iJinx - Apple vs Adobe

As recently as six months ago some technology experts thought Flash was would dominate Web multimedia. Now some are saying the technology is doomed.
- NPR.org, All Things Considered, "What's Behind Apple's Clash With Flash?"

Ah, yes, the wonderful world of overly reductive thinking. Flash will dominate the Web! No, Flash is doomed! Wait, what's all the hi-jinx about?

NPR is, as is its wont, getting in late on a story that most of the tech press has already covered to death: the disagreement between Apple and Adobe about the need (or lack of same) for Adobe's web video and animation software, Flash, to run on the various Apple iDevices, particularly the recently released iPad. I'm not blaming NPR for this, particularly -- they're not tech press, and in coming to the story late, they have at least a chance of catching the story after much of the hype has given way and can get at the actual issues involved.

But if you listen to the audio of the story, as it played on NPR's weekend 'All Things Considered', you might think that NPR is reporting on a personal grudge between Apple CEO Steve Jobs and, well, anything he doesn't like. Sadly, the NPR folks really dropped the ball on this one, missing a chance to cover a really interesting development in consumer technology and instead treating it as tabloid pablum, yet another 'celebrity man in charge pouts to try and get his way' story.

Apple's unwillingness to let Flash run on its mobile devices, the iPhone, iPod Touch, and now iPad, has been known for some time. For years, when Apple engineers or PR people have been asked about Flash on the iPhone, the response has been pretty consistently that Apple has no plans to implement Flash there, and that policy has formally been extended to the iPad. Two things, though, really made the tech press blow up about this over the past few weeks:

1) In early April, just before the announcement of the iPhone 4.0 operating system and the subsequent release of the iPhone Software Development Kit (SDK) version 3.2 which would allow non-privileged developers the chance to start developing apps for the recently released iPad, Apple announced a change to their Developer Agreement -- the licensing agreement that developers have to agree to before they can download or use the SDK.

The change greatly expanded the definition of 'using Documented APIs in the manner prescribed by Apple' to specifically forbid not just private Application Programming Interfaces (or APIs) (as was already specified in the prior version of the agreement), but also any compiled code executing against Apple's Documented APIs in anything but a handful of core computer languages.

Mac tech press writer John Gruber (in the article noted above) suggested that the move wasn't made to specifically target any given cross-compiler. Other writers, however, noting that the timing of Apple's announcement was only one day prior to the planned release of Creative Suite 5 by Adobe, in which one of the key selling points would be the ability to compile applications written in Flash as native iPhone and iPad apps, becan writing of how Apple was 'targetting' Adobe and Flash, and that this change was nothing less than the initial salvo in a 'war' between Apple and Adobe in which Apple's intention was nothing less than the death of Flash as a web platform.

Kinda silly, sure, but hey -- maybe it was just a slow news day. Regardless, it got the usual suspects' dander all up about freedom and choice and apple pie (although, ironically, the specific BoingBoing post I linked to above is actually remarkably level-headed about the whole thing).

However, fuel was thrown onto the fire when...

2) Last Thursday, Steve Jobs himself (or at least an uncredited ghost writer) published an essay on Apple's public web site explaining the decision not to allow Flash on Apple's mobile devices.

Right off the bad, Jobs takes time to address those who've seen fit to criticize Apple's decision (which has largely been reported not so much as Apple's decision, but as Jobs's own), and in a way that points out how ludicrous it is to consider Apple and Adobe 'at war' over anything -- Jobs reminds people who might not be old enough to remember that Apple was Adobe's first major customer, and that combining Adobe's PostScript technology with Apple's LaserWriter printers created the desktop publishing industry. If anything, Jobs's first paragraph sounds more like the admissions of a lovelorn former beau disappointed that his sweetheart has left him for a perceived faster lifestyle in the 'big city'.

Jobs then proceeds to list six specific points attempting to refute the idea that Apple's decision not to allow Flash on Apple's mobile devices is a 'business decision':

1) Though Apple's own iPhone OS is closed (i.e. 'proprietary'), the technologies Apple uses to allow its iPhone OS products (specifically the iPhone and iPad) to connect to and render the Internet are open standards. Flash, meanwhile, is a closed, proprietary Internet standard.

2) When Adobe says that 75% of video is encoded in Flash and that devices that don't support Flash cannot therefore access the 'full web', Adobe is being disingenuous; much of the video encoded in Flash is also available as open H.264-encoded video, which the iDevices can play just fine.

3) Enabling Flash on Apple's iDevices would expose them to security issues, as well as cause performance and reliability issues that users would blame on the devices, not on Flash.

4) Enabling Flash would reduce battery life on Apple's iDevices.

5) Flash isn't designed as a multi-touch interface language.

6) Adobe wants to convince developers to use Flash as an intermediary language to enable programs originally written in Flash to run on Apple's iDevices.

Point 6, as you probably can tell, speaks directly to the change in Apple's developer agreements (see 1 above), and Jobs spends a few paragraphs unpacking just what that means.

Adobe's immediate response came via its own CEO, Shantanu Narayen, who put together a hasty and probably ill-advised attempt to rebut Jobs's claims in an interview with the Wall Street Journal. Though Mr. Narayen's comments don't come down to a point-by-point refutation of Mr. Jobs's own article, the Adobe CEO basically argues that Apple's decision is more about control, both of the platform and the developer community that serves the platform, and that it's Adobe, not Apple, that is thinking in terms of openness and 'cross-platform' capability.

That's pretty much a load of hogwash, unfortunately.

My own feeling is that each of Mr. Jobs's points is accurate, though some are more relevant to the argument than others. For instance, the 'openness' argument doesn't really hold a lot of water with me, even if Jobs's characterization of the difference between Adobe's and Apple's approach to web standards is basically accurate. Nevertheless, it's clear that Adobe wants this 'fight' characterized as 'big bad Apple versus humble Adobe', which, sadly, also won't wash for people who know the backstory.

For instance, when Jobs says this:

We know from painful experience that letting a third party layer of software come between the platform and the developer ultimately results in sub-standard apps and hinders the enhancement and progress of the platform.

...he's talking right to Adobe and Adobe's Mac user base. From intransigence over PostScript to a long delay in implementing changes required by MacOS X into their Mac professional applications, Adobe has long been exactly that third-party holding back needed advancement in the Mac platform for their own business purposes. If Apple was trying to 'kill' Adobe, or just 'kill' Flash, the notoriously vindictive Jobs would have more than enough justification in doing so right there.

But a curious thing happened on the same day that Jobs's and Narayen's comments hit the web like a couple of tons of bricks: the blog of one of Adobe's Flash player engineers announced that Adobe was releasing a beta version of Flash Player for MacOS X that uses Apple's MacOS X video acceleration APIs that allow the OS to pass video decoding to a dedicated Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) rather than being done in software as it currently the case. The change was done with Apple's assistance, and works for most Apple hardware shipped in the past year running the current version of MacOS X Snow Leopard.

If Apple was trying to kill Adobe, or even to kill Flash on the desktop, then why bother helping Adobe implement this feature? Interestingly enough, this feature in MacOS X is precisely one of the things that, if also implemented in iPhone OS, would make one of Mr. Jobs's points about Flash all but disappear -- hardware decoding would virtually eliminate the battery life penalty Mr. Jobs says Flash would impose on Apple's iDevices.

What Steve Jobs (or Apple's engineers, whichever was truly responsible for the decision) is trying to do is make sure that the user experience on iPhone and particularly iPad when interacting with the web is as 'magical' as Apple's marketing materials say it is. As an iPhone owner for nearly two years, and a recent purchaser of an iPad 3G, I appreciate this attention to my experience, and if not being able to access Dungeons & Dragons Tiny Adventures on my iPad is the price I pay for owning the most intuitive web device I've ever owned, then I pay that price willingly.

Interlude - The iPad Conundrum

“Computers make it easier to do a lot of things, but most of the things they make it easier to do don't need to be done.
- Andy Rooney

So you may have heard about this new tech device that's out there called the iPad. It's been described by its creator as “magical and revolutionary”, and as all kinds of other things by other reviewers. Based on my own analysis, including a 20-minute session in my local Apple Store taking the thing for a test-drive, it's not really something I need, but it is something I want.

That's not strictly the conundrum referenced in the title, but it's on the way there.

One of the most clear-headed analyses of 'do you need an iPad' that I've read was put together by Ted Landau, a long-time Mac technology writer. He has this to say about my specific situation:

Suppose you own both a MacBook Pro and an iPhone, do you also need an iPad? No. If you also own an iMac,even more emphatically no. In these cases, the only real extra that the iPad provides is the ability to run iPad-optimized apps that you cannot run on any of your other hardware. This is not a big extra at this point. With the hardware you already own, you can already do just about everything else.

That makes perfect sense to me. I don't need an iPad. So why do I still want one?

Blame the devil Andy Ihnatko, particularly this description of his iPad, not from any of his excellent Sun-Times reviews of the device, but from his personal blog:

The iPad was a superstar on my first day at the conference. Not for the attention it got; for its performance. It underscored every positive impression it made upon me during the week when I wasn’t allowed to use it in public.

1) The battery life is spot-on. I was using my iPad from the moment I awoke at 8 AM to just before I sloped into a car to go backto my house at 8:30 PM. In between, if I ever had the slightest notion to do something with the iPad, I did it without any thought as to the need to “keep some battery in reserve for emergencies....”

2) The iPad shone through in the “I need to write and publish something straight away, even though I didn’t plan ahead and bring a real keyboard” scenario....

