I can't describe to you just how awesome the Lord of the Rings movies were. This is due to the fact that my editor will not allot four and a half pages to repeated typing of the word "really." Instead, let's just say that I had to change underwear between sword fights.

As with any good action movie, I and many other guys came out jump-spin-kicking off of every wall, ledge and parking meter between the theatre and our cars. It is my personal belief that we should develop a rating system based on this classic male behavior. If an action movie is good, the papers would print that it got "four out of five flailing, fully-grown men embarrassing their dates by demonstrating clumsy, improvised karate and needlessly kicking open unlocked doors." If it wasn't a good action movie, you'd read that it only got one flailing guy, that he was probably just swatting at a gnat, and that overall his date was only mildly embarrassed. I in no way condone violence outside of cockfighting, but if you must fight a guy, do it after he's just seen an action movie. He's inevitably going to attempt some move that Jackie Chan trained for months to do, and chances are he'll end up clocking himself in the back of the head with his own shoe.

Several of my friends, many female, have asked me what the big deal is about the Lord of the Rings movies. These friends A.) do not realize that the Lord of the Rings are an incredible series of films filled with incredibility and B.) probably liked Crossroads. To answer their grossly uninformed question, however, the Lord of the Rings movies did so well in theatres because all guys are closet dorks. While we will refute this to the death or at least to the first serious laceration, if you hand any one of us a bucket of action figures, we will be busy for hours. I'll even go as far as to say that every one of us still has a few Pogs in the attic. Mind you, none of us ever knew the rules to Pogs, but we all pretended like we did. The Lord of the Rings is one of only a few ways us guys can quench this repressed thirst without getting our lunch money beaten from our clammy, Nintendo-hardened hands.

Besides, we all know the true factor that distinguishes us from the real goobers are the wolf-motif nature shirts. These are the uniform of the Dorks. If you're reading this and you are currently wearing any shirt purchased from Natural Wonders, specifically one that features a wolf, a Cherokee tomahawk or both, you should try a new wash cycle where, instead of washing the shirt with ordinary detergent, you set it on fire. If you're now desperately imagining some distinction between the aforementioned Cherokee tomahawk shirt and your Inca tomahawk shirt, you might want to try setting yourself on fire.

A lot of critics complained that Return of the King was too long. They are right: by the time the movie let out, most everyone I knew was dead, California had parted ways with the mainland U.S. and everybody was speaking German-- but the special effects were worth it.

Personally, my biggest complaint is that the ending was too happy. Nobody important dies. Everybody who falls off a cliff hangs on to a ledge. Everybody who is nearly stabbed gets saved. Everybody who is kicked in the crotch happens to like it. Jeeze, it's almost as if the plot were copy and pasted from some storybook or something!

In all seriousness, the ending could be summarized entirely with "they all live happily ever after." Instead, however, the movie rambles on for twenty minutes like a six year-old girl making up a story: ""¦And thennn, he becomes king and he marries the princess and she becomes queen and then they have lots of kids who get married and are also all kings and they even have a puppy who's a king too and the puppy marries a peasant but then they knight her so she's like a king and they have ten king puppies together who are kings." Not to ruin it for anybody, but the end of Lord of the Rings is a lot like playing checkers with a moron: kings across the board.

Still the most disappointing aspect of the final installment was that they recast the parts of 'Arigorn', 'Legolas', and 'Frodo' with Ashton Kutcher, Hillary Duff, and Steve Martin. Wait, which theatre on the left was it?


If you've got questions, responses, or you'd like to comment on my driving, please feel free to email me at comeydean@yahoo.com