The Hobbit films, previously to be directed by Guillermo del Toro and now to be directed by Peter Jackson again.

When I was a kid I totally didn't like him being that age! I didn't want a story about someone older than my dad.

yeah! except hitchhiker's is fairly brutal -- nobody ever really does anything heroic. arthur just hangs out with a bunch of debauched cynics until he winds up back "home", with all his history and species pride stripped from him.

(that's only the first two books or the first series of the radio show -- i guess arthur helps save the world in book 3. but the second radio series is really just as bleak and cruel, and the final book seems to have been written from a place of real resentment.)

anyway, bilbo gets a bit more of a heroic arc than that. ALTHOUGH one of the other things i like about the story is that he doesn't actually do all that much for the Cause, except tell the comically generic deus ex machina hero dude about smaug's weakness. it's clear in the book that the real heroic climax is when he's in the tunnel, invisible, unwatched, and realizes he could turn around for home and never think about any of this again.

(xpost)

it's clear in the book that the real heroic climax is when he's in the tunnel, invisible, unwatched, and realizes he could turn around for home and never think about any of this again

Good call. Might be hard to put on film but I hope they have it there.

In the end, and as I'm sure I've said on this thread, I just want the cinematic dragon to end all dragons.

When I was a kid I totally didn't like him being that age! I didn't want a story about someone older than my dad.

when i was little i honestly probably didn't even notice he was that age; he acts like a scared kid most of the time, and that worked for me. when i was older i realized that the book shows the ways in which decent mild older people who have maybe had a little too much comfort can act like scared kids -- but also how they can force it down, and do brave things, and (bonus!) their mildness and compassion can make them braver, or more effectively brave, or nobler, than the gruff born-brave warrior types. "child of the kindly west, if more of us valued your ways...", and all that.

That dying speech of Thorin's is flat out one of Tolkien's best moments. For something best seen as 'just' a fairy tale, no matter how much he retconned it late, he has some of his highest points as an author in the book. (Also some of his goofiest -- none of that elf talk in Rivendell is going to survive.)

yeah that speech for me marks the high-water mark, as far as tolkien could go towards a moving paean to mild apolitical wine-and-song agrarianism before he became a frightened middle-class crank.

wait when did that happen

enh I think that's a ref to the not very subtle xenophobia of LOTR

yeah i don't want to make a big furious Good Leftist deal of it or anything (like i said, i love the movies, where it's barely softened at all) but, you know, lol @ all the swarthy men from the East allying with the brutish and apparently cultureless Orcs to come into my garden and build WINDMILLS

lol yeah I know what you mean. just wanted to know if there was more to it than that

i can't believe Holm's almost 80!

i really love the LotR movies -- compare the trilogy to its parallel blockbuster fantasy trilogies (star wars prequels, the matrix) and see how many things weren't fucked up. i do a marathon of the extended editions about once a year (w/ friends and beer); they're really wonderful old-school epics, shaded and lived-in and funny and generous to their actors. when they came out, press focus was understandably on the new tech, and there were a lot of snotty half-assed critical pieces complaining about "all those pixels fighting each other" and how un-stirring it was, but that's exactly backwards: it's only in the impossible aerial shots that the battle scenes are made of pixels. in most of the movie they're people wearing a huge amount of makeup, standing in the mud and rain. they look weighed down by it and it's fantastic.

anyway the books suck but the hobbit is fantastic, which means i have no idea what this movie's gonna be like. sort of wish it weren't being given the Epic Treatment, yeah, but oh well.

― difficult listening hour, Tuesday, January 11, 2011 4:20 PM (10 minutes ago) Bookmark

v. otm

Does anyone else think they might pad this out into two movies by adding in Gandalf's off-screen southern Mirkwood spy mission against Sauron? It would tighten the ties to the LotR stories, and allow Jackson to again do his own thing outside the actual books.

^^^um that IS what their doing, as posed upthread

Feel tempted to post the equivalent of 10 PRINT "READ THE WHOLE THREAD" 20 GOTO 10 RUN now.

Sorry! Too much skimming.

Never mind.

feel v confident that anything jackson changes will be a stunning disimprovement.

Will still have to see these obv, before ned explodes

Bang?