While sitting in the back listening to a panel, I checked my email and found an invitation to an Apple event on Thursday. I wrote about 500 words about it using the virtual keyboard, edited it, and published it to my blog. As I’d expected, I couldn’t type as quickly or as accurately as I can on my MacBook keyboard, but even with this little slate balanced between my knees I was typing fast and naturally. It’s a perfectly usable keyboard. With the added advantage that when I don’t need a keyboard, it goes away completely. Big, big win all around.

3) The iPad is the perfect choice when discretion is important.... At the CoWA (and many other conferences) I don’t use a computer for slides. I just use it for reference. The screen keeps a rundown of the points I want to make, in their order, as well of a list of any names or data that I need to mention. I might also want to open a browser window and check on a fact or two. Good stuff. But I don’t like using a full notebook up there. To the audience, it looks like I’m dividing my time between my participation on the panel and my Twittering about how awesome last night’s “Amazing Race” was.

The iPad is the first computer that scored tens all the way across the board. The screen is viewable from any angle; I can just keep it lying flat on the table and still read the screen perfectly. It has a big screen, so I don’t need to squint and hunt to find my place in my notes. And it’s fast and it’s powerful and has a big, typeable keyboard.

4) Carrying it around isn’t a hassle. Not in the least. Yup, you’re going to want to have a bag of some kind with you. I refer back to my earlier comment about the inconvenience of carrying books and magazines. I normally have a smaller version of my Indiana Jones satchel with me at conferences. The difference is that I’ve just deleted about four or five pounds from my normal load: My 1.5 pound iPad takes the place of a 5.5 pound MacBook plus its charger.

The most important point is that the iPad does a better job in this environment than a MacBook or any other notebook. I slide it out of the newspaper pocket of my bag, click the Home button, and it’s awake and ready to assist. When I’m done, I click the Power button and slide it back; no need to wait for the machine to Sleep or the hard drive to spin down. And I don’t even think about battery life. So I use it all the time.

Herein we begin to approach the conundrum itself. Ihnatko, in this essay, implicitly addresses the primary complaint about the iPad I consider legitimate: Why would you need an iPad when you have an iPhone?

I purchased and downloaded the iBlogger app for iPhone a long time ago; you can even see evidence where I used the app to update this blog. You may also notice that I haven't used iBlogger to update this blog for, oh, about half a year now. (There are a couple of entries from November that have the 'posted with iBlogger' footer on them, but those entries were, in actuality, originally posted using MarsEdit and only edited with iBlogger later.)

Twitter is awesome on iPhone – you type out your 140 characters or less and away you go. It's a pithy, quick-hitting format that doesn't punish you for using a small virtual keyboard. And the iPhone virtual keyboard, while fine for Twittering, text messaging, or other quick-format posting, really doesn't lend itself to the long-form, rambling kinds of things I like to do in blog posts, and especially doesn't lend itself well to sprinkling hyperlinks in among all that rambling text. MarsEdit is my tool of choice for that kind of work.

But an iPad would be significantly better than an iPhone at this task. Enough to make me give up MarsEdit on my MacBook Pro? No, but probably enough so that I'd actually consider blogging rather than Twittering when I see something I want to comment about.

Also, there is video. I have nearly half the space on my 8 GB iPhone devoted to video files, including (currently) two episodes of the Canadian series “Slings and Arrows”, two episodes of “Star Trek: Enterprise” (the mirror-universe episodes, natch), the Season 2 finale of “Leverage”, the Pixar animated short “Presto”, and two full-length films, “WALL-E” and “Sky High”. That's over six hours of video, more than enough to get me through any long stretch of otherwise soul-crushing boredom, assuming I have access to external power. (I highly doubt my nearly two-year old iPhone's battery would last through a video marathon of all the content I have on it.)

But this isn't all the video I have in iTunes. Thanks to the wonder that is Handbrake, I have the entire run of the Connections series, all the remaining episodes in seasons 1 and 2 of S&A, at least one episode each of the original series and Next Gen “Star Trek” series, and a couple more movies. While I could fit all that content on an iPad, I still couldn't watch all of it, but I could watch everything I currently pack on my iPhone, plus have about another three-to-four hours of battery left, based on estimates provided by reviewers.

Oh, and then there's the Netflix iPad app, and I am a paying subscriber to Netflix (it's how I watched much of Leverage over the past two seasons).

Watching video on iPhone isn't horrible– I've done it more than once while laying in bed, either at home or in a hotel room, and it's a decent experience. But the larger iPad screen opens up the possibility of a much better video experience, which while not necessary, is tempting and desirable. So again, clear upgrade over the existing technology.

Oh, yeah, iBooks. I've downloaded a number of e-book readers for iPhone (I have Stanza, eReader, and Kindle for iPhone all on my phone currently), and they all seem fine for what they do. The option of reading those books at a larger format size is interesting, but not compelling all by itself. What is compelling, though, is combining the iPad reader with the possibilities that an application like Calibre allows.

Calibre is to e-books what Handbrake is to digital video: a universal converter and translator. I have much of my D&D 3.5 gaming library in PDF format, thanks to a good friend, and the possibility of converting those PDFs to ePub format and being able to access them during a game on an iPad is compelling. Add in the iPhone Dicenomicon and SpellbookMaster apps, and I'm very close to being able to play an entire session of D&D using one piece of hardware, which is smaller and thus less obtrusive than the hulking Windows laptops other players bring to the table. That goes beyond compelling to 'wicked awesome' territory.

So yeah, I'd like to think I'd do a fair amount with an iPad.

Here's another facet of the conundrum: What would you do for network connectivity?

Part of the reason that the iPhone has been such a ludicrously useful device for me is that it allows me to stay connected to things in a way I hadn't imagined possible. It's a phone, so I can call people and they can call me. But it also allows me to connect to Twitter, and Facebook, and e-mail, and with a combination of e-mail polling (set to check my accounts every hour) and push notifications (for Facebook), I don't fear missing out on important communications, regardless of the format. And, in a real win, the integrated contact information that the Apple Contacts app provides means that I can track all of that information for each person I need to keep in touch with, and the iPhone can even help me by providing that information depending on which app I'm using (by, for instance, giving me Chip's e-mail address when I need to forward a GenCon hotel housing request to him).

Moving from an iPhone to an iPad would force me to lose some of that connectivity.

I could, as originally planned, wait for the 3G iPad, then sign up for the unlimited AT&T iPad contract-free data plan. Here I lose just the phone, along with the convenience of being able to dial the phone based on my stored contact information. Though my iPhone makes me a 3G superman, I have friends who still prefer more traditional technological communications, and so I'd miss not having the ability to call them.

More to the point, my iPhone is currently my only phone, so I'd have to either continue to use it, but mainly as a phone rather than a communications hub, or replace it with a less expensive phone.

Ihnatko's solution is Mi-Fi, the personal cellular modem that serves as a mobile Wi-Fi hotspot where ever you are. I'm not sure which provider he uses, but there are at least three providers in my area, which means I wouldn't necessarily be tied to AT&T (though the AT&T service has actually been pretty good, thanks to AT&T adding a cell tower in my neighborhood shortly after I bought the iPhone); I could go with Verizon (the provider for my original pre-paid cell, whose signal may still suck in my apartment) or Sprint (which I've never tried, and which also has announced that they're close to rolling out their new 4G network in the Twin Cities, so there'd be that) instead.

The bad news is that Mi-Fi, for me, would be a $60/month plus tax two-year commitment, and the Mi-Fi plans from Verizon and Sprint are not unlimited data plans.

Complicating the issue is that my employer has an arrangement with AT&T which allows me a discount on my iPhone plan; I'm currently paying less than $70 a month (including tax) for my iPhone service with unlimited data. Adding even an inexpensive phone to a Sprint Mi-Fi plan would cost more than the existing iPhone plan, and would provide me with less service.

If I had Mi-Fi, could I get rid of my $65 a month cable modem package? Maybe, if I was willing also to give up online gaming – the MiFi bandwidth limit would probably keep me from playing Magic: the Gathering Online or Star Trek Online to any appreciable degree (or run the risk of paying huge overage charges) – and also restrict myself from going nuts with the Netflix iPad app (which sort of defeats the purpose of getting excited about that app). So I'd be paying less per month under this paradigm, but getting way less satisfaction – part of the fun of having things set up the way they are now is being able to do things without worrying if I'm hitting bandwidth caps or download limits.

However, if I don't go with Mi-Fi, then I face a different problem. My employer will help me defray the cost of my iPhone plan, but won't allow me to connect my phone to their wireless network (and in all honesty, I probably don't want my phone on their network anyway, since the cellular network is far less restricted). But a 3G-less iPad, at work, would be a very nice looking piece of metal and glass that can only do things that already exist on the device, and that don't require any network connectivity. It wouldn't be a 'brick', per se, but it'd be way less useful than my current iPhone in the same environment. This wouldn't be a problem at home, or at the friend's place where I play D&D, but plenty of other places would become exercises in 'how much is it going to cost me, either financially, spiritually, or both, to get hooked into a Wi-Fi network here?' Again, that makes the iPad experience a far more conditional one than the one I have with my iPhone; the non-3G iPad is only 'insanely great' where I can get a Wi-Fi signal, whereas my iPhone is almost always awesome.

I'm not really worried about portability. See Ihnatko's article that describes the iPad as being about as obtrusive as a book or magazine, and though I'd want a bag to carry it in (I tend to drop books or magazines that I carry for long stretches at a time), I have just such a bag – the Israeli paratrooper bag I received as VIG swag at last year's GenCon.

And note Ihnatko's comments about accessibility – even with a laptop/netbook in sleep mode, you have to wait a bit for it to 'spin up', and then either spin it back down or wait for it to go back to sleep on its own, the latter of which tends to eat up precious minutes of battery life on non-useful functions. With the iPad, when you want it, zing! It's ready for you. When you're done, zoop! Away it goes without losing any extra juice. When you need it, you just use it, which is exactly the experience I expect after having owned an iPhone for nearly two years now.

