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.

One line of thinking goes like this, courtesy of reader sethgoldman:

These movies were just not that good. They exhibited a good degree of technological and logistical achievement but little more. I sat through all three and just found them to be long and boring. I enjoyed the books and tried, at the time, to identify the reasons the movies fell flat. (Unfortunately I had no help from critics or friends who all claimed the movies to be works of perfection.) What I came up with is that the films were both too long and too short. They were long enough to be slow moving and boring but not long enough to fully draw you in to their world as reading hundreds of pages of Tolkien’s work surely does.

Quite a number of Tolkien fans expressed moderate to grave disappointment with the trilogy, in fact — far more than I was expecting. Reader ptolemyx aired a whole series of grievances:

– Orlando Bloom: too mincing by half. Sorry, ladies.

– Gimli as comic relief. Seriously?

– Galadriel and Celeborn: “we-talk-slowly-so-we-must-be-old-and-wise…” Come ON. Plus the entire scene of Galadriel’s temptation by the ring: shite. Bad acting, bad effects.

– Moria: so awesome! wait till you see the immense city of the dwarves! … music swells … movie characters gasp … camera swings around … it’s … A BUNCH OF COLUMNS! SHIT!

– Liv Tyler: another slow-speaking magical fool. More suck for the elven-language teenage longing scenes with Aragorn … vomit.

– In the last movie especially: the angry vagina of Sauron. It looks here! It looks there! It’s … a lighthouse?

– The arc of the final battle scene. A chapter (or three?) of grim desperation turned into a moment of furrowed brows and then, lo!, a wave of green-glowing zombies comes to the rescue! Suck.

Let’s award extra points right now to TheKaiser, who described the aforementioned Army of the Dead who turn the tide at the climactic battle in “Return of the King” as “scrubbing bubbles.”

One particularly eloquent evisceration of Jackson’s treatment of the source material, understood as an inversion or betrayal of Tolkien’s novels based on a “cinematic requirement for the endearing weakness,” came from reader jamzen:

In Tolkien’s storytelling, every character lives in relation to the background myths. It is in relation to those — the tales contained in the almost immemorially ancient Silmarillion, and the many others that Tolkien had already spent a lifetime defining by the time he started working on LOTR — that every character in LOTR — elf, dwarf, wizard, human, defines himself.

But Jackson’s script destroys this. The destruction isn’t all that apparent in “Fellowship of the Ring,” but with each of the next two films it encroaches further and further on the story as originally told. Characters such as Elrond, Gimli, Denethor, and Treebeard, as the film defines them, are pathetic travesties of those Tolkien gave us in his three volumes.

One way of seeing Tolkien’s achievement is that he gave us real, presumably complex persons, with extensive interior lives, acting in a moral universe defined by the huge expanse of their cultural myths. Every significant choice that Aragorn makes, he makes against a historical background: he knows the history of the Rangers, the Dunedain, stretching back to Gondor and the Numenoreans. He knows his heritage.

The same is true of the other participants in the attempt to destroy the One Ring. None of them has any private motive apart from those provided by their cultures.

Except for the hobbits. They, common little people, have no such history. In their folktales, the memorable items are the blizzard of ’78, or somebody’s great-grandfather who was big enough to ride a horse. They did not participate in any of the world-defining and world-transforming events that constrain the other members of the Fellowship. They have no prior cultural commitments regarding any of the large issues that are involved for anyone else. So Sam and Frodo, and even Merry and Pippin, as Tolkien tells the story, have plenty of reason to wonder to each other why they are doing this. None of the other members of the Fellowship ever talk about their motives.

Jackson’s script wipes out this distinction. Completely. Everybody in the Fellowship, it turns out, has some personal axe to grind.

That may have been innocent enough at first. It’s not unreasonable, perhaps, to say to oneself, “Well, viewers need something to identify with, some little idiosyncrasy or weakness in their heroes. One can’t expect them to watch abstract principles in action.” But then, by the last film, we have Denethor presented as a pathetic, self-centered fool rather than as the tragically misguided figure, heroically sacrificing himself to an empty model of quasi-roman heroism. We have Gollum, free of his mindless obsession with the precious, enacting a preposterous plot to turn Frodo and Sam against each other. We have Gimli become one of the three stooges. We have Elrond and Arwen acting out petulant parent/child arguments.

And the biggest howler of all, Frodo, at Mount Doom, announcing his inability to free himself from the Ring in words and gestures that might be lifted straight from an old Fu Manchu movie. Yuk and double-yuk.