/\

Hopefully smaug is a little more impressive than this

Well, you know. He sleeps most of the time and all.

lifelong smoker, gotta do damage that

http://www.volapukblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/07/tumbleweed1.jpg

Filming to begin in less than two months...

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/02/07/us-hobbit-idUSTRE7165JY20110207

I guess I just am comfortable with the fact that I read these books decades ago. So if someone wants to make a spectacular $200million fantasy film based on these properties, I'll gladly get high and watch them.

My thoughts exactly.

Last week's New Yorker profile of Del Toro, featuring all the Hobbit back story, is fantastic, albeit weirdly weight-obsessed. http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/02/07/110207fa_fact_zalewski

"pictures from the set of Hobbiton, used in Lord of the Rings and currently being prepared for filming of the new "The Hobbit" movie."

http://www.flickr.com/photos/59354874@N04/

page 2: http://www.flickr.com/photos/59354874@N04/page2/

Bilbo's house is on the second page.

I have never understood why anyone would put a door handle in the middle of a circular door. I don't care how short you are, it doesn't make any sense

actually the shorter you are, the harder time you would have opening it, because you're arms are too short!

After reading that NYer profile, I'm kind of glad he's off this. Really want him to make that Lovecraft flick though, which the wikipedia page seems vague on whether it was actually greenlit or not.

http://io9.com/#!5757616/first-video-of-the-dwarf-and-hobbit-cast-of-peter-jacksons-the-hobbit-together-at-last/gallery/5

whoa, didnt know andrew sullivan was gonna be in this

Via Ian McKellen's blog: http://www.mckellen.com/cinema/hobbit-movie/110308.htm

I've seen Bilbo — in three dimensions.

I was visiting old friends in the Stone Street offices and heard Martin Freeman was just round the corner by the permanent greenscreen, done up as Bilbo, testing his costume in front of the 3D cameras. Indeed, there he was in the open air, mostly oblivious to the camera, though turning this way and that as required. Martin improvised a hobbity gait, padding back and forth, testing his big hairy Hobbit feet, pointy ears and little tum.

Beneath the shade of a tent, in a sun hat, Andrew Lesnie was remotely controlling the two lenses within the mighty camera which digitally records in 3D. His screen showed the familiar 2D image but next to it, above the director's chair, was a large colour screen in full magical three dimensions, much as it will appear in the cinema — courtesy of the spy-glasses that transform the blurred outlines onscreen to the high definition exactitude of the 3D effect.

oh man

FUCK 3D

goddamn you Avatar so much to answer for

i have no desire to see any movie in 3D but how much does shooting it that way effect (or dim) the visuals if you're watching it in 2D (in a regular theater or at home later)?

"the spy-glasses"

Well to me it suggests that instead of shooting the film to make the best 2D movie they possibly can, they will be splitting their attention between two different formats, and possibly with an edge to 3D gimmicks.

"I've seen Bilbo — in three dimensions."

This statement seems so dirty to me...

Could it be that people aren't going out to see movies at the rate they used to unless they are 3D IMAX MEGABLOCKBUSTERS?

That's my guess.

People want to see those 1D blockbuster stories in 3D!

so can we talk for a second about how he was watching Martin Freeman live in costume doing motion capture work and that's not the part he's talking about re: "I saw him in 3D"

He saw Martin in reality and Bilbo on screen in 3D is how I understood it?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FfesknLk5uI

This is the first truly exciting thing I've seen about The Hobbit in a loooonnnggg time.

I'm totally psyched now and I think Peter Jackson as director is great move.

April 1st lol @ http://www.mckellen.com/cinema/hobbit-movie/blog.htm

Surprised no-one posted about the 48 frames per second thing. Sounds much more interesting than it being in 3D.

I'd like to see a comparison 24/25 fps vs 48 fps because I'm not sure what to think. If it were such an improvement, wouldn't they've been shooting at 48 for years already?

can the human eye tell much difference?

"Dear Mr. Lucas. Please take note.... ehem..

REAL FUCKING SETS!!!!

Thank you for your time.

aegisgfx 1 hour ago 5 "

It'll look a lot more like video. x-post

martin freeman doing well for the ol' Postwar British Comedy scoreboard between arthur dent and bilbo. he should go oscar with money or something.