The iPad handles basically everything I find good-but-not-awesome about my iPhone and makes it awesome. The challenge will be to find a way to get that without having to take half-a-step backward and turn something that's currently awesome on my iPhone back into good-but-not-awesome.

Paintball, Part the Fourth - Standing My Ground

Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result.
- Winston Churchill

Game Three: Civil War
Venue: some open field

After completing the VIP games, we moved to an open field next to the field where we played VIP and started a game that the referees refer to as 'Civil War'. The game consists of dividing into two teams. Each team then lines up on one side of the field, with the two lines anywhere from 100 to 150 feet apart, and each player in each line standing at least arm's length apart from the next player in line.

Each player on one line then fires a single shot at any player they choose in the other line. Anyone hit is eliminated, and any survivors get to return fire, again firing only a single shot. Any survivors after the exchange of fire take two large steps toward each other, then the process repeats until one team is entirely eliminated.

I discovered that the game isn't called 'Civil War' because the actual American Civil War was fought this way; this Napoleonic-era 'let's all stand in long lines and shoot each other' was used early, as part of the 'state of the art' in warfare, but was slowly abandoned after Gettysburg. The game is called Civil War because playing it reminds you of reading Civil War-era diaries and letters written by men describing what it felt like to have iron balls whizzing past their heads, and feeling as if you understand their sentiment.

Also, because both you and your target are stationary, Civil War is an ideal game to observe the aiming characteristics of your air-powered gun -- or, to be more accurate, the lack of aiming characteristics of most paintball guns. Begin with the ammunition: a small, hard pellet filled with liquid paint. There seem to be many ways for a paintball pellet to be unbalanced or lopsided in some way, even as the surface of the pellet is a uniform spheroid. For starters, the paint may not completely fill the interior of the pellet, resulting in an air pocket that leaves the pellet not of uniform density and weight. Or even if pellets without air pockets, tiny cracks can form that allow small amounts of air into the liquid center and cause some of the paint near the crack to congeal into semi-hard latex, also resulting in a lopsided interior. (Cracks don't appear to be terribly common, but are common enough that severe cracks can even cause a ball to break in its storage bag during shipping; the experienced paint-ballers among us warned that if we noticed a broken ball among our ammo, to simply throw out the ammo from that bag, as it would be difficult to determine which balls had been adulterated by having paint from the broken ball leak on them and thus become lopsided externally rather than internally. The guys running the paintball field took that opportunity to remind us that they didn't take exchanges on ammo.)

To the vagaries of the ammunition, then add the characteristics of the weapon. The standard rental paintball gun, as noted above, was something of the size of a submachinegun, having a barrel about two feet long or perhaps slightly longer. Unlike the barrels of actual guns, paintball gun barrels are not 'rifled'; that is, almost all guns made today have grooves cut into the barrels in a helical manner, so that the bullet traveling along the barrel is induced to spin, which provides something of a gyroscopic stability during flight and allows the bullet to stay on a true line longer, making it more accurate. I suspect paintball gun barrels are not rifled for two main reasons: first, since the ammunition is round, like a Civil War-era Minie ball, the rifling would have far less impact on the paintball than it would on a projectile shaped more like a bullet. (You can apparently purchase both rifled paintball gun barrels and vaguely bullet-shaped ammo to go with them, but these things are described as 'ridiculously expensive' even by the guys so much into paintball that they have their own guns, ammo with different colored paint, and camouflage clothing; i.e.: the guys who've clearly already invested hundreds and perhaps thousands of dollars into this hobby.) Second, on the rare occasion that a paintball pellet does burst in the barrel, having a rifled barrel would make the gun far more difficult to clean, and refusing to clean your own gun is tantamount to throwing it away; even a fairly tiny imperfection in the barrel can make it so that instead of firing high-velocity balls of paint at your enemies, you are instead firing a vague pink mist with virtually no effective range.

All this is a long-winded way of explaining why, when I fire a round during this game, I can watch it curve and curl off the path I intend for it to take. I am on a team that is eliminated once and is victorious once (though I am 'killed' in both games), and I can't be certain that any of the shots I fired in this game actually hit a target. The good news is that I fire barely over half a dozen rounds myself, and thus have still barely scratched my allotment of ammunition for the day.

Before moving on to the next game, I should also point out that this is the game that features the strangest of all injuries that happens today. Ed, an older fellow who is something of the designated 'sad sack' in any group he happens to be in, is hit in the throat by a ball during this game (which also points out the relative inadequacy of the safety equipment being used; everyone, including the veterans, is surprised at the location of the injury, as if nobody noticed that the facemasks provided by the paintball groundskeepers barely cover our jaws much less our throats). The injury provokes some concern at first -- I myself have visions of being hit in the Adam's apple, which then fractures and strangles me from within my own throat, slowly and horribly -- but once it's clear that only Ed's pride is seriously hurt, his wound, which has produced an angry red welt which, once cleared of paint, strangely resembles a livid vagina, is mockingly commented upon for the remainder of the day.

After the Civil War game, we pack up again and once more take the looooong hike back to the picnic tables, the compressor, and our stored gear. We are the only customers on the range today, so we're taking very casual care of our snacks and spare ammunition and other stuff, just leaving it all setting out at the tables while we're gone at one battleground or another. It makes us almost feel as though we own the place, which in a sense, we sort of do, at least for the next hour and a half.

Paintball, Part the Third - Game Time!

I probably should have seen this and certain other signs of impending humiliation...
- David Foster Wallace, "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again"

Game One: Elimination
Venue: Artillery Hill

There are a number of playing fields at the paintball grounds, though they generally break down into two types -- smaller, contained battlefields, and larger, more open battlefields. The open battlefields are more varied -- one is just an open field, while another is peppered with trees and the occasional foxhole or improvised embankment to hide in/behind -- while the closed fields tend toward relative sameness, measuring about 100 feet wide by anywhere from 150 to 200 feet long, and being littered with objects to use as cover, though the particular objects vary from field to field. (One field, which we don't play on all day, is being worked on by the people who aren't busy serving as our judges; they're inflating what look like seven-foot tall plastic-and-canvas cones, then filling the bases with water to create something like giant Weebles all over the field.)

Artillery Hill is the smallest fields we'll see today; it's called Artillery Hill because it's also one of the few fields with a pronounced slope.

The game is Elimination, and it's the simplest of all the games offered - divide into two teams, with each team taking one side of the field, then try to kill everybody on the other team.

We divide into two teams, and thus begin a trend that will last for most of the games we play that day -- the younger, more experienced players team up together, while the groom-to-be and his wedding party tend to team up on the other side. It doesn't take long until this is an official age-segregated division of sides, which the judges quickly simplify into 'Young Bucks' versus 'Elders'. I am chagrinned to note that there's no interpretation of my birthday that will allow me to finagle my way onto the Young Bucks, so I man-up and join the Elders. As the guest of honor (as well as probably the oldest person on the field), Senior is given the option of which side of the field to start on, and he, seemingly sensibly, chooses the higher ground, thinking to make the younger players have to come up the hill to engage us.

The judges call out the order to don our protective masks, then to remove the barrel bags from our weapons. Finally, they announce the game: "Starting a game of Elimination in 3...2...1..." Then a whistle is blown and the game officially begins.

Within what seems like 60 seconds, the whistle blows again and the Elders team is declared defeated. A brief post-mortem shows that we were unable to inflict even one casualty on our opponents.

It turns out that, on the upper slope, there is very little to hide behind, and almost nothing that a post-40-year old with a jumbo-sized ass and very little athleticism can hide behind, no matter how much he tries. Within a few seconds of the start of the game, I can hear the distinctive 'thump, thump' of the compressed air guns being fired. As I head toward a tree to hide behind, I hear a sharp crack and feel a jolt of pain on my right leg. When I look down, there's a blotch of orange paint there, and a judge who sees me immediately calls out, "Player is eliminated!" I haven't fired a single shot from my own weapon yet.

Once eliminated, you're supposed to raise your hand or make some other gesture to indicate to the other team that they shouldn't waste ammunition shooting at you while you make your way to the 'dead box', the imaginary zone in each battlefield where eliminated players wait for the game to end. It's not long before the game is called.

We decide to play another round, and this time the Elders are given the lower slope to defend. On the lower slope, there are barrels, a couple of concrete dividers like those used for highway construction, and even a half-buried sheet of plyboard that can be used as a makeshift fort.

In the second game, I also experience my first embarrassing moment of the day.

When the game begins, I quickly find my way to one of the concrete barriers, relieved that the sheer size of it is large enough to hide me from enemy fire. Peeking up over the top and around one side of the barrier (to avoid being a predictable target for enemies), I note that the Young Bucks are finding the upper slope as cover-bereft as we did in the first game, and that they're aggressively moving downslope trying to reach the better cover closer to us. I see someone trying to move in my direction, so I raise my weapon and fire.

The paintball ammunition provided to us is colored blaze orange, and thus it's not too difficult to pick up the ball as it leaves the barrel of the gun. The ball quickly passes out of sight, however, and it's impossible to see if my ball strikes home or not; I assume it doesn't, since the player doesn't stop moving until another volley of shots provokes a nearby judge into declaring him eliminated, and he walks toward the dead box to await the end of the game.

We seem to have an advantage, and I note that, if I can reach the other concrete barrier located closer to the center of the field, I can deny the other team access to a lot of cover they might otherwise try to occupy from upslope -- the angle of fire I can achieve from that barrier basically makes the other cover untenable, and though it would make my position untenable as well, at least I'd have the advantage of already being in position and being able, hopefully, to get off the first shots.