Oh, and the Ents. Don’t get me started on what Jackson did to them. In the film, they are comic figures and they are stupid. They are dumbed down to where, in just two sentences, Merry can persuade Treebeard to completely reverse his course and take them near Isengard.

In order to provide this endearing touch, Jackson had to rewrite the Entmoot so that it turns out exactly the opposite of Tolkien’s Entmoot: the ents decide to have nothing to do with the coming battle. Jackson’s cinematic requirement for the endearing weakness has conquered all: myths, legends, and finally even Middle-Earth common-sense. None of these characters has any heroic resonance at all. If Jackson wanted viewers to feel as though his characters could have come off the street, as though we could sit down and have a beer with Boromir — well, unhappily, he succeeded all too well.

There was a fair amount of debate about whether Tolkien’s original epic was racist, or perhaps racist in effect (as an imaginary mythology rooted in the British Isles) but not in intention, and about how Jackson dealt with that issue. The case was perhaps stated in its most developed fashion by Mountainviewer:

I don’t think the original books (overrated as literature IMHO) or Tolkien’s project were racist per se, or feudalistic, or even necessarily conservative. He seems to have wanted to create a set of myths for a society — his own — that he felt was sorely lacking in same, from a comparative-cultures view. Myths can serve good, even progressive purposes, and I think that’s what he had in mind. It made sense then that his center of gravity was archaic northern Europe, and the hierarchical relationships were more classical (Olympians vs. mortals) than they were medieval/feudal (lords vs. serfs). And — though someone who has read the books in the last 20 years might correct me here — I don’t think the descriptions of the “bad guys” in the books trafficked overly in racial (or religious) hysteria.

HOWEVER, the entire literary and visual genre that has descended from those books has no such putatively noble purpose in mind. It simply consists of artists and audiences that get off on the visual and rhetorical aesthetics of premodern society, with all its attendant xenophobia, authoritarianism, corporatism, etc. When placed in a modern context, it’s impossible for most of that work not to come across as racist or even fascistic, regardless of the specific plot argument.

Now, the films of LOTR had to walk a fine line. They could have taken refuge in the specificity of the books’ project while distancing themselves from the aesthetic community the books created. That is to say, we could have seen multiracial elves, white bad dudes, etc., etc., while still keeping the mythogenic purposes alive. They (mostly) didn’t do that, (mostly) giving in instead to cheep visual cues of the type already discussed here. A kind of fidelity to the letter of the texts (something the purists have already noted was of only varying interest to Jackson et al) while missing the opportunity to recuperate the spirit.

Other readers suggested that the trilogy’s near-constant play on TNT has worn out the audience and made the films seem like cultural wallpaper. What would have happened to the reputation of the “Godfather” films, wondered kalyarn, if cable networks had existed in the late ’70s to play them nonstop?

A few people picked up on my suggestion that the movies now belong to a lost, post-9/11 era of American cultural history. “All that talk about ‘Men of the West’ fighting the amorphous menace from the east, the obsession with dynasties — it’s all so G.W. Bush-era,” wrote possible possum.

But I was especially struck by a comment from ducdebrabant, near the very end of the thread, headed “We don’t read James Branch Cabell anymore either”:

The LOTR films are achievements in a way: they prove the books can be filmed. To my mind, they never prove they ought to have been. Jackson takes the texts, treats them as canonical, turns them into coloring books, and colors them in. Everything that’s in them is cleverly and dutifully put on the screen in a technically complex and ultimately labored way. The movies have no spontaneity, independence, idiosyncrasy or charm. They are slavish. They might as well be a Muslim’s film of the Koran. Unlike Jackson’s “King Kong,” which is a very good film and a take on the original, the LOTR films are nobody’s take. They express nothing but of the filmmaker but his virtuosity. It’s odd to call something so crammed with superb CGI, marvelous actors, exquisite set design, good taste, fast-paced action, mysticism and exoticism … pedestrian. But that’s what they are — the most ambitious, expensive, elaborate and eye-socking pedestrian movies ever made.

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.

He goes on to discuss David Edelstein’s NPR review of Peter Jackson’s new movie, “The Lovely Bones,” which he felt was dripping with unearned distaste for Jackson and his work. Granted, lots of people who liked or loved “Lord of the Rings” (including our own Stephanie Zacharek) haven’t exactly been brimming over with affection for “The Lovely Bones.” But Mr. Burr is onto something here, and we’ve got a gift certificate for the Outback Steakhouse in Guam with his name on it. I received perhaps 65 or 70 suggestions for our Films of the Decade series, and exactly zero pertained to the LOTR trilogy.

