Peter Jackson's The Hobbit

[laughingoctopus]

Official trailer! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eM--4Ukl ... e=youtu.be

[LotsoA113]

Excuse me as I calmly have a spasm of nerdy awesomeness!!!! This loooms amazing!!!

[laughingoctopus]

I know! WOO-HOO!

[EricJ]

Yes, I could've waited to see it with Tintin, but my link-clicking fingers weakened.

I was still traumatized by too many memories of the good-but-cheap Rankin-Bass version (something that never happened with Return of the King), that seeing the early "Unexpected party" part of the story Peter-Jacksonized was a welcome brain-cleaner.
Nice to see they even left in the Dwarves tossing plates at the dinner table ("That's what Bilbo Baggins hates...") but doing their dragon-backstory song as a cultural-anthem-in-exile was the right touch.

[ShyViolet]

I saw it tonight and enjoyed it very much. Yes, it was overlong, episodic and a bit tedious at times, but it was great to be back in Middle Earth. Martin Freeman was just so good. Hope he gets more screentime in the next one. (Ditto Andy Serkis and Gollum.)

[Bill1978]

I don't think there are any plans to insert Gollum into the final two movies. And story wise he makes no more appearances. But not being familiar with the Appendix, it wouldn't surprise me if Jackson managed to work Gollum in somehow.

[ShyViolet]

I hope so! That part with him and Bilbo was easily the best in the film.

[Ben]

Gollum is done in The Hobbit as far as the book is concerned. But there *is* stuff in the appendices that they could use to send Gollum on a parallel journey that might/could interweave with Bilbo's story. Since in marketing and the movie terms, Gollum = LOTR universe, I would expect Jackson to work him in somehow. Gollum is the face of LOTR and the main tie to The Hobbit. Although he *shouldn't* be back, my guess is that he could/will be.

[EricJ]

The "money" in TH:AUJ was all the callback cameos of LOTR Trilogy characters who show up whether they're in the book or not (Frodo, Galadriel, etc.), to prove to skeptical audiences that this was a "real" Jackson LOTR movie despite all the new characters and different lead actors, so Andy Serikis's callback practically got top billing in the movie.

They've still got Legolas to show up in TDOS, but they may run out of cameos by the time they get to TABA.
By that point, they may assume all their LOTR-callback money is on having the "good" Gollum show up in every movie, so normally I'd be picturing their trying to work in his being captured by the enemy--just to anal-retentively backstory every plot point of Fellowship--except that that didn't happen fifty years earlier.

[James]

Just saw it today. Ugh. So disappointed. Martin Freeman was the best thing about it, barely salvaging the part as written. Too many negative things to write. I'd say this is a worse followup to a successful trilogy than Phantom Menace!

[Ben]

Well although it's made a ship-load of money I don't think everyone is talking about it and reacting as well as they did to any of the LOTR movies. And the lack of Academy recognition shows too.

Personally, what I liked about LOTR was that behind every line of dialogue you knew there was a page and a half of backstory and reasoning as to why that line was being spoken. There was a huge amount of depth under the surface that gave everything a gravitas. Here, everything IS surface! And with the extra appendices material (sled rabbits, anyone?) it felt to me that it was even stretching that to breaking point.

In Fellowship, the fellowship is there...it's just done. "Here's the fellowship", wide-shot, big-score...done. In Unexpected Journey we have a half hour of each dwarf turning up without much to go on in terms of characteristics. Knock-knock, it's a dwarf...knock-knock, it's another dwarf. And another. And another. And...

It did look great, I thought, but no need for the 3D. It was shot properly with depth, as opposed to Pirates 4 that I watched the end of without the specs on, but when I took them off for a bit of Hobbit, although the image was 3D-fuzzy to emphasize that this was natively shot in 3D, the image was actually so much sharper, clearer and brighter. We've already decided that we'll only see the last two "flat" (although I thought the image had great depth anyway).

My main complaint here is that they took a slim kids book, and have "Lord Of The Ringsed it" to make it a LOTR prequel, when it wasn't really that to begin with (LOTR, of course, was a semi-sequel to it, not the other way around). And so to keep the visual consistency, everything has had to become "bigger" and more grand. Of course, imagination plays a huge part when reading the original book, and it could look this way for some, but for me it's been artificially "lifted" up into this more expansive LOTR universe so as to fall in line with those films.

The bottom line is that the material (Hobbit book and otherwise) has been stretched out when even two films might have been breaking point enough. I would have preferred that: ultimately, a couple of 2 1/2-hour movies would have been perfect. I know an extended cut is already in the can for home video...but I wonder if we couldn't get a *shorter* version, haha!

However they release them, I think I'm still going to wait for the ultimate mega Hobbit/LOTR set in three or four years time rather than pick them up one at a time and then again (I already have the LOTR theatricals and Extendeds on DVD, the Extendeds in the big Weta Collectibles boxes) and have held off on the non-PJ-endorsed Blu-rays so far. Now watch me pick them up anyway...!

