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.

Jackson, the project’s mastermind, isn’t worried. “There are a few times in your career when you come across an actor who you know was born to play a role, but that was the case as soon as I met Martin,” the director said in a statement. The CS Monitor thinks Freeman is “the perfect Bilbo Baggins.” The Washington Post says he’ll be fine.

Let’s hope.

“The Hobbit” is scheduled to begin production in February 2011.

Here’s a scene from the second season finale of “The Office.”  It’s dramatic, sad and funny all at once.  Maybe Freeman is the right choice.

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.

As Steven Zeitchik explains in the Los Angeles Times, this is more a matter of Wall Street fallout and the uncertain future of MGM (which holds the rights to “The Hobbit”) than “creative differences.” Despite vigorous denials from all concerned, the tormented and tortuous effort to film Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings” prequel is clearly in jeopardy of collapsing altogether — as other MGM films, including the next James Bond feature, already have. The current incarnation of the long-troubled MGM is buried under almost $4 billion in corporate debt and is for sale, presumably at a bargain-basement price. Until that situation is resolved, there will be no start date for “The Hobbit,” which was supposed to begin shooting later this year, during the Southern Hemisphere summer.

I was skeptical about this whole “Hobbit” thing from the beginning; I think it was a cul-de-sac in del Toro’s career path, and he’s better off developing his own projects. Personally, I’d much rather see his grotesque fairy-tale vision applied to such proposed ideas as new adaptations of “Frankenstein” or “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” or Roald Dahl’s “The Witches.” I’d gladly give up the “Hobbit” movie forever, in fact, if it meant getting to see del Toro’s hypothetical versions of H.P. Lovecraft’s “At the Mountains of Madness,” or Marvel Comics’ “Doctor Strange.” (You can’t accuse the guy of lacking ideas, ambition or a work ethic.)

But let’s play along with the Internets, people. Presuming MGM, Warner Bros. and Peter Jackson are telling the truth about the current situation, they’re going to hire a new “Hobbit” director forthwith. It has to be somebody who seems capable of handling epic fantasy, obviously — but also somebody who doesn’t mind being the second choice (if not third or fourth choice) and who doesn’t have much to lose in taking on a project with a 50 percent probability of total implosion and a 100 percent probability of relentless scrutiny from blogging Elves, Dwarves and Goblins. Let’s review the leading candidates. Chime in, please!

Peter Jackson — Could the “Lord of the Rings” director be “pulling a Leno,” in the Twitter-phrase of indieWIRE’s Eric Kohn? Signals vary. Jackson’s manager told Entertainment Weekly that directing “The Hobbit” is “not something he can consider at this time as he has other commitments to other projects,” which comes under the heading of a non-denial. Over the weekend Jackson told the Dominion Post, a New Zealand newspaper, that taking the reins himself was not out of the question: “If that’s what I have to do to protect Warner Bros.’ investment, then obviously that’s one angle which I’ll explore.”

What all this means in English: Jackson sees himself as a grandiose, Lucas-scale producer these days, and is busy developing two “Tintin” films, with Steven Spielberg directing the first one. (Wake me when that franchise has come and gone, please.) He’d really rather not get his hands dirty on this one, but if the investors insist, he’ll direct at least one of the “Hobbit” movies. Fanboys around the globe, needless to say, would explode like the TV commentators in David Cronenberg’s “Scanners.”

Alfonso Cuarón — Let’s see: He made the best of the Harry Potter movies along with a terrific adult-oriented sci-fi film (“Children of Men”), he’s a friend, compatriot and occasional producing partner of del Toro’s and he’s got the proven creativity and flexibility to work within the Hollywood production system and outside it. He’s pretty much the perfect choice, but given the cursed nature of the “Hobbit” project, that means it probably won’t happen.

Bill Condon — Well, the director of “Dreamgirls” and “Gods and Monsters” has long been an odd duck in Hollywood, beloved but somewhat misused. And he was recently hired to direct the 2011 “Twilight” film, “Breaking Dawn,” which was pretty weird. That franchise could certainly use an injection of glamour, tragedy and theatricality — and personally, I’d love to see what Condon would do with “The Hobbit.” Won’t happen.

Catherine Hardwicke — Speaking of “Twilight,” Hardwicke made the first film in that series much more attractive and ambitious than it might have been, and was rewarded by being fired and replaced by Chris Weitz, which is what Hollywood producers do when they run out of actual ideas (and/or it’s raining in Malibu and they can’t play tennis). She’s got adaptations of “Red Riding Hood” and “Hamlet” in development, which both sound kind of cool, but it’s not like she wouldn’t bail on that to do “The Hobbit.” An outstanding option.

