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

^^^ this. I cared when the film was announced but it just seems like a chore now.

if you want to know what the future of the Hobbit movies will be like, imagine a big hairy foot stamping on a human face, forever

Eh, it will be by Jackson, it will have Hobbits and such, I will merrily watch it while my butt goes numb.

numb yr ass and yr mind will follow

Not sure what I want to sit through less, this or Del Toro's upcoming joint.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vKz7WnU83E

Ouch:

http://www.filmfreakcentral.net/ffc/2012/12/the-hobbit-an-unexpected-journey.html

Seeing this in 48fps tomorrow morning, whee

It looks pretty bad imo but I want to see a 48fps movie on a nice screen.

http://www.filmfreakcentral.net/.a/6a0168ea36d6b2970c017d3ec21f9b970c-800wi

otm

I think 48fps is the only way i'd want to see this in a theater.

old hobbits die hard

That review is pretty terrible, but yeah hard to take anyone serious if they are going to compare something to the Star Wars Holiday Special right out the gate. All the bitching about Jackson "manufacturing" villains and plot points and stuff.... the reviewer realizes this is fiction, right?

It's fiction, but it's also based on a beloved text.

tbh one of the things i am most anticipating is seeing what kind of invented business Jackson/Walsh et al have imported into the book's story. It's totally fine with me as long as it's awesome.

Via a friend on FB:

According to a post on thehalloffire.net from someone who's gotten a copy of Brian Sibley's "The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey Official Movie Guide", this is the quality dramaturgy we have to look forward to in Jackson's HOBBIT movies:

"According to Barry Humphries [who plays the Great Goblin], the Great Goblin's throne doubles as a toilet, with a hole in the seat... 'The Goblin King is, among other things, grossly incontinent so if he hears the call of nature it doesn't need to interrupt his conversation and, from time to time, a beautifully crafted urn beneath the throne receives a compliment of matter from the Goblin King, generally speaking of ill-digested Dwarf.'"

Very Meet the Feeblesy.

A follow-up comment indicates this isn't actually IN the film, but perhaps...implied.

That sounds kind of great?

It was also implied in the Fellowship film that Saruman fucked mud to generate uruk-hai iirc

being an H Shore fan in general, I got the Special Edition of the film score last night at lol Best Buy. The booklet includes a cue by cue rundown, which I stopped skimming pretty soon as it became evident that this is gonna be nothing like the book. That actually made me more eager to see the film...

(will post more on the score later, am finishing it up now)

It's not the deviation from sacred text that rubs the wrong way but the simultaneous fealty and extrapolation. I think there is legit reason to roll eyes when a 250 page book for kids is padded out into the same three-part, nine-hour epic format that an epic trio of books ostensibly for older readers merited. Whoever hoped there would be a shorter cut on DVD was OTM, since my understanding is that every fleeting mention of conflict in the novel is expanded into a full-on battle, and that what begins as dwarf adventure is bogged down both by portent - the ring! my precious! - and dwarf frivolity.

Basically, Lessons in the Perils of Trying to Please Everyone, Part 343.

didn't notice the Great Goblins's throne but he basically has a ballsack for a face

If it's just a matter of inflating every incident in the book into a set piece then that will, indeed, suck. My sense is that there's completely invented stuff though? Forgive me for not having read the reviews on AICN and its ilk; maybe I would already know these things if I had.

xpost

It's kinda both Jon

didn't notice the Great Goblins's throne but he basically has a ballsack for a face

I was wavering but now I am definitely seeing this movie

There's apparently invented stuff, extrapolated stuff from other books and also overblown set-piece stuff that warranted passing mention in the book.

Yeah one of the things that leaps out rereading the book vs LOTR is how quickly the perilous incidents are wrapped up. It really is a survival from the old kind of fantasies that feel like written-down hearth tales. You don't get bogged down in details of battle choreography. I love that.

hoping for a whimsical scene set to "The Greatest Adventure (The Ballad of the Hobbit)"

The modern genre storyteller's obsession with tension and release is just not there.

xpost to self

man if they followed the book there would be SO many songs; I'm surprised they retained as many as (judging from the sdtrk) they did.

Also, I'm astonished to report that the Neil Finn song is pretty dope and apt.

There's a Neil Finn song? That's the first thing that's made me want to see this.

Unless it's just "Don't Dream It's Over" again, which would also be apt.

There are two songs, both quite brief

The Finn song might not be in the actual film. It closes both editions of the soundtrack. It should be on youtube or something, I know it got revealed a couple of weeks ago.

it's a cover of "Toot It and Boot It"

it's a promo jingle for Gandalf's Gobble Melt

a ballsack with tits

http://www.comingsoon.net/nextraimages/goblinking001.jpg

Crap.

Having just finished listening to the score 2CD and liking it very much indeed, I went over to the usual film score nerd boards to find out that the lion's share of the best stuff was not used at all by Jackson's team in the film, in favor of tons and tons of retracked cues from the LOTR recordings.

That sucks.

I want him to rescore "The Hobbit" with cues from Ornette Coleman's and Shore's "Naked Lunch" score.

There. Much funnier here.

I mean, Jackson did a lot of that with Shore's stuff in the LOTR films too, but this sounds much more wholesale than what he practiced before.

RIP awesome Radagast The Brown theme

AO Scott not impressed

Mick LaSalle: exactly one Jar Jar Binks away from being as bad as "The Phantom Menace."

nah. It's mainly just boring and unnecessary

No one is impressed, are they? Even the people who begrudgingly respect bits of it say it is significantly, stultifyingly too long, or too silly, or too repetitive. One review pointed out that the skinnier Jackson gets, the more swollen his films become. And no one likes the frame rate.

Jackson may have the most depressing career arc of any mainstream blockbuster director I can think of

I was sort of excited to see this until I realized it was part 1 of 3

I know I'm going to see it at some point over the next week, but I admit I'm way less revved up about this than I might have even six months ago.

The Kotaku review pointed out the lack of tension in scenes where a hundred orcs are fighting all the dwarves and you never feel like anything is really at stake, but there were quite a few such scenes in the original LOTR trilogy. As for this 'fake'-looking 48fps, the more it's described, the more interesting it sounds, and the more I kind of want to see it.

again, I cannot believe what gluttons for punishment ILX0rs are. you guys will watch anything!

stop encouraging them!

I already bought my ticket, so my fate is sealed

yeah the 48fps part is the only part that sounds cool