[Randall]

I'd decided a while ago to catch these all in the "ultimate box set" version in a couple of years or so. I was never a big Tolkien fan to begin with, and could never make it through reading The Hobbit (I read LOTR while the films were coming out, but still found them a slog--- just not my thing). I loved the LOTR films, though; but stretching The Hobbit into 3 epic-length films seems ludicrous, Appendix or no. Still, I'd be curious to see one in 48fps just out of curiosity.

[GeorgeC]

Just saw it today. Ugh. So disappointed. Martin Freeman was the best thing about it, barely salvaging the part as written. Too many negative things to write. I'd say this is a worse followup to a successful trilogy than Phantom Menace!

The fact that I see basically NO traffic about this film on any site I regularly frequent speaks volumes...
If people really receive a film well, they're still talking about it months later.

Oh, I'm sure the home video release do decently but yeah, it's not LOTR.
I bet the higher-ups that authorized a trilogy release are beginning to wish they'd stuck to a two-picture adaptation!

I'd decided a while ago to catch these all in the "ultimate box set" version in a couple of years or so. I was never a big Tolkien fan to begin with, and could never make it through reading The Hobbit (I read LOTR while the films were coming out, but still found them a slog--- just not my thing). I loved the LOTR films, though; but stretching The Hobbit into 3 epic-length films seems ludicrous, Appendix or no. Still, I'd be curious to see one in 48fps just out of curiosity.

I have The Hobbit, LOTR, and The Silmarillion and have read through all but the Silmarillion twice.. at intervals of roughly 20 years. Last time I read them was at the time of the LOTR theatrical releases. I got through the trilogy around the time of Fellowship.

The Hobbit is definitely the easiest book to get through and the most readable. It should have been the easiest to adapt... I still don't see the need for three films, let alone two. The story that needs to be told could be done in just over 3 hours if that's even needed. It should be embarrassing to the producers of the live-action version that Rankin-Bass managed to tell the same story in a lot less time. (Then again, the people running Hollywood now are mostly MBA's and others who have never seen, let alone, read much fantasy books (or much of anything) in their lifetimes. Their ignorance about many things is fairly shocking. It's all about money and they don't care if they cheapen and ruin things along the way for a fast buck.)

The other books (LOTR) could easily be shrunk at least 33% and you'd still have the story you need. Jackson made the right calls with the screenplays.

The Silmarillion is just a mess because it was constructed out of notebooks written over the course of Tolkien's adult life. It was never organized by J.R.R. Even J.R.R. Tolkien's son, Christopher, couldn't read his father's mind and did the best he could with the material. It's an encyclopedia and reads like that -- just like the appendix sections in Return of the King.

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I don't know that many people like the 48fps format.

You basically have only a few people -- James Cameron, one of the most hated individuals in entertainment, and Peter Jackson -- that actually want this crap. They only get the toys because their films have grossed over a billion dollars. The questions about end-quality and necessity for this technology are still not being put forward enough. The economy is definitely not there.

We have just barely gotten through a bruising period of FORCED hi-def conversion -- and many TV stations, networks, etc. still have not upgraded even now in the US. It'd be easier to swallow this 48fps business if we knew Jackson and Cameron were funding this out of their own pockets but of course someone else is paying for it and ultimately passing that cost onto the ticketbuyers!

(That's one of the few things I still respect George Lucas for... Even if his later films were crappy at least he funded most of his movies out of his own pocket! Fault his artistic sense and lack of taste, yes, but at least he's not taking money from someone else...)

I think it's completely unnecessary but then again I'm not also the one WASTING an extra $20million to do post-film conversions to make 3D versions of these tent-pole films, either.

The powers-that-be still have this notion that the average consumer has plenty of money to burn on entertainment.

They should get that idea out of their heads as soon as possible. Money is not unlimited despite what economic forecasters, businessmen, and theorists believe.

It's very, very easy to pass on a lot of entertainment if you find that the producers, stars, and others in the industry are actually contemptuous of the audiences. I have very little trouble not supporting these jerks and putting my money elsewhere.

************

Excuse my mood, but I just got done reading Marvel Comics: The Untold Story by Sean Howe. What happened to that company over the past 25 years is just a microcosm of what's happened to entertainment in general, and it's very heart-breaking. Good history book but it's unfortunately a confirmation of things that I witnessed or heard second-hand in the mid-1990s.

[Ben]

The Silmarillion could make for an excellent LOTR series like Game Of Thrones, though...

[ShyViolet]

Interesting interview with Sylvester McCoy (Radagast the Brown)


I was lucky enough to meet him years ago at a Doctor Who convention; he is a really, really nice guy.

http://m.digitalspy.com/movies/intervie ... ippie.html