Zack Snyder — There was a lot of fanboy hate directed at Snyder’s screen version of Alan Moore’s graphic novel “Watchmen,” but you can color me Philistine on this one — I thought it had terrific darkness and style, and solved some problems with plot and tone in the source material. (I am not arguing it’s “better” than the comic, only different, and successful in its own terms. Given the outpouring of rage that would follow, Jackson et al. won’t pick Snyder, but he’d be a solid choice.

Chris Columbus — Yeah, he’s a hack. He’s also a moneymaker. Director of the first two Potter films and the recent mediocre knockoff “Percy Jackson and the Olympians,” Columbus would make the investors sigh with relief, and would allow Jackson and del Toro to check out, physically and spiritually. Movies on this scale are more about making the safe financial play than making the right artistic choice, and you just know this is being talked about. I could write the same entry about Chris Weitz, with different details, so I’m sorry to say we might as well throw his name out there too.

Sam Mendes — I’m not sure why the English-born director of “American Beauty” and “Revolutionary Road” keeps turning up on the rumor mill; his poetic and rather ponderous aesthetic seems totally wrong for “The Hobbit,” but evidently somebody believes he’s in the running. It may simply be that MGM hired Mendes to direct the 23rd Bond film, which now appears to be on permanent hold, so he’s definitely available. Supposedly Mendes is working on an adaptation of George Eliot’s “Middlemarch” right now — and while I admire that novel and like some of Mendes’ films, I suspect I’d rather spend two hours at a Tea Party meeting.

Sam Raimi — I get all my inside-Hollywood news from indieWIRE blogger Anne Thompson, but I’m going to part company with her here: The director of three “Spider-Man” films and “Drag Me to Hell” is all wrong for the “Hobbit” franchise. No question Raimi is talented and has proven himself with big budgets, but at this point he’s become a splashy, frantic, action-oriented filmmaker who’s all show and no tell. Given that he was apparently interested before del Toro took the gig, and has no near-term directing jobs locked down after the collapse of Spidey 4, he clearly remains a plausible choice, whether I like it or not.

Julie Taymor — A legendary creator of stage spectacles whose forays into film have been indifferently received (I haven’t seen her upcoming adaptation of Shakespeare’s “The Tempest”), Taymor’s a strong personality who remains untested with Hollywood-level budgets. She’d be a brave, adventurous choice, exactly the kind of thing Peter Jackson might pursue in a different economy. Not in this one.

Neill Blomkamp — File under “duh”: Blomkamp is the young South African effects wizard and Jackson protégé who made “District 9″ on a relatively low budget, released it in the late-summer movie swamp — and wound up with a major worldwide hit and a best-picture nomination. He’d be the obvious choice, if the whole thing were really up to Peter Jackson. It isn’t, and Jackson might have to convince investors he’d direct the film over Blomkamp’s shoulder. I have no idea how well Blomkamp knows Tolkien, or whether he’s even interested, but the blend of action, humor and drama in “District 9″ was promising.

Darren Aronofsky — From now until the end of time, whenever some big directing job comes open, the one-time indie god of “Requiem for a Dream” and “Pi” will be mentioned. (Wasn’t he once going to make a Superman movie?) That doesn’t mean it’ll ever happen. Maybe the relatively uncomplicated success of “The Wrestler” has changed Aronofsky’s reputation as an impresario of doomed projects, but he’s still the wrong guy for this movie, or any other that involves a high probability of failure.

Who else do you want to see take this on? Would the Coen brothers cast William H. Macy as Bilbo Baggins, John Goodman as Gandalf and John Malkovich as the great dragon Smaug? Would Michael Haneke stage the whole thing as an enigmatic journey in which the hobbits are plagued by unexplained acts of brutality, and the spiders of Mirkwood triumph in the end? Will Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez turn Bilbo and pals into a posse of shotgun-packin’ hobos? Will Andrew Bujalski transform the whole story into a series of indirect but angst-ridden conversations between Bilbo and Gollum, set in city parks, chain stores and coffee shops? 

