The Mayan Calendar was incredibly accurate!

[Julius Seeker]

It predicted the release of the first of the Hobbit movies within mere days!

To whet your appetite, here's over 7 minutes of footage taken from the numerous trailers and releases and stitched together by fan.



I am expecting huge things from this movie, HUGE things =)

Happy 12/12/12.

[Shrinweck]

My Father said he read an article that Peter Jackson's female writing partners added in more female parts for The Hobbit since there are next to no female roles, which is saying something since LOTR had so few female roles and they didn't go around hugely bolstering their appearances. This kind of makes me nervous but my Father also mentioned that they did this by digging around in the appendices. I think the result of this is a bolstered role from Galadriel, so it can't be too detrimental to the experience.

In a search for Hobbit stuff I turned up a book called "Finding God in 'The Hobbit'" which just has to be a huge stretch... I've never been able to see an ounce of pro religious sentiment in any of Tolkien's works that I've read. Nature, yes.. god, not so much.

[Eric]

Boobs are a good thing my child, embrace them.

[Anarky]

My work is actually hooking us up with a prescreening tomorrow

[kali o.]

The dwarves look shitty to me...that pretty much ruins it. Seriously. I am a nerd.

Also, probably not fair to judge it based on stitched together trailers, but it looks more like a standard adventure flick compared LotRO.

[Shrinweck]

Trailers and sneak peaks of high lights make basically everything look like shit. I don't expect anything more than more of the same albeit INCREDIBLY drawn out and detailed compared to LOTR. Some of the dwarves do look shitty but dwarves are basically caricatures and Thorin looks fine so I can get past it.

But yeah The Hobbit in general doesn't have the OOMPH of LOTR, The Silmarillion, or The Children of Hurin... the word superficial comes to mind but it's still leaps and bounds over most of the stuff that we've been getting in sci-fi/fantasy these days.

[Julius Seeker]

The Hobbit was written in a style explained to be a creative fiction written by Bilbo Baggins. It makes light on some fairly gruesome acts that occur in the book. Tolkien, of course, was intending this to be a children's tale, and so this style was purposely done to mimic the style of the Grimm tales.

Regardless, I have a suspicion I will enjoy it a great deal... At least twice =)

I do agree that te Children of Hurin and Silmarillion are stronger stories... Also if you're interested in more female characters, the first age tales by Tolkien have way more than the third age books. A lot of people are skeptical about Silmarillion era films, I think (in the right hands) those would be surprisingly good even to the optimistic crowd.

[Shrinweck]

A Google search tells me that Christopher Tolkien and the rest of the family own the film rights to The Silmarillion and have so far refused to sell them. Maybe there'll be some interest when they're done with the last Hobbit movie.

I'll still be surprised if The Children of Hurin ever gets made into a film since it makes The Road look like a happy romp through the countryside.

[Julius Seeker]

Hmmm.... The initial test screenings had people not too pleased by the visuals, and blamed the filming being shot at 48 frames per second rather than the traditional 24. I too am not sure I agree with Peter Jackson's approach, but blame the post-production treatment, but I suppose it will look much better in 3D.

[Julius Seeker]

So I actually finally saw the movie last night. I LOVED it =)

Considering it was about 3 hours long, it seemed fairly short in length. I liked the Orc's more in this one than I did in Lord of the Rings, they had more personality.

Just as a note, the story is based on the Expanded version of the Hobbit. The original Hobbit was about 300 pages long, but there are about 100 more pages in the Appendices of Lord of the Rings which expand the story - they give a lot more background on the Necromancer, Thorin's past including his father and grandfather, and the Dwarf Kingdoms, the Orcs, the White Council, and other things. The Lord of the Rings Appendices make a very significant appearance in Peter Jackson's adaptation.

Martin Freeman makes a surprisingly great and believable young version of Ian Holm's Bilbo Baggins.

There were a few disappointments I had, but mostly they dealt with the accuracy of some of the wording; I also wished the songs played a bigger role. Though in light of EVERYTHING else, these are trivial matters.

[Flip]

The songs never played a big role in LOTR either, that shouldnt surprise you.

I'm interested in seeing this in the new controversial 48 frames. I've heard weird things like it looks like a Spanish soap opera. Its funny how we get used to simple things like frame rates.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/huff-wire ... ertainment

[SineSwiper]

I remember watching Batman Returns on my parent's 120Hz LCD. It just look really weird, like it was a British production with some sort of PAL/NTSC conversion. It's almost "overly smooth", and it did detract from the action. My parents were used to it, so I guess it's just like adapting to SD/HD.

[Shrinweck]

Seeing this tomorrow in IMAX 3D

[Shrinweck]

So I really liked this for the most part. This was my first 3D movie in a theater since, like, the Disney stuff in the 90s so that was a little bit of a treat. For the most part how it was shot was beautiful and in a 3D IMAX theater I didn't find the visuals detracting from the experience the way people explained they would be. I did have some issues with the visuals and 3D stuff, like when there was quick action and the screen was panning side-to-side rather quickly basically everything on screen became an indiscernible, blurry mass of nothing. These were seconds to the movies hours, though, so I can't complain about that too much.

The movie was very enjoyable and other than a couple changes that I didn't care for I like what Peter Jackson did with it. Light spoilers for what I didn't like:

Spoiler: show

Bilbo not coming up with the answer "time" himself bothered me. I liked it more when he realized the answer when he was asking for more time more than Gollum being an imbecile. More than this, I disliked the ring falling out of Gollum's pocket rather than already being on the ground. Also the sleigh lead by rabbits. Ugh, really?

Basically everything else was really well done though. The opening dinner with the Dwarves in Bag End was flawless. Even with the issues I've had with LOTR and this movie I really doubt any filmmaker could have done a better job.

Really top notch.

Also there was this SUPER long preview of the next Star Trek movie which was absolutely-fucking-amazing in IMAX 3D. I didn't have a watch or anything but it was something like seven minutes. Looks gooood.

[Anarky]

I remember watching Batman Returns on my parent's 120Hz LCD. It just look really weird, like it was a British production with some sort of PAL/NTSC conversion. It's almost "overly smooth", and it did detract from the action. My parents were used to it, so I guess it's just like adapting to SD/HD.

I have that same problem with Blu-ray. It always feels like I'm looking at photoshop layers.