The most heartbreaking thing about faithful moviegoing is that awe, beauty and

excitement, three of the things we go to the movies for, are the very things we’re cheated of the

most. The great wonder of [[The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring]] is that it bathes us

in all three, to the point where we remember — in a vague, pleasurably hallucinatory sensation

from another lifetime — why we go to the movies in the first place. It would be an insult to say

the picture merely lives up to its hype; it crashes the meaning of hype, exposing it as the graven

image it is. Advertising is dead: Long live moviemaking.