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With Fellowship being the second greatest movie-going experience of my life (Jurassic Park at age nine will never be topped), the releases of the next two installments were some of the most anticipated events of more than my movie-going life. To this day, I use their years of release as a means to catalogue memories. Let's see, I went to see the Two Towers with her so we must have broken up in early 2003.

While my enthusiasm was, shall we say, a touch more asthmatic than the rest of the public, it wasn't by much. The overwhelming success of the Rings trilogy blew the door - that Gladiator had cracked the year before - wide open and gave new life to the old Hollywood staple, epics. Soon any film that could potentially feature a massive ground battle scene was a hot commodity.

Peter Jackson actually stoked the fire on two fronts. On the one hand you had the "historical" war films like Troy, Alexander and King Arthur and on the other you had fantasy book series like Chronicles of Narnia, The Golden Compass and Eragon. Notice a pattern here? I honestly tried to find a good film that was made with The Lord of the Rings' success in mind. Maybe I'm in the minority, but I think all of these films are pretty lame. The difference is that the real magic of the Rings Trilogy was not The Battle of Helm's deep – though that was crazy awesome. It was (here comes a geek out, consider yourselves warned) Viggo Mortenson telling Háleth, son of Háma, as the army of 10,000 Uruk-hai marched towards Helm's Deep, "This is a good sword," even though he knows it isn't, then putting his hand on the 14-year-old's shoulder and saying, "There is always hope." Oh man, I totally got chills thinking about that. I am so lame.

But so what if this large-scale epic trend that Jackson helped create wasn't top of the line? He just knew how to do it better than everyone else. It isn't his fault that most directors don't know how to properly construct a narrative, is it? Well, if he hadn't added any flames to the fire I might say yes. But in December of 2005 that all changed when Peter Jackson threw his own massive log on the heaping pile of big-budget mediocrity.

For me, King Kong was a case of cinematic denial. It took me a long time to realize, and even longer to admit, that it was not a good film. The thought that someone who literally redefined my late teens and early 20s could lead me so far astray was difficult to accept. I can't blame Jackson for getting carried away. He had access to ridiculously unlimited resources and endless creative control. In retrospect, a bloated, comically serious exercise in self-indulgence was probably unavoidable. Remind you of another recent case where a filmmaker turned an unlimited budget and creative control in to a youth-shattering travesty? I shudder to even type the name. Let's just call him GL, or he-who-shall-not-be-named.

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