Time: “Lure of the Rings”

Do you have a teensy weensy problem when a magazine (say, Time) owned by a media conglomerate (AOL Time Warner) reviews the big seasonal movie from a studio (New Line Cinema) owned by the same conglomerate? I do. Especially when it reads like Time’s recent cover slobberfest on The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, with breathless prose—“[Viggo] Mortensen … transforms himself before your eyes from brooding beefcake to full-blown movie star”—that mimics the sort of behavior that got Monica Lewinsky in all that trouble. The story, credited to Jess Cagle, really hits the kneepads when Cagle offers up “a new American obsession with fantasy, a national journey to a mythical past where evil is punished and virtue rewarded.” A few graphs later, he starts jabbering about Frodo’s similarity to a certain putatively altruistic White House inhabitant. Laughable hagiographic twaddle? Hey, if the ring fits …