.

While I don't watch Leno, I agree with Sullivan's assessment. The comedian's politics are reportedly nowhere near right of center, and yet conservative television host Brit Hume uses clips of Leno's political wisecracks for his show's lighthearted outro. They really fit right in.

That got me thinking about irony and how heavily it influenced culture and society in the last decade. Take film (please!). The Nineties expanded and collapsed, respectively, by the strength and overuse of irony. The flood of "(American) life is not what you think it is" movies throughout the decade finally did it in. Whatever countercultural, self-critical insights gained from flicks like Reality Bites, Clerks and Trainspotting were jumbled by nihilist, violent frenzies from the likes of Tarantino and collaborators. Pretty soon the f-word and graphic violence were standard fare - and thus became a little boring. So cynical indie directors, too sophisticated and Europhiliac for their own good, put out the really dark stuff like Happiness and Buffalo 66. Hollywood followed suit with its focus-group-approved American Pie, Fight Club and American Beauty, and the irony industry began to buckle under its own self-hating, self-adulatory weight.

Then the World Trade Center vaporized, and the whole thing about laughing in the face of the devil (who, like, sooo didn't exist) wasn't as funny anymore. How ironic.

I finished Angela's Ashes Saturday evening, as well. Nicely done, though like the Lord of the Rings film trilogy, noticeably abridged. Gritty, too, with more oddly emphasized retching than you'd find in Flannery O'Connor. Patrick, are the Irish really this, er, eccentric?

Returning Gattaca to Blockbuster, I went ahead and picked up a couple more DVDs. I know I've made quite a case for the Cuyahoga County Public Library's best kept secret, but as the movie shelf only contains about a hundred or so titles at any given time, the variety and convenience of a commercial outlet is still superior. And one feels a sense of tradition, too, I suppose, by patronizing the old video store. "Old," right? Can you believe that? Find that on the cover of a Saturday Evening Post.

In the mood for fiction abroad, I picked up Angela's Ashes and Farewell, My Concubine. Farewell, as it turns out, is a movie based on a Lillian Lee novel, directed by Chinese filmmaker Chen Kaige. It follows the lives of two Beijing opera stars whose landmark roles - a king and a concubine - bind them uniquely; friends through poverty, riches and fame, jealousy and misunderstanding, Japanese invasion and the Communist upheavals. Winning the Cannes Film Festival in 1993, it's yet far from over-artsy or dada; beginning the DVD last night and finishing this evening, I easily found in Farewell the depth, pathos and impression of good independent films. The main character conflict took me by surprise - the back of the box didn't exactly spell it out - but as this right-on-the-money 1993 review by Roger Ebert explains, the concubine actor's unrequited love is powerful and transcendent.

Brilliant stuff. Also of note is the film's generous presentation of Chinese music and modern history. The former I actually began investigating through library compact discs earlier this summer and the latter I feel compelled to study, especially considering the reading I've been doing on postwar Japan. And I will most certainly seek out more Orient films of this class; considering the last one I watched was Red Firecracker, Green Firecracker, some catch-up is required.

HOLD THAT THOUGHT: Well, not quite. In May I rented Seven Samurai, Akira Kurosawa's moralist masterpiece. One of the greatest movies ever made, no doubt. But still, there's a dearth of these films on my "watched" list.

Since my discovery of the county library's stunning collection of every DVD known to civilized man, I've begun a season-by-season viewing of my favorite television show, Star Trek: The Next Generation. It's steady going, several episodes on a weekend and one or two on a free weekday.

Three weeks ago, I began an essay on the first season. These shows came on the air when I was in fourth grade and they represent an incredible balancing act on part of Gene Roddenberry - meeting the demands of a syndicated classic while defining a new, fresh series. So revisiting them is eye-opening. And self-correcting: I long assumed the first season to be consistently shaky and corny. After borrowing the DVDs, the best of them turned out to be a promising collection. I never realized that TNG's potential was obvious before the end of 1987, that the cast was already putting on memorable performances. The clunkers were, indeed, silly, but if you'll forgive me: heavy-handed camp made Kirk's universe.