I fire off a few more rounds in the direction of what Young Bucks I can see, then lumber toward the next concrete barrier. As noted, I weigh over 300 pounds and am not athletic or 'in shape' by even a generously friendly definition, so perhaps it shouldn't be surprising that my speed isn't overwhelmingly quick. I do reach the barrier without being shot, however, but at that point find myself trying desperately to stop my lumbering advance, with the only object clearly available for the task being the concrete barrier in front of me. I hit it, and for a short, agonizing instant, it looks as though I'm about to knock it over, rendering my entire move pointless.

As it turns out, the thing that saves me is that my teammates have eviscerated the Young Bucks, and only one Buck remains on the field. He sees my predicament and sights his weapon to try to take me out, but the barrier mercifully rights itself and protects me from his fire. I sit behind the barrier, breathing heavily and not even venturing as much as a glance past the now-secure barrier until the judge blows the whistle and ends the game with our team of Elders victorious.

Though I've managed just a handful of shots, others have been firing much more freely, so we take a trip back to the compressor to recharge and allow people to access their stored supply of paintball ammo. One of the things I'd requested from the menu and wasn't denied was a belt containing three plastic containers in which ammo could be stored, in theory allowing for an empty weapon to be reloaded in the midst of battle. Sadly the belt is far too small for my Brobdingnagian frame, so the rental office gives me two belts which I snap together to make one gigantic belt, which is now just a bit too large to fit comfortably. I continue to try to wear it, though, since it has my spare ammo.

After reloading and recharging, we begin a long hike to the next field and the next game.

Game Two: VIP
Venue: ??

I don't actually catch the name of the next field, which we reach after an almost agonizingly long walk, but it's one of the more open fields, large and not obviously bounded, with a makeshift castle constructed of painted plyboard situated on one side. The castle gets some excited chatter going about possible siege games, but it turns out that only the judges end up using the castle while we're out here.

Senior is named the VIP, and is asked to name two bodyguards before having the rules of the game explained. Senior decides to choose his best man, Bruce, and the goatee-sporting younger guy whose name I never did catch but who's clearly the most experienced paintballer present.

The object of the game, it turns out, is for the VIP's team to get him safely from one side of the field to the other; even a single hit on the VIP kills him. The bodyguards are nigh-invulnerable (only a head-shot will kill them; the only explicit suggestion all day that aiming at the head is allowable much less encouraged), but can't go too far from the VIP, lest someone sneaky get past them and assassinate their charge.

The castle is about mid-way between the two ends of the field where the VIP must travel, but the area around the castle is pretty clear of cover save for the castle itself, which isn't the VIP's destination. Instead, the VIP and his team, once the game begins, head up the more forested side of the field, the bodyguards fanning out ahead of the VIP to flush anyone trying to wait in ambush. That's what I attempt to do, angling my way over to find a tree to hide behind where I might get a long-distance shot on the VIP, but it ends up that I don't need to worry -- Victor has managed to sneak around the bodyguards and blows Senior away from point-blank range, giving the first game to the attackers.

Senior is allowed to choose two additional bodyguards and we start again.

I try the same tactic, this time joined by Brandon, a guy I know from playing 4th edition D&D at his place a few times. When the larger party of bodyguards arrives, following the same forested path as before, they quickly mass their fire to eliminate Brandon. Seeing the effect of their massed fire, I turn to find a better hiding place, and am again betrayed by my lack of physical condition -- I just fall over in mid-stride, my gun pinwheeling off into space to land about 15 feet away from me as I go down on my back. Realizing I'm alone and unarmed and not wanting to get savaged by massed volleys of paintball fire, I raise my hand and a nearby judge pronounces me out of the game.

Two fields, two embarrassments. Total number of shots fired in two games of VIP: zero.

As we head to a nearby field for the next game, I begin to wonder if I made a wise decision coming along for this.

Paintball, Part the Second - Safety First!

'"Ah," said Arthur, "this is obviously some strange usage of the word safe that I wasn't previously aware of."'
- Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"

It turns out that this particular paintball field requires only two pieces of safety equipment: a face mask, and something called a 'barrel bag'. The latter is a small bag made of some heavy canvas-like material, and that is attached to some sort of bungee cord which allows the bag to be put over the barrel of the paintball gun and then held there by pulling the bungee cord over the top of the gun and wrapping around the back of the gun. While this doesn't prevent the gun from being fired, it does cause the paintball expelled from a 'live' gun to break in the bag, which does two things:

• prevents the ball from sailing out and hitting anybody who's not expecting to be shot, and
• really irritates whoever is going to be responsible for cleaning the gun you just fired.

Along with the safety briefing comes a review of the 'menu' options available to those of us who need to rent equipment. The good news is that there are plenty of options, including upgrades to the standard gun and goggles, as well as options to buy extra paintballs, a kelly green set of plastic coveralls, and a set of white cotton mesh gloves.

Although I mark all of these options, by the time I get to the ordering desk I'm informed that a) the rental shop doesn't have any of the gun upgrades, and b) the coveralls and gloves, which otherwise seem really useful for someone who doesn't have his own apparel, come only in sizes that are apparently meant for children -- one of the other older participants, name of Dan, picks up the largest 'XL' size of coverall, and it's a near-perfect fit for his 5-foot, 6-inch, 160-pound frame.

We're also introduced to the air compressor while we're assembling our gear; the compressor is what's used to provide the accelerant for the paintballs to be fired from the gun.

At this point, it'll be worthwhile to describe the actual rental guns. They look what I, in a lifetime of playing modern-era and near-future role-playing-games like Top Secret and Twilight 2000 imagine a submachine gun would look like if, instead of a standard gun stock, the butt of the gun consisted of a small propane bottle. The bottle allows air to be stored at pressures of up to 3000 psi, and it's a little intimidating to realize that, once the pressure drops as low as 1500 psi (which is still 100 times normal atmospheric pressure), the performance of the paintball gun will likely be 'impaired' enough so that I'll want to come back and recharge the air bottle (at least, according to the guys running the intro lecture). It's also a little intimidating to hear JR ask if the compressor can pump up to 4500 psi, since that's what his custom weapon's bottle can handle; it turns out that 4500 psi isn't supported at this site, to JR"s disappointment (and much relief from the rest of us).

The weirdest thing about safety on the paintball field, though, is that there's no admonition about places not to shoot -- you're not told to avoid aiming at somebody's facemask or groin, and in fact it turns out that, of the different scenarios we play that day, there's one where there's an implicit suggestion that aiming for the face is not just kosher, but good tactics, and a different one where the head is explicitly the only place on the target where a valid hit can be scored. (This seems particularly bizarre to folks I talk to later who've played paintball in an era where aiming for the head could get you expelled from the site, especially given that helmets are not required. I can only assume the 3000 psi restriction has something to do with it, or perhaps 'modern' paintball is more of a bloodsport than previous generations were comfortable with.)

We are informed that we can be expelled for not obeying the orders of a paintball judge -- there are four such guys dressed in the zebra-striped shirts of American football referees -- and that the judges will tell us when we can remove our barrel bags and when we must don our facemasks. They do their best to seem stern with these warnings, though unfortunately all the judges labor under the handicap of being the youngest men present on the field, and certainly less than half the age of the guest of honor.

As we prepare to head to 'Artillery Hill' for the first game, I get an odd feeling not unlike the feeling I often get while setting up a game of Talisman, a fantasy-themed board game that I've seldom finished with an equal or greater number of friends than I started.

Paintball, Part the First - With Apologies to David Foster Wallace, Wherever He is

Striking thing (b) turns out to be an illusion, one not unlike the illusion I'd had about the comparative easiness of golf from watching golf on TV before I'd actually ever tried to play golf.
- David Foster Wallace, "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again"

Right now it's Sunday, 11:08 PM Central Daylight Time, and I'm sitting at my computer keyboard trying to summon up all the moments of triumph, pain (often literal), and embarrassment that accompanied my foray, the afternoon prior, into the world of amateur paintball. (1)

I was invited to participate in this gathering of paintball enthusiasts because it was being held as part of an all-day bachelor party for a friend, whom I generally refer to as Senior. (2) And so, just before 11am on Saturday morning, I drove my car onto Highway 77 headed south toward Lakeville, MN (3), and the MN Pro Paintball Grounds.

After a brief hiccup with directions, I find myself turning onto a dirt road that advertises the patch to MN Pro Paintball, and am almost immediately presented with a sign containing a stern warning that, if I do not have business along this road, I may be considered a trespasser and prosecuted to the full extent of the law. (4) Undaunted, I drive down the bumpy dirt road, eventually finding my way to the parking lot and the group of men waiting for their chance to play paintball.

The group of guys standing around the parking lot can be roughly divided into two groups; those who know Senior himself and are friends with him, who tend to be older, and those who know Senior mainly through his son JR, and who tend to be closer to JR's age. As I get out of the car and join the growing scrum of weekend warriors, it's clear that there's another broad division that can be made: those who've played paintball before, all of whom have their own camouflage apparel and some of whom have their own compressed-air paintball guns, and those who haven't, who are dressed in various grungy-looking outfits ranging from jeans and a leather jacket to sweatpants. (5)

The invitation asked us to arrive between 11:00 and 11:30 AM, and since it is almost exactly 11:30 AM, I fear I am holding up the party. It turns out, though, that neither the best man nor the groom-to-be himself have arrived yet, so we all stand around in the late morning chill and shoot the shit.