As a point of information, nobody suggested decade box-office champ “The Dark Knight,” either, but that’s much less surprising. Despite its vast popularity, Christopher Nolan’s Gotham City pseudo-noir met with a more evidently divided response, while the LOTR trilogy had massive box-office numbers, was acclaimed by populist and highbrow critics alike and brought home multiple Oscars and other hardware. In the first half of the decade, Jackson’s trilogy seemed like the dominant moviegoing experience, and suggested that a new era of big-budget fantasy, aimed at a tween-to-adult audience, was upon us.

What the H-E-double-hockey-sticks happened? As our Texan friend suggests, the zeitgeist, or at least its critical-cinephile-pointyhead component, seems to have shifted somehow. (“The world has changed,” to quote the icy-elegant female voice-over — isn’t it Cate Blanchett? — from the opening of “Fellowship of the Ring.”) What’s more, I feel this shift within myself, although I can’t exactly quantify it. As a lifelong Tolkien fan, I loved Jackson’s trilogy when I saw it, but after a second viewing I haven’t been back. When I made an initial list of 40 or 50 favorites to consider for my decade-end list, I included “Fellowship of the Ring” (the story is inescapably better-told and more exciting in its first third, both in print and on screen). But when I asked myself whether I had any overwhelming visual or emotional memory of that film, I lopped it off in the first cut and never looked back.

I could speculate. And, hey, I will! Maybe the immense hype surrounding the trilogy’s release and all the attendant marketing burned itself out. Maybe the slow-burning backlash among a certain segment of Tolkien purists has gradually taken its toll. Maybe the context in which the films were launched — the early Bush era, just after 9/11, when the “War on Terror” hadn’t yet become a dreary mixture of Orwellian gag-line and grinding reality — is now so deep in the cultural past that the movies have lost the invisible penumbra of meaning that seemed so strong at the time.

I’ve asked a few Film Salon contributors whether they’ll rise to this particular bait, and we’ll see what rolls in. In the meantime, I’m just guessing that some of you have thoughts to offer on this question.

My choice for favorite film of the decade may not be the best film of the 2000s. Heck, it’s probably not the best animated film of the past 10 years. But it’s one of those movies that I probably love more than anyone else on the planet, which perhaps only makes me love it more. I have never been so surprised by, and overjoyed with, a film as I was following my first viewing of “Meet the Robinsons.” This under-the-radar Disney film, about an orphaned young scientist who travels into the future and meets the surrogate family he could only dream of, is constantly clever, often hilarious and unabashedly emotional. I walked out of the press screening, my eyes more than a little watery, and immediately called my wife to inform her that I had wasted a Wednesday afternoon. I had just seen something truly special and she was going to have to accompany me for a repeat viewing as soon as possible. The heartbreaking initial act, the goofy but human futuristic family, the mobster-frogs, the way that the deliciously villainous Bowler Hat Guy becomes the most sympathetic figure in the film, the stunningly powerful and completely earned happy ending — everything about this unassuming picture is just magical. To paraphrase another classic of this decade, “Meet the Robinsons” is a movie I love so much that it hurts.

Film Salon has invited a group of special guests to write about their favorite film(s) of the 2000s. To read the entire series, go here.

But with his garish, pointless and downright inept rendering of Alice Sebold’s 2002 novel, “The Lovely Bones,” Peter Jackson has hit a new low in the annals of movie adaptations. Sebold’s novel tells, in the first person, the story of a 14-year-old suburban girl named Susie Salmon who, in 1973, is raped and murdered by one of her neighbors. Susie finds herself in a teenage girl’s version of heaven — a heaven filled with the things she loved in life, including dogs and ice-cream shops — from which she can view the world, specifically her family, as it goes on without her. The story Sebold tells here is less about victimhood than it is about the interior lives of families; she explores not just the ways in which they cope (or fail to cope) with grief, but the weird little mechanisms that make them tick in the first place, the things that only an outsider — a dead girl, watching from somewhere else — can see clearly.