The essay may expand into a larger critique of the spinoff's spinoffs. Years ago I tossed around a screed against the limp Voyager, with a totally overserious title like Student's Blight on the Master's Legacy. After a few scribbled outlines I settled on simpler catharsis: turn the damn television off and stop watching the show. Funny how easy some cures really are.

Having finished the second season yesterday and begun the third season today, I'm enjoying the loose continuity I can draw out from each season's arc. TNN used to run a gratuitous block of TNG, four or five hours long some days - but it was a grab-bag rotation of the Trekkie Top 40. Nothing wrong with the classics; it's just that even the weakest shows were passable and stuffed with nuance. And, unlike the reruns of a local station years ago, TNN never played them chronologically. Want to skip along the months, watching the characters develop while their surroundings grow sleeker and smarter? That's the magic of DVD, matched only by a miraculously intact pile of taped-on-Saturday-night VHS tapes. Either way, it's all there. TNG was episodic, especially set next to its soap-operaish successor, Deep Space Nine. But start taking in the first three seasons as chapters, and TNG carries a powerful thread.

I've always been a passive fan; neither the conventions nor the fanatic sites interest me. Actors - minus the inimitable Clayton Moore - are preoccupied with their career, not a role, however popular it may become. You'd be surprised how many of them haven't even the faintest memory of everybody's favorite moment on film. Or how readily they leave the character behind. TNG's cast, perhaps because it was the first to come after the original series, always struck me as more eclectic and more professional. Talent was crawling out of that ensemble's ears. But I haven't followed any of them actively. So I found it out of character to search this out: an excellent interview of Brent Spiner, with a good deal of biographical warm-up before the inevitable Star Trek questions.

Five seasons to go, library willing. I'll keep you all informed.

UPDATE: I stumbled on the best review anyone could hope for last year's otherwise sub-par film Star Trek: Nemesis.

UPDATE II: Just watched "Sarek" before turning in. Patrick Stewart's performance of grappling with the old Vulcan's incontinent emotions, one I hadn't seen in years, was unbelievable. Seven years of mastery. As much as I look forward to Enterprise this fall and appreciate its uniquely rougher nature, I can't do it without a measure of wistfulness for a series come before that can never be rivaled.

I stopped by the nearest county library on Saturday to peruse its little-known gold mine of DVDs. Really, if the region could wait a week for materials transfer from one branch to the other, nearby Blockbuster and Hollywood outlets would be boarded up by Christmas.

The magic is without fail: walk up to the shelf holding no more than one hundred movies, open your eyes wide and pick up a "Never did see that one" film or three. For me, it was From the Earth to the Moon, Tom Hanks' television follow-up to Apollo 13. I've yet to see the latter but if it's anything like the miniseries, I'll be enjoying a spectacular viewing sometime in the near future. Twelve episodes (nine of them I caught a couple of months ago); some familiar faces, some talented unknowns, all portraying the men and women of the moon program. Universal and timeless as the series may be, it's so very Sixties. Suits and ties; thick, black-framed glasses; every other man smoking a cigarette in a board room or from behind million-dollar NASA communications and telemetry equipment, or just about anywhere else that's at least ten feet from a giant tank of liquid oxygen. Women on the cusp of discarding hats as regular formal wear. Excellent.

No, From the Earth to the Moon is not a thriller. After searching the shelves, I picked out LA Confidential, one I missed from the Kevin Spacey salad days; and Rear Window, classic Hitchcock I managed to only see once.

I watched LA Confidential late Saturday night and Rear Window yesterday evening over dinner, enjoying both. Keeping in mind that they fall into the mystery-intrigue-murder genre (and time periods only a decade apart), I couldn't help but compare the two.