One young man in particular catches my attention quickly. He's not someone I've met before, and ends up being a friend of JR's. What attracts my attention is that he's already dressed head-to-toe in the traditional forest camouflage colors of the Army Rangers, and while we wait he opens the trunk of his car to reveal his own paintball gun as well as an entire case of extra paintball pellets, purchased at the 'pro shop' run by the same guys who run the grounds -- apparently it is cheaper to purchase your ammunition in the 'pro shop' than to wait until buying extra rounds at the site. This guy (whose name I never do get straignt) encourages the rest of us to get together in groups of four to purchase an additional case and split the 2000 balls between us; apparently the rental package covers only 200 rounds of ammunition, which this guy warns us probably won't last very long.

Eventually the best man, named Bruce, and Senior himself arrive, and the group of us head down to a convenient group of picnic tables to hear the safety briefing and complete our rental packages.

---

(1) - Anyone reading this who is quite well-read may recognize this as an homage, of sorts, to the opening of David Foster Wallace's essay, "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again," which begins in the Fort Lauderdale coffee shop while he's waiting for a flight to take him home to Chicago after having just completed a seven-night Caribbean Luxury Cruise on which he was sent by the editors of Harper's magazine. Wallace's essay is one of my favorite pieces of writing, ever, and while I'm certain there's no chance I can match it for length (it runs over 100 pages in his book of published essays, the book taking its title from the title of this particular essay, and when I recently decided to record it as an amateur audiobook as a gift for a friend, the audio ran nearly four full hours) and little chance I can match it for clarity and insight (you'll have to read it for yourself, as there's no chance I can do the thing justice in any kind of summary that would fit between parenthesis on a blog), I couldn't help but be reminded of it time and again in the past day-and-a-half or so since leaving the paintball grounds. If Wallace's consciousness survives in some afterlife that's aware of events on Earth (Wallace committed suicide just over a year-and-a-half ago), I hope he's at least a bit tickled by the homage.

(2) - The friend's actual name is John Corbett, Senior, which distinguishes him from his son, John Corbett, Junior, the latter whom organized and sent out the invitations to the paintball extravaganza. Those of us who refer to Senior as 'Senior' are generally those who've met him through one of his gaming hobbies, either D&D Miniatures or something similar; his family and 'older' friends call him 'Jack', since Senior doesn't like to be called 'John'. Senior's son also doesn't like to be called 'John', nor does he like to be called 'Junior', so we refer to him as 'JR'.

(3) - Lakeville is one of the well-to-do exurbs of the Twin Cities, built up by developers to accommodate upper-middle class white people fleeing as far away from the urban center as they can get while still being able to commute to their jobs within the inner ring of Twin Cities suburbs, or possibly downtown Minneapolis or St. Paul itself. The paintball ground is not the most apposite symbol of the odd combinatorial sense of privilege and fear that drives people to live here (at least, those who haven't lived here their entire lives), for reasons that will become clear later; the best symbol of the kind of people who choose to live out here would be the Celebration Church, a mega-church affiliated with the World Assemblies of God Fellowship and thus Pentecostal. The church building faces Interstate 35 and has a huge, ornate facade, looking oddly like a casino as I drive past looking for my exit.

(4) - It turns out that it's not the paintball guys who are responsible for the signage; they lease the grounds from the owners, who run a tree farm on the site, and the large quantity of pine trees on the site leads me to believe (though I never actually get confirmation) that the signage is meant to deter those people who'd poach Christmas trees from the site.

(5) - The latter outfit is part of my own apparel; JR noted in his e-mail invitation that one shouldn't wear anything one thought highly of, so I'm decked out in an old pair of black sweatpants and a grey cotton sweatshirt that boldly reads "U.S. Polo Association" along the chest, the much quieter label behind the collar, however, shows that the shirt itself was made in Pakistan. My only concession to camouflage is the forest-green shirt by Faded Glory (a Wal-Mart imprint, purchased a few years earlier in Kansas City and no longer really fitting) that mostly covers the sweatshirt. As it turns out, sweatpants were not a terribly intelligent choice of apparel for playing paintball on damp fields covered in dead grass exposed by melted winter snow, of which more later.

I Am Not Metal

Frost giants are extraordinarily metal, and being metal is always good.

Interestingly, slaying frost giants is also metal--even more metal than being a frost giant. And therein lies a great insight into the nature of metal.

- Zak S., "Playing D&D With Porn Stars"

If there's anything metal about playing Dungeons and Dragons, it would have to be running a home-brew campaign for a table consisting almost entirely of female porn stars. So for starters, bravo to you, Zak S.

I, on the other hand, play a lot of D&D with people who aren't porn stars, though one of the groups I play with is a group I've been gaming with for nearly 20 years now. That's still probably not metal, but I suspect in some circles it has to at least be praiseworthy.

The thing that convinced me of my non-metalness, though, wasn't that I don't look up from my character sheet and see Justine Joli on the other side of the table, but rather because my D&D character has changed over the past year-and-a-half since I told you all about him last.

Yes, it's another post about my D&D character: run for your lives.

A brief recap: Rennal is an elf whose childhood and adolescence** was spent as the psychic plaything of alien intelligences, who, when they finally tired of him, broke him to the point where he killed his father. The elf community who tried him for this crime did not believe him when he claimed to have been manipulated by these aliens, and they forced him to take the surname Maiavar as a sign of his outcast state.

** - If the 3.5 Player's Handbook is to be believed, elves become adults just as humans are reaching their maximum possible 'venerable' age.

At the time I wrote about Rennal, he had just learned how to cast fireball. A being who'd been manipulated by soulless alien intelligence for as long as a human lifetime, and as a result had been cut off from his family and culture, has just learned how to cast an explosive ball of flame.

That, I'd think, has the potential to be extremely metal.

As it turned out, the composition of the party aided him in this. The party also contained a druid who, at that time, was focusing on summoning magic. Another character was a beguiler -- a sort of illusionist/trickster who focuses on mind-manipulation, but who also has a reasonably large stock of utility magic. With summoning, illusions, and utility magic all handled by other party members, Rennal was thus free to focus on being a pure 'blaster mage'; throwing fire around like it was...well...water. In one particular adventure, when the party was ambushed by a group of frost giants who started tossing down rocks from a snowy overhang, Rennal responded by effectively re-enacting the 'napalm in the morning' scene from Apocolypse Now, lighting up the entire ridgeline with fire, then following up with specific-target fire spells to drive the giants into submission. Given the quote at the intro, if Rennal had a Crowning Moment of Metal, that probably would have been it.

Time passed, though, as it always does, and the party changed.

The beguiler left the party, specifically because the beguiler's player finally got tired of having to deal with another player whose playstyle he didn't appreciate, so he left the campaign. The druid slowly changed over from summoning magic to his own category of blaster magic, focusing on the two spells he remembered from Advanced Dungeons & Dragons as being 'awesome' damaging spells.

Rennal has also continued to grow in power since that time. Now, however, he uses his vast arcane might to serve as the team's hypersonic transport and magical item identifier. Oh, and he throws the occasional buff spell on the party fighters to keep the pressure off the 'back ranks'.

If I were metal, I wouldn't care that the party has specific needs that aren't being met and that another character is horning in on my 'schtick' as the bringer of nuclear fire; I'd just go on as before, proving again and again that Rennal has the biggest balls of fire on the planet. But I'm not. I'm giving up the spotlight, letting others have their moments in the sun, and only occasionally showing hints of the unbridled might I could have had, had I been as selfish as the other players at my table.

No, I am not metal. And that's part of the problem.

Favorite Movies of the Past Nine Years - #1

I don't think there will be a return journey, Mr. Frodo.
- Sam Gamgee (Sean Astin)

#1 - The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2004)

One way to tell whether I liked a movie, and I think this is probably true of most people, is to ask how many times I saw the movie in the theater. It's not a perfect measure -- two of my all-time favorites, "The Princess Bride" and "Casablanca" were not seen in the theater (though at least in the latter case, I have an excuse, since I was born about 25 years after the initial theatrical run), but for movies of recent vintage especially, when I have ample opportunity to just wait until the DVD comes out, even if it's a movie I'd otherwise be interested in, it's a mark of some merit that I'm convinced to see the thing more than once in the theater.

Interestingly enough, four of the movies on this list were not seen in the theater at all. Four others were seen once. Only two were seen more than once:

• WALL-E, which I saw three times, and

• this movie, which I saw at least four times in its opening week.

By this measure, it's arguable whether WALL-E or daylight finishes second.

Why I liked it

I could recap the things I said in the capsule reviews of the other two LotR movies on this list, but rather than do that, I'll stick with just the things about this movie that struck home for me.

- Bernard Hill as King Theoden of Rohan really comes into his own in this movie, from his question to Aragorn near the start of the movie ("Tell me, why should we ride to the aid of those who did not come to ours?"), his reversal of his own question when Gondor does finally call for aid (through Merry's climbing skill and trickery), and his speech before his troops before their charge into battle on the Pellennor Fields. The best moment, though, the moment where it's clear that he's chosen a warrior's fate and will bring all under his command to that fate or they will not be warriors, is his comment to his lieutenant shortly after Aragorn leaves to try to recruit the spirits of the mountain to join his ranks:

Gamling: Too few have come. We cannot defeat the armies of Mordor.
Theoden: No, we cannot. But we will meet them in battle nonetheless.

It is my belief that the truest test of honor is the willingness to spend oneself in a necessary cause, even if that expenditure might not bring about success. Only cowards seek battle merely because they're sure they can win.

- David Wenham as Faramir also gets a great turn in this movie. Short-changed a bit in the screenplay for Two Towers (as noted in that recap, in the books, Faramir does resist the lure of the Ring when it's presented to him, making him Aragorn's equal in this; in the movie, Faramir has to have the consequences of claiming the Ring demonstrated to him at Osgiliath before he comes to his senses and lets the hobbits go), he makes up for it here by showing both honor and ultimate loyalty, taking his men on a suicidal charge against the orcs occupying Osgiliath simply because his father orders him to do so, and knowing that his father seems to want him dead.