“The Lovely Bones” is a fiercely delicate and often funny piece of writing, a work of fantasy with a solid footing in reality, and it wouldn’t be an easy book for any filmmaker to adapt. But Jackson (aided and abetted by frequent collaborators Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens, who co-wrote the screenplay with him) has reinvented Sebold’s story in the most facile and heedless way imaginable: He’s turned it into a supernatural thriller. Susie is played by Saoirse Ronan, the young actress who gave such a marvelous performance in the 2007 film “Atonement,” and it’s perfect casting: Ronan, with her translucent skin and unblinking, observant eyes, has the look of a wide-awake but confused angel, a girl trapped between two worlds. But Jackson requires nothing of her beyond that look of alert innocence. Instead of giving her a role, he asks her for little more than a single expression. Susie barely figures into the story here: Jackson plunks her into her heaven — in the movie’s terms, it’s more of a pre-heaven holding pen — and then pops in to visit her occasionally so she can open her eyes wide for the camera. If Jackson is stingy with his lead actress, he’s generous with the special effects: Susie’s heaven is sometimes a misty, moody-looking Middle-earth-style landscape; at others, it looks like a rejected set from H.R. Pufnstuf, a brightly colored cartoon afterlife in which she’s doomed to flounce around in flower-power granny gowns, a fashion hell if ever there was one.

Jackson doesn’t seem to realize that you don’t need fancy effects to re-create heaven — that, in fact, it’s maybe better to imply heaven than to attempt to show it outright. Jackson is all about showmanship, which is a positive trait in the right context: His Lord of the Rings movies were satisfying and gorgeous entertainments, and taken together the three films constitute an honorable adaptation of the J.R.R. Tolkien source material. Jackson’s “King Kong” was less popular with audiences, but I still admired his eagerness to attempt a grand, go-for-broke spectacle.

But Jackson is all wrong for “The Lovely Bones.” The picture was originally given to Lynn Ramsay, director of the strange, beautiful, elegiac Scottish picture “Morvern Callar,” and it hurts to think about the picture she might have made. Jackson is certainly cunning: Susie’s killer, neighborhood loner George Harvey (Stanley Tucci), is a builder of dollhouses, and Jackson uses some clever camera angles to take advantage of these props. At one point Harvey and the detective assigned to the case (Michael Imperioli) play a game of hide-and-seek on opposite sides of one of these diminutive structures, peering furtively at one another through doll-size doorframes and windows, a metaphor, perhaps, for the cop’s failure to see the big picture inside the small one.

But it appears that tricks are all Jackson has; any deeper understanding of the material eludes him. In his hands, this isn’t a movie about grief or about families, but a haphazard whodunit — or perhaps more of a “whocares?” considering that here, as in the book, the killer is revealed practically at the beginning. Jackson has a fine cast to work with here: Susie’s parents are played by Mark Wahlberg and Rachel Weisz, who are touching even when they’re not trying to be. Maybe that’s because even though they’re certainly old enough to be parents in real life as well as on-screen, they still look young enough to seem invincible. But on the other side of Jackson’s lens, their sorrow plays itself out in the most bland and obvious terms. Wahlberg’s character, frustrated by the police’s inability to come up with a suspect, spends an inordinate amount of time chasing down his own unlikely leads. Meanwhile, there’s Stanley Tucci just a few doors down, skulking around in his bad comb-over — you’d have to be blind to miss the pervert/murderer signals he’s sending out with every Actors Studio twitch of his eyelids.

Somewhere in the middle there, Susan Sarandon (as Susie’s glam, hard-drinking grandma) shows up with her cleavage, and the mood brightens considerably. But not for long. “The Lovely Bones” is a perfect storm of a movie disaster: You’ve got good actors fighting a poorly conceived script, under the guidance of a director who can no longer make the distinction between imaginativeness and computer-generated effects. The result is an expensive-looking mess that fails to capture the mood, and the poetry, of its source material. David Byrne once sang, “Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens.” There’s way too much going on in Peter Jackson’s heaven — and yet it isn’t nearly enough.

“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?

Instead of deflating the novel’s spell, this skepticism liberates the story from the old fantasy clichés and takes it into exhilaratingly uncharted territory. There are some ravishing episodes (especially a passage in which Quentin gets transformed into a migrating wild goose), and above all an irresistible storytelling momentum that makes “The Magicians” a great summer book, both thoughtful and enchanting.

Check out recent Critics’ Picks:

“The Speech: Race and Barack Obama’s ‘A More Perfect Union,’” by Andrew O’Hehir

“Dollhouse” Season 1 DVD, by Mary Elizabeth Williams

Prada fall/winter 2009 look book, by Stephanie Zacharek

“Troll’s Eye View: A Book of Villainous Tales,” by Laura Miller

HBO’s “Boy Interrupted,” by Heather Havrilesky