But it wouldn’t be very bloggy to end without giving each side one more shot, now would it? Reader Troy Blanchard from San Francisco, who describes himself as an admirer of the films and books, delivers an especially pithy summary of why he doesn’t feel much need to watch the trilogy again:

I don’t really think it has to do with their length, but more with the fact that the films do not speak to a wider truth. For example, “The Godfather” is not really about the Mafia; it’s an examination of the nature of capitalism and revenge. There is something very universal about the Corleone saga, and every time I’ve seen that movie and the sequel, I notice something different and have a different reaction. The LOTR movies are just about hobbits, wizards, elves and the rest. That’s it. They do not offer us any insight into human nature or our culture. There is no desire to see them again because there is nothing else to see aside from what we saw the first time. This doesn’t mean they are bad or not entertaining; they just fail to produce a deeper meaning that creates new insights and emotions over the years.

But since I’ve been stingier about pro-LOTR responses, let’s give the last word to Open Salon blogger and Film Salon contributor Scott Mendelson (whose weekly box-office reports will become a regular feature here). Scott writes that while he picked “Meet the Robinsons” as his personal favorite for our Films of the Decade list, LOTR remains “the most impressive and astounding cinematic accomplishment of the last decade”:

It’s called “blockbuster backlash,” and it’s not a new phenomenon. I actually found an essay I wrote in early 2005 about this, which stated that “the Lord of the Rings backlash has only recently started.” Can you find anyone, film critic or otherwise, who still admits to loving or even liking “Independence Day,” “Jurassic Park,” “Titanic” or the “Lord of the Rings” series? Someone did back in the day, as those films made tons of money, back in the olden days when it wasn’t so easy to gross $200 million, let alone $300-$600 million. But since it’s considered uncool to like something so beloved by the masses, blockbuster backlash has set in, swinging the pendulum in the other direction. What starts as “Oh, it wasn’t that great” quickly turns into “That movie was terrible.” The tide of critical opinion almost immediately turns, so that the focus on these films revolves purely on the technical merits, with snide disdain at the idea that the films succeeded for any reasons related to character, story or craftsmanship.

“Oh, those films were just about the battle scenes,” says someone who bawled like a baby during the finale(s) of “Return of the King.” “Oh, it was just the groundbreaking FX of the dinosaurs,” says another who gripped their seat in terror during the raptor kitchen attack in “Jurassic Park.” We immediately forget that these films were not only popular with the masses, but with the critics too. “Titanic” received rave reviews upon its release. “Jurassic Park” received solid notices too. And each of the “Lord of the Rings” films was greeted with a wave of “I can’t believe Peter Jackson pulled this off” hysteria, to the point that “Return of the King’s” Oscar triumph was a foregone conclusion. Just you wait: The tide is already starting to turn against “The Dark Knight” (“It only made so much money because Heath Ledger died”), and I can only presume that “Avatar” is next on the chopping block (“People only went because of the 3D effects,” which explains why “Captain Eo” was the century’s top-grossing film).

This isn’t a case of people who disliked the film from the get-go voicing their opinions louder than everyone else. This is a case of mass amnesia that renders any prior smash hit as something to be disdained by the critical elite, which then filters down to the general public.

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.

Or, as the great Firesign Theatre pinpointed, “honest stories of working people as told by rich Hollywood stars.”

Let’s be clear. Peter Jackson finally got his Oscar for “Lord of the Rings” by simple attrition. After three consecutive films of excellence, and frankly, some palooka-like competition in 2004 (“Seabiscuit,” anyone? “Master and Commander”?), the Academy just got worn down.

Look at “Avatar.”

The smug critical consensus seems to be: If Cameron could have only jettisoned that stupid fantastic story, the amazing fantastic world he created might have really been cool. Uh, but, um, did not one begat the other? Is not the simple, elegant, uncluttered fantasy the beating heart of the thing? This smugness pervades how Cameron has been regarded his entire career. He’s just that Canuck Fanboy Truck Driver who somehow managed to crash the Oscars with “Titanic.” And when Cameron consecrated that moment by quoting a line delivered by his doomed, hubristic, foolishly optimistic lead character, in a wry foreshadowing of his own post-”Titanic” future, well, let’s just say the irony was lost, and has been lost in approximately 10,237 (wait, 10,332 as of last Monday) subsequent lazy “journalistic” references to that boorish egomaniac who thought he was the “King of the World.”

But I digress.

There are a lot of “fantasy” films that fully deserve critical scorn, and audience disdain. As the great fantasist Theodore Sturgeon opined, “90% of everything is crap.”

But that 10 percent that isn’t should be allowed to keep winning the race against “Seabiscuit.”