Where does my allegiance lie if not here?

I'd like to think that the 'reunited at the foot of the cliffs leading to the Fireswamp' scene between Buttercup and Westley in The Princess Bride is a call-out to the burgeoning romance between Faramir and Eowyn, which is given short shrift in the books, but is clear given their behavior when Aragorn, after being made King, puts the two of them together in lordship over Rohan. The movies, sadly, don't treat this any better, but on the other hand, since they were already cutting vast stretches of the books, adding in new material would have been profoundly difficult, I understand.

- The 'big themes' are more visible at the end of the tale.

Way back in the initial recap, when discussing the critical backlash against the trilogy of late, I quoted a fellow who claimed that the LotR series didn't really have anything to say about larger themes, but was just a story about elves and hobbits. I pointed out a couple of items there to try to refute his point, but it's here, at the end of the tale, where you can really see some of the bigger themes, such as...

Ambition, while not evil in itself, can make one into a tool of evil

We, the children of the Reagan era and the internet bubble, have been told pretty much all our lives that if we want something, we need to strive and strive hard for it, and never let anybody get in the way of your goals. The difference between a champion and a loser is that the champion wants it more. Blah, blah, blah.

This trilogy teaches something very different: every character whose ambition extends beyond himself fails to achieve that ambition, and most come to a bad end:

• Saruman, though it's clearer in the books than in the films, joins with Sauron to gain knowledge as well as power; he ends up dead at the start of the third film, impaled on his own water wheel. (He survives in the books, but goes on to orchestrate the Scouring of the Shire -- the movies are able to skip that (save for a few harrowing insights that Frodo gleans from Galadriel) by killing him off instead.)
• Wormtongue's ambition is to gain influence, power, and comfort by serving Saruman, specifically in subverting Rohan; he wants Eowyn's hand as payment for his labors. He ends up alive, but utterly friendless; Eowyn forever lost to him.

• Denethor's ambition is to rule the lands of Men in the absence of a king; Sauron uses Aragorn's very existence as a poison pill, not to get Denethor to join, but rather to leave Gondor weak and unable to resist Mordor. Denethor also believes that bringing the Ring to Gondor will turn the tide in Gondor's favor, but he refuses to see (as Faramir does at Osgiliath) that the Ring will doom rather than save Gondor. He ends up having sent both sons to their deaths, though one survives, barely, and goes mad realizing that he nearly burned that survivor on a pyre. He flings himself from the highest point of Minas Tirith, presumably to his death.
• Boromir's ambition is the only one that can truly be described as noble; he wants to preserve Gondor from darkness, and believes that fulfilling his father's mission and bringing the Ring to Gondor will accomplish that. The Ring still uses that ambition to corrupt him, to the point where he nearly kills Frodo and takes the Ring from him. In the end, Boromir realizes his error, but still pays the ultimate price; he dies trying to save Merry and Pippin, and fails, yet his distraction allows Frodo and Sam to slip away with the Ring, keeping it out of the hands of Saruman's Uruk-Hai.

Nearly every other character begins with a simple ambition, if any. Sam wants only to serve Frodo, at least until the end of the quest, when his chief ambition becomes to marry Rosie (he does)**. Merry and Pippin join on a lark, participate in mighty events, and return to the Shire as heroes. Aragorn resists the draw of the kingship of Gondor again and again until finally forced to stand up against Sauron and fight; he, of course, ends up with everything at the end. Theoden, after his rescue from the grip of Saruman, wants only to find a good death; he does, in the arms of the person he loves best in the world.

** - The role of rejection of overweening ambition in resisting the lure of the Ring is even clearer in the books -- in the movie, when Sam rescues Frodo from the tower at the edge of Mordor, he hesitates when handing the Ring back to Frodo. In the books, it's made clear that Sam is having a vision -- the Ring is attempting to seduce Sam with a vision of Samwise the Great, mightly hero. Sam, of course, knowing he's not a mighty hero, finally shakes off the vision and is able to give the Ring back to Frodo.

Frodo's case is interesting, though -- at first, he merely wants to be of service to Gandalf, carrying the Ring to Bree where he is to meet Gandalf in secret. When Gandalf doesn't show, he carries the Ring onward to Rivendell at Aragorn's behest, then volunteers to carry the Ring further to Mordor once it's clear that no one else will carry out the task at hand. Yet in the end, the Ring seduces him, and he succumbs to his ambition to own the Ring right on the doorstep of its destruction; only a greater ambition to own the Ring than Frodo's own can take the Ring from him, resulting in its destruction anyway. But both Frodo and Bilbo have been tainted by their association with the Ring, and both end up traveling with the elves and Gandalf away from Middle-Earth, though the departure is portrayed as positive for both hobbits.

Even the very wise cannot see all ends

Gandalf even has a line to this effect in the first film, and the obvious pay-off for this line comes once Frodo has succumbed to the lure of the Ring; only Gollum, who could have been killed many times before if rasher heads had their way, ends up ensuring the Ring's destruction, though not in any way he intends.

The same theme echoes throughout the series, though. Theoden thinks Rohan is alone when resisting Saruman's forces at Helm's Deep, only to be shocked by the arrival of elvish archers to honor the ancient alliance between elves and men. Aragorn, Gimli, and Legolas think they are about to face Saruman in Fangorn Forest, but discover that instead, this White Wizard is Gandalf, returned from certain death. Eowyn, finding while in camp that she will neither achieve glory (as her uncle Theoden orders her to remain behind to rule Rohan after his death) nor Aragorn's love (who still carries a torch -- and a necklace -- for Arwen), steals away with the army to find her own death; she ends up finding both glory (in slaying the Witch-King) and love (with Faramir), as well as being able to comfort her uncle in his last moments of life.

There is a lot going on in this trilogy, and anyone who can't see it is willfully refusing to see it. I may not be any kind of film expert, but Jackson's (and his collaborators') achievement is amazing, and the trilogy as a whole and this final chapter in it in particular is my favorite since the turn of the calendar in 2001.

Favorite Movies of the Past Nine Years - #2

Autopilot: On the Axiom, you will survive.
Captain MacCrea: I don't want to survive. I want to live!

#2 - WALL-E (2008)

You have to wonder, sometimes, if people really understand the things they're seeing.

Take, for instance, Pixar Animation Studios, the makers of Toy Story 2, A Bug's Life, Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Up, and this movie.

Every one of these movies was well-received. Every one of these movies had a sizable 'kid' audience (though in 'Up's case, there was some complaining that the movie wasn't nearly as kid-friendly as they'd come to expect of a Pixar film); as if to underscore the point, every one of Pixar's film with the exceptions of Up and The Incredibles was rated 'G' by the MPAA, with the latter two being rated 'PG' (and none were rated as 'highly' as PG-13).

And every single one of these movies has moments of almost unbelievable bleakness and despair:

• In Toy Story 2, there's an entire song devoted to the moment where Jesse the Yodeling Cowgirl's owner didn't want to play with her anymore, and that moment so scars Jessie that she allows that feeling to justify her existence as a sealed-away collectible on a museum shelf.
• In A Bug's Life, the entire plot is driven off of the knowledge that, if the ants don't drive off the bullying grasshoppers that are extorting them, they'll all die -- either murdered by the grasshoppers themselves, or left to starve in the winter after the grasshoppers have taken the rest of the ants' food.
• In Finding Nemo, the main characters are two clownfish that are the only survivors of a predatory attack by a larger fish that resulted in the deaths of not only the mother clownfish, but every other egg in her clutch.
• The Incredibles features a villainous plot where the main bad guy, as a result of being forsaken by the heroic Mr. Incredible, devises a plan by which he not only secretly murders other superheroes, but will eventually make the entire idea of superheroes obsolete, complete with the catchphrase, "When everybody's special, nobody will be."
• Up, of course, is one of the saddest and bleakest films Pixar has ever made, with a protagonist whose main motivation though the first two-thirds of the movie is to get his house to a particular place in South America so he can die there. (Don't believe me? Well, it's not like there are any grocery stores near Angel Falls, at least not as it's portrayed in the film. And while the protagonist's hero has survived in the area for decades, that hero also has a horde of intelligent dogs to do his hunting (and cooking!) for him; no such assistance is forthcoming for the protagonist, at least that he foresees.)

Even the now-famous Pixar Intro, featuring a bouncy desk lamp named Luxo, Jr., is capable of being interpreted bleakly.

The supreme irony is that this company, responsible for some of the bleakest moments in all of animated cinema, has entirely replaced the classic Disney animation studio, renowned for, among other things, hardly ever being bleak.

Why I liked it

True to the Pixar form, WALL-E contains a number of moments of bleakness.

Begin with WALL-E himself, who as we see has survived his 700-year mission of cleaning up Earth (or at least the area around ersatz New York City) by cannibalizing broken-down versions of himself. We later see that he has plenty of parts from other WALL-E's, arguably enough to make an entire additional WALL-E, yet the only other thing on Earth with which WALL-E interacts is a cockroach, who WALL-E treats as a pet.

WALL-E's mission, of course, is to clean up the Earth while humans are away enjoying the luxuries of 'executive starliners'; when we finally meet the jewel of that fleet, we discover that nobody particularly seems disturbed by going on year 700 of an original 5-year trip.

While still on Earth, WALL-E meets -- and falls for -- EVE, a fancy-looking robot who nevertheless is violently paranoid and has anger-management issues, at least when we first meet her.

Lastly, in getting humanity back to Earth, WALL-E himself is beaten up to the point of near destruction, and ends up posing the philosophical Ship of Theseus question in an ending which is arguably much too intense for small kids to really handle, and I'm sure led to many more uncomfortable driving-home conversations than most parents really anticipated.