Valuing a movie's ability to keep my eyes glued to the screen and teeth chattering, Window swept, second viewing notwithstanding. Hitchcock at his mastery is tough to best; in fact, the more you know about the tortuous suspense sequences, the more they terrify you. Hitchcock's psychological magnifying glass is unmatched, every odd little vignette between minor characters a piece meant to define the whole. I looked forward to Thorwald's staggered lurch towards the helpless L.B. Jeffries through the whole movie and still white-knuckled my armrests in joy. I'd forgotten how early Grace Kelly sees for herself the disturbing departure in routine from across the back lot, or how impulsive she becomes to bring the murderer to justice. To top it all off, the rear window could just as easily be one at my Grandmother's house in Queens (sure enough, the last time I slept the night there I checked for murders in progress - all clear.)

I didn't realize Confidential was set in period - save for Danny Devito's tiny, corner smudge, you wouldn't know that the movie's setting was anything but modern. All the better: back fifteen years and they would have been using tommy guns. Abundant shotguns worked just as fine. The movie was far more baroque than Window, trading depth of character for story saturation. It worked - when the three hoodlums on the run were downed and the crime "solved," I wracked my brains against when and to where the plot was sure to twist. Though nowhere near as explicit as a film like Goodfellas, Confidential grew to be a bit overviolent by the end of the movie; less in terms of red than a slightly rushed string of keep-quiet murders. And the script could have been sharper in a few places.

I was still impressed. Side note: ten dollars says a blooper take caught Spacey's dying character muttering "Kaiser...Soze."

Good flicks. I knew I'd started a smart tradition a couple of months ago. Rediscovering a competitive collection - waiting at the library for free - was even smarter.

I can't be serious all the time. Megan McArdle tossed her chickadees a poser: who is today's Ronald Reagan of Hollywood, remaining afloat on a sea of B-Movies? It's not an easy task, as second-hand cinema for any length of time is more often than not an indication of either inferiority or decline.

Bill Pullman was a favorite of respondants. Rick Moranis got a vote; Brendan Fraser and Steve Gutenberg another.

Only one person mentioned Gary Busey - and rather offhand. In fact, I'd contend that Busey is the B-tier actor. Look at his credentials: the man has been working on lesser-known flicks for over thirty years. Here, he's an unhinged ex-special force agent; there, he's an unhinged ex-military officer who murders a carrier captain in drag; first, he's the father figure of a wraithlike conjuration of a condemned man's youth; next, he's mimicking Buddy Holly. Neither vice nor career frustration has knocked him to the ground for long; substance abuse or motorcycle accident, he's as overbiting and irrepressible as ever. His name exudes B-movie more than most, and his longevity in the medium beats out any associative contenders.

Besides, he's just Gary Busey:

Reporter: Do you think that "Busey-ism" can catch on as a religion or philosophy?

Busey: Yeah...That's what's going to happen. You saw the episode [of Busey's reality television show] where I'm talking about The Wizard of Oz being a movie of the highest technology. If you listen to that again, if you understand what I'm saying, you'll understand that the technology that you have in your imagination and your creative heart is your power, and the power of your identity and your truth. That's what this show symbolizes, finding your power, your truth, and having fun with yourself. Fun, peace, harmony and communication are the four platforms that surround your foundation like railroad ties. Imagine railroad ties.

We can see them, Gary, with a one-way ticket on the camp train to Bottom-Shelf City. Have you ever forgotten a Busey performance? Immortal.

"He who saves his life will lose it; he who loses his life will be saved."

An interesting rebuttal to Gloria Steinem's fears that when confronted with the me-first morality of box-office darling The Hours:

[V]iewers, especially those who can't empathize with the self-erasure that goes along with living a derived life, may demonize Laura for leaving her family to save her life.

