Salon asks this interesting questionin this article. For a set of films that were generally very well received by most critics and the public there doesn’t seem to be much love left for them at the end of the decade.
Almost no critic' s "Best films of the last decade" lists have any of the LOTR trilogy movies - Why?
The critics probably read the books beforehand.
Lack of taste?
I frankly don’t think much of movie critics.
Didn’t look very hard, did they?
http://www.rollingstone.com/photos/gallery/31234572/peter_travers_10_best_movies_of_t
http://www.ew.com/ew/gallery/0,,20321301_20324027_10,00.html
It was on the Onion’s top 20.
I googled “best films of the decade” and the first three results all had one or more of the LOTR films.
I think the Slate author had to submit an article in a hurry, and ran with the first thing that popped into his head, without checking if it was an actual phenomenon or not.
Seems a bit snarky. On the SDMB, I think you will find plenty of people who read the books first and enjoyed the films quite a bit. You’ll find those who didn’t like the movies too, of course, but both are quite present.
Come on, that’s a pretty good joke playing on the old “the movie is never as good as the book” meme. I chuckled.
Many are pretentious snobs. They pretend they hate any popular film.
Do you have an actual evidence to back up this claim? Name some names, at least.
A quick look at Rotten Tomatoes show that, among professional critics, the review for the three films never dropped below 94% fresh. Both The Two Towers and Return of the King had higher ratings among professional critics than among fan critics – and Return of the King hit 100% fresh. So 100% of the pretentious snob critics gave the film a good review.
Actually, and I know I’m in the minority in asserting this, but although they were very visually impressive, and even with the Jackson emendations decent enough stories, they aren’t particularly great movies. So I can easily see some critics saying that the fact that they were epics in scope, and hugely popular, isn’t enough to cause them to be listed among the greatest movies of the decade.
But, of course, one critic’s “best” list will be another critic’s “worst” list, or “overblown” list, or “what the hell was HE watching” list. 
Agree with this wholeheartedly.
Bringing these books to film in the manner Jackson did was a huge achievement. But I don’t thing that “huge achievment” neccessarily + “best film”.
My kids are currently working through the series. Yesterday I watched TTT, and the day before 1/2 of TFotR. Parts of each were very entertaining, and yet more parts were visually spectacular, but they sure didn’t impress me as great films.
Of course, I’m a multiple reader of the trilogy, and was quite disappointed by various liberties in the films. Last night I was trying to figure out how good of a movie/story each individual film would be to someone who had not read and liked the books. I sure didn’t see TTT appealing to such a viewer - tho, of course, it suffers from “middle-film” syndrome.
While I enjoyed all 3 films immensely, none of them would’ve made my Top 5 for their respective years, which means that in assessing a Top of the Decade, there are already 15 films ranked higher from just 3 of those 10 years. Of course, you could count (as many have) the entire trilogy as one collective achievement, but I suspect that while a lot of the critics love and/or admire the films, when you’re talking about the expanse of 10 years, there are just a lot of other films in contention.
In my opinion the LOTR trilogy was just trying too hard to be the next Star Wars. For me it just didn’t feel very immersive. I never felt like I was sucked into the world they tried to create. One of the things is the graphics just weren’t that impressive. They ranged from decent to mediocre. The story was ok, but the pacing was slooooooow… Yeah, it was far from being “bad” but nowhere near as epic as it wanted to be. I’d probably give it an 8/10. But no way “Best of the decade”.
I don’t really know how you can claim this, when “The Two Towers” has an 8.7 rating at IMDB (#29 of all time) & a 96% positive rating at Rotten Tomatoes. While the book fanboys love to complain about it, *clearly *the film appealed to the general public.
No evidence here, just speculation based on personal experience and personal observations/interactions, but I think that these were movies that you were “supposed” to love and appreciate. I mean, they were so epic and such an accomplishment and the cinematography was so great, yadda, yadda. I think a lot of people rate the movie(s) high becuase they feel they’re supposed to and because everyone else is, but they really don’t get it themselves.
Just a thought …
(btw, I have no such compunction – apart from a few cool battle scenes, I thought they all sucked 
)
Because those critics were not 12 years old when they saw them. When today’s kids get older and start writing as professional journalists and voting on films for Hall of Fame or Smithsonian archival preservation, the LOTR trilogy will make every list.
Here’s the famous “Everything Was Better When You Were Twelve” comic:
People in the 1600s thought Shakespeare was nothing special.
People thought the Eiffel Tower was ugly when it was new.
Citizen Kane was not everyone’s Best Film Ever Made when it first came out.
It will also speed things along a bit of Peter Jackson and most of the cast to die. Death seems to grease the wheels of adding mystique to works of art.
Yes, but even those of us in today’s world who read Shakepeare for the first time as adults see and appreciate the greatness in it. If LOTR requires professional journalists to remember how much they liked the movies when they were 12 to get onto tomorrow’s Best Lists, I wouldn’t exactly call that a ringing endorsement.
Who would take seriously my list of all time works of literature if I included Hop on Pop because I remember how much I loved it when I was 6? Part of being an adult (and credible) critic is understanding that what you thought was the most awesomenest ever at age 12, isn’t necessarily quite so great now that you’re older (and hopefully wiser and more experienced).
It has to do with the definition of “best.” Looking at all of the movies of the last decade, it’s not at all difficult to make a solid argument that ten of them are better than any of the LOTR films.
Of course. It can’t be that people actually *liked *the films. I mean, *you *didn’t, therefore everyone who said they did is clearly lying and trying to be cool. :rolleyes:
I also don’t even think the OP is even true. Time Magazine listed the LOTR trilogy as #2 of the decade. Metacritic lists it as the 6th best reviewed film of the decade. Rolling Stone has it as #10. Vanity Fair has it as #8. Entertainment Weekly listed it as #1. There are plenty of places that have LOTR on their Best Of lists.
Also, from the OP:
Just because a film is not on a Top Ten list, does not mean there is any kind of negative criticism about it. For all he knows LOTR could be in those critics Top 20 lists.