“But if I asked you now?”

“Now,” the knight said, “I am less certain.”

-- George R.R. Martin, "A Game of Thrones"

Epic fantasy -- sprawling stories full of swords, castles, magic, kings and lots and lots of white people – is slowly finding its way into America's cultural mainstream. In the age of the anemic box office, Peter Jackson's films of J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy remain a gold standard of blockbusterdom – and his forthcoming version of "The Hobbit" will almost certainly follow suit. Newer writers like Brandon Sanderson and Patrick Rothfuss have sold hundreds of thousands of their "door-stopper" tomes of wizardry and courtly intrigue. And tonight, countless viewers will be glued to their sets for the return of what is arguably the hottest show on television, "Game of Thrones," HBO's adaptation of George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire fantasy novels.

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Our hypothetical casual observer might therefore also conclude that epic fantasy -- one of today's most popular genres -- would hold little interest for African-American readers and even less for African-American writers. But that observer would be dead wrong. One of the most celebrated new voices in epic fantasy is N.K. Jemisin, whose debut novel, "The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms," won the Locus Award for best first novel and nominations for seemingly every other speculative fiction prize under the sun. Another is David Anthony Durham, whose Acacia Trilogy has landed on countless best-of lists. Both authors recently published the concluding books in their trilogies.

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While my first reaction was to send that idea to Yikers Island for a life sentence, Berger's bold vision grew on me. Think of how many jokes there are to be made here! Lord Licorice bellowing from the Cupcake Commons, "NONE SHALL PASS ... UNTIL THEY PICK A PURPLE CARD FROM THE TOP OF THE PILE!" And that's just from the top of my head! I could think of so many more jokes by the time the film actually came out.

So anyone who thought Berger was going to try to backpedal from that grandiose claim was badly mistaken. If anything, the writer wants audiences to know how committed he is to doing a J.R.R. Tolkien thing for the Hasbro game. Also, how committed he is to candy:

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Well, there's two sides to every story, or to quote a less banal maxim, history is written by the winners. That's the philosophy behind "The Last Ringbearer," a novel set during and after the end of the War of the Ring (the climactic battle at the end of "The Lord of the Rings") and told from the point of view of the losers. The novel was written by Kirill Yeskov, a Russian paleontologist, and published to acclaim in his homeland in 1999. Translations of the book have also appeared in other European nations, but fear of the vigilant and litigious Tolkien estate has heretofore prevented its publication in English.

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Director Peter Jackson announced yesterday that British actor Martin Freeman will play the lead role of Bilbo Baggins. Freeman is best known to Americans for playing Tim Canterbury in the British version of "The Office." The character Tim, a mild-mannered salesman who is drolly aware of his job's pointlessness, is the U.K. version of Jim Halpert.

Freeman, at the very least, looks the part of Bilbo: boyish, unassuming, short with a decidedly British expression. "Hobbit" fans, however, wonder if Freeman can carry a dramatic movie. He was at ease starring in the underrated "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" and he proved more than capable with short cameos in "Shaun of the Dead," "Hot Fuzz" and "Love Actually." But those, like "The Office," are comedies. Falling in love with the receptionist is one thing; fighting off trolls, goblins and giant spiders is another.

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OK, I'm being mean, largely because "The Romantics" is a middling little movie that tries to trespass on Bergman-Renoir territory and simply isn't adroit enough to pull it off, and because in its weaker moments it's overheated and silly. Niederhoffer's title is meant to refer to her characters, whose collegiate clique took on the name thanks to their incestuous dating habits, but also to the Romantics in the English-lit, turn-of-the-19th-century sense. So we get Katie Holmes and Josh Duhamel, as the maid of honor and intended bridegroom, not merely snogging furiously out in the woods on the night before the wedding like a couple of soap opera characters, but also murmuring snatches of "Ode to a Nightingale" into each other's ears.

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Yes, consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, but maybe del Toro should have stuck with that view all along. Two years after rearranging his family life and career and putting about a dozen other films on hold to move to New Zealand and direct a two-part adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien's "The Hobbit" for Peter Jackson, del Toro has now officially quit the project. Or semi-officially but not quite totally quit the project; he's still listed as a co-writer, along with Jackson, Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens and whoever else is hanging around the production offices in Wellington.

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This provokes me to milk the debate just a little longer, and also to save you the trouble of reading through almost 200 comments to find the juiciest McNuggets. To be clear, I'm genuinely not pimping any particular ideology. I enjoyed the films immensely, and wrote a rave about "Return of the King" for Salon at the time. But I can barely remember them today, feel unsure whether I'll ever watch them again, and still don't regret leaving them off my own personal decade-end list. Then again, this isn't about my dumb-ass list, or Stephanie Zacharek's, or anybody else's; this was about the fact that when I reached out to 60 or 70 filmmakers, critics and bloggers I know, in search of entries for our Films of the Decade series, not one of them suggested Jackson's colossal trilogy as a personal favorite. So something's going on here, and these responses are helping me figure it out a little.

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I just want to ask [Matt writes] if one of the Salon movie contributors would explain why the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy has been so disrespected by critics. Not just at Salon but also at Slate and in every list I have seen. This suggests that a negative critical consensus has formed about LOTR and I have to admit that that really surprises me. I consider LOTR one of the singular cinematic achievements in film history. But if not that, at least of the decade. And I think there was a time where some critics would have agreed with me. It seems that some sort of gestalt has changed while I wasn't looking.

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It's the story of Quentin Coldwater, a glum teenage Brooklynite preparing for his first year of university, who finds himself enrolled instead in a secret college of magic. Like most of the other students at Brakebills, Quentin grew up on a series of children's novels about a magical land called Fillory, emblem of all the wonder he longs for but that seems forever out of reach. Could his long-denied dreams finally be coming true?

"The Magicians" is a grown-up's book, one that reflects on the sort of questions you never think to ask about fantasy narratives as a kid, such as: Is it such a good idea to meddle in the politics of a strange country you barely understand? Wouldn't magical powers drain much of the challenge -- and therefore the purpose -- out of life? If animals and trees could really talk, would they have anything especially interesting to say?

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