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.