Warning

Finally saw The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Rings last night. I liked it. I was inspired to see it in part by my viewing Sunday of Kingdom of Heaven, which I also liked; I figured one overlong medieval freakout with Orlando Bloom deserved another.

One of the things that most struck me about Fellowship was not in the movie itself, but in the MPAA warning that preceded it. The ratings board gave the film a PG-13 in part because of, as the card said, its "epic battle sequences." This made me laugh, as it did the literary scholar with whom I watched the film. Poor old misunderstood epic, a genre out of time. I fantasize that an MPAA rating will one day cite a film's novelistic approach to temporality.