​1st Place in Derby #338: Metallic Ink, with 214 votes!

This week's Derby winners will be printed with metallic ink. Pretty cool, right? Pretty cool until a TSA employee form-tackles you in the metal detector. 

All right, we're going to go out on a big nerd limb here and say something that needs saying: Peter Jackson is a crappy director. 

Now that's not to say that his movies are crappy (necessarily, ahem), but just to acknowledge that, by obsessing over sweeping visual effects and canned Hollywood drama, he failed to develop the characters and underlying tensions of his stories. He doesn't do a good job directing. 

And he's certainly not the first director of really popular but poorly directed nerd movies! George Lucas was an abysmal director in many respects, as shown by the dramatic improvement in acting quality and cinematography between New Hope and Empire (when he wrote and produced but stopped directing). The Phantom Menace was so crappy in no small part because freakin' Lucas directed it himself -- and he's a bad director!

Indeed, the Wachowski brothers couldn't effectively direct an actor to save their lives, yet they created one of the best modern sci-fi movies in The Matrix. Which is all to say that it's OK to acknowledge that Peter Jackson's stilted-yet-over-done directorial style is just plain bad even if you like his movies overall. 

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