Let's quickly touch on my other personal love-buttons, as noted in previous posts in this series:

• Protagonist not an uber-competent warrior but rather a 'regular guy': check (though one could argue that EVE is as much protagonist as WALL-E, and she manages to get quite a bit done, it is WALL-E who originally finds the plant and shows it to EVE, triggering the main conflict of the story)
• Juvenalian satire of commonly-accepted 'truth': check (to wit, the idea that capitalism will naturally make us all healthier, happier, and leave us with a better world than we started with)
• 'Hey, it's that voice!' moments: Not just Sigourney Weaver as the voice of the ship's computer (which also makes a humorous contrast with her role in GalaxyQuest) and John Ratzenberger as John, but also MacInTalk, the Macintosh's text-to-speech software, as the voice of the autopilot
• Science-fiction connections: check (the story itself takes place over 700 years in Earth's future, but is also, as noted by Matthew Battles on the Encyclopedia Brittanica blog, a re-formulation of a turn-of-the-20th century science fiction story by E.M. Forster, "The Machine Stops"; this may, in fact, be more significant than it first appears -- see below)

Oh, yeah, one other thing: the juxtaposition of conflicting emotional images. Consider the end of the movie, with WALL-E restored and Captain MacCrea jubilantly explaining to the kids watering the plant that brought the humans home how they'll grow all kinds of plants as they grow up, as a triumphant orchestral snippet goes on in the background, eventually giving way to Peter Gabriel's "Down to Earth" as the end credit theme. Then recall that the beginning of the movie featured the jaunty "Put On Your Sunday Clothes" from the musical Hello, Dolly! as we approached Earth and discovered a barren, sepia-colored wasteland.

Oh, and remember the reference to Forster's "The Machine Stops" above? That story ends with the machine-addled 'civilization' falling apart as the machines that maintain it break down, with the machine-dependent humans dying off in favor of "The Homeless", those exiled from machine-enabled society for questioning it, some of whom manage to find a way to survive on a bleak and desolate Earth, and who inherit it with the collapse of machine-addled society. Now go back and re-read the exchange between the autopilot and the Axiom's captain that leads off this essay.

Still think this movie has an unabashedly upbeat ending?

Favorite Movies of the Past Nine Years - #3

When dealing with aliens, try to be polite, but firm. And always remember that a smile is cheaper than a bullet.
- Automated MNU Instructional Voice (uncredited)

#3 - District 9 (2009)

Yes, not only did I think this was the third-best movie I've seen since the start of 2001, I think it's the best movie I've seen all year; thus, it would have gotten my Oscar vote. (More on this in a post to come.)

Also, for the record, this particular write-up is spoilerrific, so here's the obligatory SPOILER WARNING.

Why I liked it

OK, have you not noticed by now the trend of SF/fantasy films in this list? If not, then I guarantee that the last two are going to shock the heck out of you.

I noted in my previous write-up that Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind was SF, but not Asimovian societal-impact level SF. Well, this one is. Basically, the gimme question at the opening of the film is, what might have happened if aliens appeared over Johannesburg in 1982?

That's the gimme question -- the one the audience is supposed to allow you for free. One of the cool things about District 9 is that the film also proposes other questions, many of which it doesn't answer, leaving the audience to try to figure that out for themselves:

Why do the Prawns just sit in their ship, even when it's obvious that they're starving?

This isn't answered, and isn't even really addressed in the film, except that it becomes the justification to put the newly 'rescued' Prawns into District 9, originally intended as a temporary settlement where emergency care could be provided, immediately under the alien ship, but which, after nearly 30 years, has become an institutional slum to the point where MNU, the multinational corporation that has taken 'responsibility' for District 9, decides that the aliens need to be relocated.

(My own pet theory is that what we see isn't actually the entirety of the ship -- when the officers and other Prawn elites realized that the ship was running low on fuel, they made a decision to detach a smaller command-style module which could make it back to the Prawn homeworld, taking as many of their own as they could and leaving behind the equivalent of Douglas Adams's Golgafrichan B-Ark dwellers to fend for themselves -- except for one ethical scientist who chose to remain with the swabbies in the hopes of being able to find a way to synthesize enough fuel on Earth to be able to get the rest of the aliens home as well. As you'll see, this explanation works for other unanswered questions as well.)

Why don't the Prawns just use their uber-weapons and take over?

Though Wikus eventually demonstrates how much cool a Prawn battle-suit is capable of, and does so after basically zero training, it's also clear that a concerted effort by 'inferior' terrestrial military technology can overcome it. It's also likely that any Prawn that had such an idea was dealt with when he first started acting up, which would also tend to explain

a) why MNU goes into District 9 with military escort every time they go in force, and

b) why the Prawns seem so subdued and 'broken' as a race; they're accustomed to having the humans knock the rebellion out of them, regardless of how much it costs them

(It's also possible, given my own theory, that just about everyone who'd be capable of masterminding such a military operation left with the command module; showing these aliens overcoming a superior multi-national military force would be the 21st-century equivalent of having a bunch of rural high-school kids hold off the Soviet Army.)

It's also suggested, in the scene where the MNU guys torch a hovel that's hosting a Prawn hatchery, that MNU deliberately tries to keep the Prawn population down specifically to keep them from becoming numerous enough to develop into an organized military threat.

Also, the scene gets in a nice twist on the traditional abortion debate. On one hand, abortion foes will appreciate that the scene raises ethical hackles even in pro-choice viewers as Wikus explains that, while they don't kill the Prawn children, the eggs are fair game. On the other hand, the act itself doesn't fall anywhere on the existing abortion debate spectrum -- what MNU is doing is the equivalent of compulsory abortion, not the sort of abortion that pro-choice advocates...well...advocate for. (Consider the very different emotional message that would be present if MNU had been invited to destroy the hatchery by a Prawn couple who said they couldn't afford to raise the hatchlings.)

The fact that the film doesn't feel the need to tie up every single loose end, but leaves some things unexplained (though with plausible explanations that the audience can then discuss later) is a very big part of the attraction of this film for me. The film expects that its audience will want to interact intellectually with the world that it's presenting rather than trying to handwave or techno-babble away everything that would interfere with having a nice, neat, packaged ending. It's a movie that presupposes an audience that's looking for something more than just passive entertainment, and as such it doesn't insult or belittle the audience's intelligence.

Well, maybe it does, for a few folks. After all, one of the biggest criticisms of District 9 is that it once again, at least in the minds of some viewers, presents the 'white people are inherently evil and dominating' trope that many, especially on the right, find condescending and insultingly 'politically correct'. All I can say to these folks is, do you not notice that the Prawns are taken advantage of by the Nigerians every bit as much as they are by the white scientists and middle-managers of MNU? It's an example of people deliberately looking for a reason to be upset, rather than people identifying a real flaw in the film. (Or do you want to argue that power hierarchies don't actually form where different societies are in close proximity?)

The other, and frankly even more irritating criticism of District 9 is that it's just Avatar with a less-expensive skin; both are about white guys who enter an alien culture and ultimately save the day.

This, frankly, is borderline insulting. Anybody paying attention should be able to see that Avatar and District 9 are very different films:

- Avatar features a damaged human who travels to an alien world where he interacts with the local culture and learns their ways. Ultimately, he falls in love with one of the aliens, becomes one of them, and delivers them from the human interlopers on their world. In the end, he finds redemption and healing.

- District 9 features a clueless human who travels to an alien slum ensconced within a human world, obliviously bemoaning that the aliens don't seem to have a culture. He is exposed to a chemical that slowly begins to transmogrify him into an alien, which separates him from his human love. His transformation makes him the target of every human power bloc in the area, and must hide out in the alien slum, where he reluctantly becomes party to a plot to try and get one alien (and his son) away from the slum to, maybe, deliver the rest of the aliens trapped on Earth. In the end, he is lost to humanity (the film uses a documentary style as a device, and ends with the admission that no human knows the true fate of the protagonist, though some have theories), and only time will tell if he can ever go back to being even part of what he once was.

So, yeah, both guys turn into aliens. That makes them exactly the same fucking movie.

Lastly, this movie does in spades something I touched upon in my write-up of Fellowship of the Ring: the protagonist of the film, Wikus Van Der Merwe, is not a hyper-competent action hero who wins every fight and rises above every challenge through his sheer awesomeness. At the start of the film, he's an arguably incompetent middle-manager who holds his position through nepotism rather than any shred of talent, and it's that very incompetence that makes the initial crisis, from which all other action in the movie flows, possible and believable. Yet his experiences allow him, even if just for a moment, to become the kick-ass action hero the story needs at the climax, where the fate of Christopher Johnson and his plan to rescue the aliens stranded on Earth is decided. I wrote somewhere (but now can't find it) that, while I didn't know at the time how good District 9 was as a movie, I did know that it was exactly the kind of story I wish I'd been involved with making.

That last is really the only reason I need to rank this movie #3; everything else is just details.

Favorite Movies of the Past Nine Years - #4

Why do I fall in love with every woman who shows me the least bit of attention?
- Joel Barish (Jim Carrey)

#4 - Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)

Why I liked it

Man, how many reasons are you gonna need for this one? Let's get started:

It's actual science fiction.

We live in an age where 'sci-fi movie' immediately means 'CGI effects'. (See 'Avatar'.) And on one hand, this movie does have CGI effects. But it also has far more traditional effects, and the CGI effects don't overwhelm either the non-CGI effects or the movie itself.

But more to the point, the movie is science fiction because it follows the golden rule of science fiction: take a world very much like our own, ask the question "what if (this thing) were different in some way?", and figure out, as closely as possible, what happens because of that. In Eternal Sunshine's case, the question is, what if you could have your memory selectively erased?

