> I would never have dreamed that a movie about "Lord of
> the Rings" could be done so well.
Haven't seen the flick, but Tolkien is sort of the godfather of Brit postmodernism, i.e. the text is far more radical than the author. Tolkien was so conservative, he ended up being progressive, is another way to look at it. The Ring is basically an allegory of the Fordist consumer culture, and there are moments -- the Dead Marshes is one, a moment clearly based on Tolkien's own biographical experience of WW I trench war -- where Tolkien becomes painfully self-aware of the horrors of capitalist imperialism.
I've often thought that the Brits had Tolkien where the US had E.E. Doc Smith; both sort of anticipated Anglo-American postmodernism way ahead of the realized thing.
-- Dennis