Rod Dreher of National Review offers a spectacularly even-handed condemnation of the movie, following the lives of three women intellectuals who simply can't let the trappings of others stand in the way of their personal growth:

It's superficial to think that happiness comes easy; some people have everything, and yet are still estranged from themselves. It's even more superficial, though, to think the point of life is to find personal happiness. Most people outgrow that egotistical worldview after their teenage years, and come to understand that the task is to live a meaningful life, if not a happy one. A meaningful life is to be found in love, in living nobly and selflessly in the service of something or someone greater than oneself: God, family, friends, country, humanity, or some combination thereof. The secret to happiness is paradoxical: You find it most truly and deeply through loving others more than you love yourself. Only a father can know how joyful it feels to cradle his crying newborn at three in the morning. Only a saint or a hero knows the joy of dying so that others might live.

That last sentence carries great weight for me, having recently watched the first and second episodes of Band of Brothers, and therefore witness to a frightful recreation of the cacaphonous spectacle of men in war, fighting and dying to no rhyme or reason but the collected wit of goodness immersed, for the benefit of mankind, in the depths of hell.

I suppose It's a Wonderful Life never sinks in for some of us.

I'll admit to being a non-fiction reader, and at that, far from a tomeworm. I prefer periodicals, short bursts of idea. My attention span is not the most linear; associative properties excite me more than ordered learning, so connectivity will frequently interrupt my reading or studying as I either contemplate material and become lost in speculative branches from the root, or else break away altogether and move to the next source I find to be the most necessary to my train of thoughts. I greatly prefer pith and efficiency - for enabling quick cognitive entry/exit - to the sprawling, ponderous prose that we as a literary culture have inherited, particularly from the 19th Century - one requiring a far longer, less flexible mental visitation. Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment or Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities I literally could not settle into; and failed to finish reading either of them under high school assignments, their worlds not relevant enough to be of value to me. Frank Herbert's Dune, an equally voluminous novel, did manage to catch and hold my interest - I can only assume that his blend of descriptive color and narrative economy struck a favorable balance with me.

J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit I can read easily; the depth and deliberation of The Lord of the Rings trilogy, however, has rebuffed me through my youth and early adulthood. I've managed to read most of the first two books, The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers, and so the story arc and major characters are in good familiarity. The Return of the King I have never begun, sheepishly acknowledging that a trilogy can only be completed when all its segments have been digested to satisfaction.

It is with that lack of intimacy that I was able to enjoy Peter Jackson's filmmaking of The Lord of the Rings to a certain point. As any film will dictate alterations and abbreviations, no one should be surprised that a book will almost always retain a greater breadth and depth than its cinema counterpart (one notable exception is The Shawshank Redemption an ambitious expansion on an otherwise inconspicuous short story by Stephen King). I saw The Fellowship of the Ring (FOTR) last year and fairly well enjoyed it; I did feel as if the movie were "one day in Paris," madly trying to stuff all the events of hundreds of pages, bursting with culture and legend, into the better part of three hours.

Now, here's where I depart from your average purist who'll knot his brow at the first sign of verbatim betrayed. It's a two-tier system of appreciating movie adaptations of books: I call it "Dune and Oz."

I have never read L. Frank Baum's Oz series, but I recall a schoolmate - back in fifth grade, no less - decrying the night-and-day discrepancies between the fantasy-epic novel and its eponymous, light-hearted musical-film counterpart. Here's where I draw the line: while confident that the book provides a fuller experience, the MGM movie is fantastic. Ignorant of Baum's typewritten Oz, the Western world has a cinema classic nonetheless.

Even before I read Frank Herbert's first installment of his Dune series, I was nonplussed by David Lynch's mid-1980s bizarro feature. Yes, the general artistic styling, particularly the Fremen stillsuits was impressive and, in fact, for my mind definitive - but the plot emasculation and plethora of other, less-successful Lynch-inspired artifacts (no, music by Toto doesn't count for points) added up to a failed attempt to bring Herbert's sci-fi classic to the screen. It's a dud movie that one must ultimately separate from the book.