Joel: Is there any risk of brain damage?
Dr. Mierzwiak: Well, technically speaking, the operation is brain damage, but it's on par with a night of heavy drinking. Nothing you'll miss.

It's a very literary kind of science fiction storytelling, and one we seldom get in mainstream Hollywood films. That alone makes it interesting for starters.

It's got a blow-out cast

I'll admit, I'm very actor-centric when it comes to my movie likes and dislikes. If I like a performer, I'll often go see a movie I wouldn't otherwise consider, just for the chance to see that performer in action. Kate Winslet, for instance, is one of my favorite actresses, so much so that she nearly made 'The Holiday' and the first episode of 'Extras' watchable all by herself. (Sadly, she didn't, but the fact that I watched those at all is testament to how optimistic I am about any project she's involved in.)

But this film has many more outstanding performers:

• Elijah Wood, in his first big-ticket movie since the end of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, as a creepy stalker-type guy (aka: the anti-Frodo)
• Mark Ruffalo, in a traditional Mark Ruffalo role
• Tom Wilkinson, as the avuncular doctor in charge of the company that runs the procedure
• Kirsten Dunst, in a vulnerable yet sexually-forward role that, if you didn't know she had also appeared that summer as Mary Jane Watson in Spider-Man, would have started conversations in geek circles about how this Kirsten Dunst could probably do a good job playing Mary Jane Watson in that rumored Spider-Man flick coming out soon.

You'll notice that I didn't include co-star Jim Carrey on this list, but that's because there's a different point I want to make about him...

The movie actually gets good use out of Jim Carrey

I am not, generally speaking, a fan of Jim Carrey. In fact, Carrey is in the category of performers that has exactly the opposite effect on me as the category of performers that Winslet is in: knowing he's in a movie makes me significantly less likely to want to see a film.

Carrey is a 'bankable' star because people like to see his manic on-screen persona. I, frankly, tired of his manic on-screen persona during The Mask and, once I realized most Jim Carrey vehicles were, basically, The Mask without CGI, I didn't see much reason to watch him again.

With that said, the combination of director Michael Gondry and screenwriter Charlie Kaufman is able to keep Carrey playing it straight, and an amazing discovery results: Carrey is actually a pretty darned good actor -- he doesn't need to be manic in order to perform well. (Though Carrey does get to be a bit manic, though not Mask-level manic, during the stretch of the film where he's racing through his own memories, trying frantically to hide the memory of his ex-girlfriend, which he's realized too late he wants to keep after all, from the people he's paid to erase those memories from his mind.)

Now with all that said, if the movie was just about the cast, it wouldn't necessarily have to be a good movie. (See Superman IV.)

It's a science fiction movie with big ideas, and not just about science

Joel: I can't see anything I don't like about you.
Clementine: But you will! But you will. You know, you will think of things. And I'll get bored with you and feel trapped because that's what happens with me.
Joel: Okay.

You might think of this as cheating, going back to the first reason I liked the film to close out my personal analysis, but doing this actually reinforces some of the major ideas from the film.

For instance, one of the main themes in the movie is that memory is sometimes the only thing that can stop us from acting on impulses that would be bad for us. There's an element of this in the Joel/Clementine relationship, but the real illustration of this point is a subplot where Mary (played by Dunst) has a powerful crush on Dr. Mierswiak, and Mierswiak (we learn from his soon-to-be-ex-wife) has been manipulating Mary into maintaining that feeling by convincing her to erase every bad memory associated with acting on that feeling. The revelation is actually far more chilling than Wood's character's admission that he steals panties from women he's attracted to while the 'team' is in their bedrooms erasing their memories of prior bad relationships.

In Joel and Clementine's case, though, the movie adds an additional wrinkle -- sometimes you have to be able to remember a bad memory in order to know how much of it to ignore. Because sometimes memory can also be an excuse that prevents us from acting in ways that would actually be beneficial.

These are big ideas, but they're not Asimov-level postulations on how society will change as a result of the science-fiction 'what if' premise explored in the story. They're explored within realistic-seeming relationships between unusual but still fairly realistic people. (For instance, I've known more than one woman who, while perhaps not quite as manic-depressive as Clementine, certainly play in the same ballpark.)

There's a reason Netflix lists the film under 'cerebral comedies', and if that genre isn't your style, then feel free to take a pass on this one. Otherwise, if your taste in movies seems at all like mine, why haven't you seen this one yet?

Favorite Movies of the Past Nine Years - #5

"Much that once was is lost, for none now live who remember it."
- voice of Galadriel (Cate Blanchett)

#5 - Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001)

Why I liked it

What's not to like?

OK, let me be more precise.

I did try, when I was in high school, to read through JRR Tolkien's trilogy -- it seemed something of a geek rite of passage, and it was mentioned as an inspiration to those who put together Dungeons & Dragons, a game to which I was devoted in those days even when I had no one to play it with.

When I tried to get through the first book in the trilogy, though, I found it very slow going. So slow that I gave up about a third of the way through. Sure, I recognized elves and halflings, things I'd first encountered through D&D, not Tolkien directly, but those things weren't breathtaking. And yeah, there was ancient Elvish history and such, but everybody who's ever tried to write a campaign world has ancient Elvish history, and I didn't see that Tolkien's (at least as far as I'd read) was markedly better than any number of his professional and even amateur imitators in world-building that I'd encountered in my travels through D&D campaign settings.

The thing that should have tipped me off, oddly, was "The Princess Bride".

By the time the film version of "The Princess Bride" came out in 1987, I'd learned to avoid things that my fantasy-obsessed friends thought as wonderful, based largely on my experience with Fellowship. I skipped seeing Princess Bride in a movie theater, waiting until it came out on VCR tape (we didn't yet have DVDs in those days).

Once I'd seen the movie once, I realized what a mistake I'd made in dismissing it. It's become one of my favorite movies of all time, and I never pass up an opportunity to see it if I have any ability to do so.

But if anything, the book was even better than the movie.

The great conceit of the book was that William Goldman, who wrote the screenplay for Princess Bride, was only transcribing the words of a Florinese writer named S. Morgenstern, who'd penned a story that Goldman's father, an immigrant and poor English speaker, read to him during a long stretch of illness. Interspersed with sections of Morgenstern's story were snippets, outtakes if you will, of bits of Goldman's own memories of his childhood, his attempts to turn on his son to the book as he was originally turned on by his father (though not, significantly, by reading the book to him).

It's that last point that turned out to be the most significant. Turns out that what Goldman's father was reading wasn't the book, per se, but a variant of his that Goldman, in his own book, called the 'good parts' version -- a version focusing on the main plot of the princess bride and her perils, and avoiding the side trips into political discussions and dissertations on historical fashion, etcetera.

It didn't hit me at all, until this movie came out, that Goldman's comment was a satirical dig, not at the fictional S. Morgenstern, but at Tolkien.

Seeing the movie, a movie that captivated me for over two hours, compelled me to go out and get the book again, just to be sure my adolescent memories of boredom weren't some kind of youthful hallucination. They weren't -- but what Goldman (and Jackson, et al) had taught me was that, if I found something that didn't seem to relate specifically to the plot at hand, I could probably skip it, then come back later if it seemed relevant to understanding some plot point. I very rarely backtracked, and realized only later that some entire sections that looked like plot (such as the whole section featuring Tom Bombadil) could have been skipped without harm.

With all that said, though, the main reason that Fellowship appeals to me is in its hero.

Those of my D&D-playing friends who weren't much into Tolkien growing up tended more toward fantasy that featured uber-competent heroes: Conan the Barbarian, Doc Savage, etcetera. A story might begin with its hero in a fairly weak and impotent state, but that would only be until the hero understood the power he was growing into; one day, he'd be the most powerful being in his world, as was his right.

Turns out that most fantasies following this sort of trope bored the undistilled piss out of me. (One of the very few exceptions was the Riftwar Saga by Raymond Feist.) Turns out the fantasy that I like best is that where your normal, run-of-the-mill person (with perhaps one or two not-quite run-of-the-mill attributes) ends up saving the world, at least in part because they aren't the uber-competent super-warrior that can do anything or win any fight. While Fellowship featured a few of those kinds of characters (specifically the hyper-competent Aragorn and the fanboy-fetish-object Legolas), the odd thing about Fellowship, and the rest of the series (which I greedily devoured before the second movie was even released), was that, while these characters had their own adventures and successes, none of them could have accomplished what Frodo accompished, and without that latter accomplishment, everything else done by the hyper-competent heroes would have been for naught.

Now that's the kind of story that gets my engine running.

With all that said, though, one thing I didn't get at the time the movie first came out (and one reason I think so many critics have since backtracked on the nice things they said about it at the start of the decade) is the supposed echoes/parallels with September 11: men of the west duelling with an ancient and implacable evil from the east, intent on overthrowing the world and leading everyone to a time of utter darkness. I've never seen the alleged War on Terror as being of that sort of Manichean scale (perhaps that comes from being on a bus heading to a plasma center on 9/11, trying to fend off starvation for another week), and now that it's obvious that the al-Qaeda terrorists who attacked the U.S. on 9/11 weren't real-life analogues for the once-human Nazgul, servants of ultimate evil, but were more accurately just guys who got lucky while attempting something of tremendous audacity, everybody who once thought that the story of Frodo and Gandalf was somehow a reminder of What We Faced in this New Era of Terror now realized that what they said was, if not hilariously misaligned, at least hyperbolically overblown. It's no wonder so many critics have performed a volte-face with respect to this film.

As for me, who never thought Fellowship was anything but a marvelous adventure well-told, I can go on thinking that it's one of the best movies I've seen in the past nine years, and even of all time.