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

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

I liked this bit from Anthony Lane's review (even if the Shakespeare ref is a little too Lane-ish)

Bilbo finds it: “His hand met what felt like a tiny ring of cold metal lying on the floor of the tunnel.” That is the account given by Tolkien, who knew that turning points were all the more momentous for being unadorned, but Jackson, with so much room to spare, cannot dare to underplay the crux. Instead, before Bilbo stumbles upon the ring, we see it slip from Gollum’s safekeeping, tumble in refulgent slow motion, and, on impact, give a resounding clang. (If Jackson ever films “Othello,” wait for Desdemona’s handkerchief to hit the ground like a sheet of tin.)

tbh people complaining about this being awful is the first thing that's made me want to see it

before Bilbo stumbles upon the ring, we see it slip from Gollum’s safekeeping

Ugh. If I'm ever tempted to see this I should just remind myself what Jackson did to Treebeard in LOTR. (Yeah yeah I'm a tolkienerd.)

- the argt that this is an adaptation of a 250 page kids book not a 1,400 page grownups book is kind of moot, this is a film for people who already like lord of the rings! bilbo finding the ring in the hobbit (encountered naively) is just yo found a ring dood; the naive reader of the hobbit doesn't know that it is The One Ring. number of naive viewers of this film = perishingly small.
- though i'm sure the above scene could be executed awfully, still.
- something as heavy with incident as the hobbit could be this long in film without feeling too bloated, i think; text has powers of summary and condensation that film doesn't, and to complain that "the battle raged for three days" can't be executed in a proportionate length of film-time to one sentence of 250 pages is to miss the point
- though again i don't want to defend it too prophylactically - i'm sure it could still feel awful, padded, bloated etc

-think there's probably an interesting piece to be written about how advances in digital cinematography (i.e. 4K being the new aspirational standard, with 8K and upwards being thought about??) have far outpaced what CGI rendering is capable of rendering realistically

but CGI has always been crap. Apart from Jurassic Park

feel like there was a period during the film era when you could count on CGI to look pretty good since the transfer to film would 'smudge' it enough to make it look passable

but now everything looks so extremely plasticky

but CGI has always been crap. Apart from Jurassic Park

Crazy talk. Most people don't even notice 90% of CGI in movies.

yeah there was a whole bunch in skyfall i didn't notice (don't know if it was digital projection or not). but i think when it's fantasy orc dragon dinosaur nonsense that you know isn't real it's easier to see the flaws.

jurassic park cgi was stellar tho.

feel like everybody needs to move back to 1:100 scale models lovingly painted and detailed and then set aflame

No idea why anyone would want the 48fps version. Haven't you ever seen that horrible motion smoothing setting on a TV?

I remember an interview with Ang Lee many years ago where he said his most successful use of CGI was in "Sense & Sensibility." That that anyone would have noticed, which I think was his point.

fuck this movie and fuck peter jackson, cheers

This defense (!) of 48fps is one of the harshest takedowns of the film I've read yet:

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2012/12/the_hobbit_in_48_fps_why_i_liked_the_increased_frame_rate.html