Let's review some book-to-movie events as they apply to my criteria. Gone with the Wind: Oz. Braveheart: delightfully at odds with history, Oz. Roots: the best example of how to bring an epic to realistic viewer proportions - well-funded television miniseries - Oz. The George C. Scott adaptation of A Christmas Carol: sheer Oz.

Flops - enter your favorite here, since unless spectacularly headline-worthy in their fall these forgettably failed movies are more difficult to ferret out. Dune is my standout. Tim Burton's Sleepy Hollow is another inventive stinker. No more pain - I'm sure you get the idea.

Peter Jackson's The Fellowship of the Ring is slightly bearing the marks of an Oz - it was pleasantly faithful to the spirit and letter of Tolkien's work. That said, deviations did occur. A significant character was cut, as were several "nuance" passages; barely any of Tolkien's pervasive songs and tales found their way into the relatively terse screenplay. A romance was added with the emphasized role of a minor book character. At the theater, I enjoyed the film - though I felt a little deprived. After buying an extended release on DVD, however, which managed to fill in crucial narrative and development gaps, I could sit back and call the movie definitive.

I watched The Two Towers in the theater last night. As a cinema experience, I quite enjoyed it. Where Jackson was merely illustrating indirect descriptions offered in print by Tolkien - the magnifcent duel through ages and elements between Gandalf and the Balrog - the movie is powerful. True to his words as early as December of 2001, however, Jackson did modify the story more noticeably than with the first movie. Charmed by the power of the drama onscreen and insulated by a relatively distant familiarity with most details of the book, I was immediately aware of only one major deviation through the film. Other sections, oddly enough, seemed less successful and it was only after I consulted the book later in the evening - and checked some fan sites this morning - that I realized to what extent Jackson had supplanted Tolkien's masterpiece with his own team's hand at storytelling.

At this point, I won't offer spoilers or dredge anyone through a nerdily exhaustive list of charges, scene by scene. Suffice to say, watching the movie draws me nearer to the book; in Fellowship of the Ring, Jackson's modifications arguably helped the movie's composition; he was successful in truly "adapting." In The Two Towers, not only were modifications conspicuous to those of us at least somewhat familiar with the original work but, as I had observed in the theater, several of them were rather unsuccessful simply as movie elements - and so extremely maddening as to why a would-be definitive film translation might so readily abandon its source.

I can foresee the disappointing conversations I'll be sharing with well-read Tolkien fans.

Finally, and perhaps the most important aspect of what this is, a film independent of the original author: people unfamiliar with the books almost unanimously love the movie. So in a way, Peter Jackson knew what he was doing as a filmmaker.

And, funnily enough, he's from the land of Oz.

I feel the weight of events - domestic, world, personal - in a false stagnation, moving imperceptibly but decisively and grandly as if tectonic. No startling news: Trent Lott waxes Clintonian and hangs onto power, the Republicans are remaining silent as to his inevitable replacement, Rush Limbaugh shows civility even to Hillary Clinton, Saddam Hussein continues his defiance, the Bush administration slowly completes its military structure outside of Iraq, the United Nations is full of countries with disturbing ulterior motives. Even Pepsi remains true to form in its discarding of one celebrity spokeswoman for another.

I can feel the tension and the friction. God only knows if everything will break at once. Stagger it a bit, please?

In the meantime, we can find solace in a decidedly unescapist fantasy world created by a skeptic and a Christian, who understood all too well the universality of goodness and its struggle with evil. National Review is devoting two articles to J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings masterpiece; good reads to be had.

I'm occupied this evening and would have loved to have seen it with my pal, Paul. No matter: we'll catch up to see it a second time, as I plan my first viewing to be with my parents. Subjecting them to the extended DVD release, I won two quick converts (one substantially more frightened by monsters, of course, but faithful nonetheless) and am confident that a moviegoing will be a fantastic three-quarters' family outing.

Universal, I say.