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

I would take this to the GoT thread but everyone would just be yelling at me to read the books/watch s3, I suspect

i wish more ppl talked about the english civil war. learning about it was kinda my biggest revelation as a history major, i literally can't remember ever hearing about it in any history class i'd ever taken before college.

I remember learning about Cromwell and the Roundheads, we probably spent a week on it in AP English or something iirc

er AP History that is

those are plot mechanics, not underlying themes

Seinfeld is rather famously a show about nothing, he said, explaining the joke.

are you really gonna get me started on Seinfeld

Please tell me you didn't like Seinfeld, I will feel that much less alone in the world.

according to larry david the actual seinfeld concept was 'where a comedian gets his ideas from,' and they just pushed the 'show about nothing' stuff to the media because it sounded catchier

xps to jd: well, high school history. i was kicked out of honors history freshman year of high school for poor grades so i'm sure my friends got a better education than i did over the next three years, but i learned nothing. like literally not anything at all. (said this before but once we watched spartacus cuz we were doing the spartans.) my sophomore u.s. history teacher was this older guy who banged his fist on the desk exactly once on the second or third day because everyone was being an asshole and yelled (this is still rly vivid and sad) "this is MY CLASS!" and then never did anything like that again and let everybody walk all over him for the rest of the term while we crawled through one of those empty u.s. history textbooks and nobody paid any attention or learned anything. once i went into a bar(/grill) with my dad and saw him there, and he left. so yeah i was not taught about the english civil war either. (except by my mom, but i didn't listen.)

i think i want to teach high school history.

Please tell me you didn't like Seinfeld, I will feel that much less alone in the world.

Neither did I so I think we're all united, actually.

It has its moments but it is invariably ruined by Kramer, the most obnoxious variant of the "wacky neighbor" trope ever. I also think the "it's a show about nothing!" interpretation is just a marketing angle designed to obfuscate the fact that it's actually a show about misanthropy and alienation, made especially clear in its final episode. I don't hate the show as much as I used to - it's occasionally amusing.

xp

'where a comedian gets his ideas from,' = misanthropy and alienation

I rest my case

Curb Your Enthusiasm, now there's a good show.

i had an 8th grade teacher who did some great units on nazi germany and the civil rights movement but yeah, apart from that history was a total boring blur for me until senior year of HS when i got obsessed with it after reading james loewen's 'lies my teacher told me' (which i still rate as one of the best ways to get obsessed with history).

i can't really get with 'curb,' larry david playing larry david is so much less interesting than jason alexander playing 'larry david.'

People consider GoT adult and complex? I think it's totally hilarious (the show and the opinion). A great soap opera with beheadings and boobs and the occasional dragon or two.

I've avoided the GoT threads, btw, because I'm still catching up. But I think it's a hoot. Mostly well acted and extremely well executed in service of totally silly sword and sometimes sorcery stuff. I love its embrace of grime and bad things happening to good and bad people alike. The Hobbit movie is just so bright and mechanical compared to pretty people rolling around in the mud and blood.

i dunno i'd rather just read about actual medieval history, that shit is way more dark and fascinating than any contrived swords n' sorcery claptrap.

i'm willing to bet that there are some people who read both

Curb is great but it is also 90% people yelling at each other. Seinfeld at least knows how to have fun.

Yeah, those bombadil scenes were a bit silly, but I always liked what he signified for the mythos.

The shape and history of that world is mapped out so exhaustively, from the creator god down to the smallest of small details. And just when you think it's all pretty much pinned down and you know where you stand, along comes bombadil to upset the apple cart. Tolkien basically pulls the rug out from underneath the whole hierarchy that he created. I mean, I wish TB didn't sing so much, but I like his status as more or les the only total mystery in his universe.

Fwiw thought this film was excellent in places but a bit of a drag over 3 hours, same as most everyone else it seems.

― Windsor Davies, Friday, December 21, 2012 5:33 AM (5 months ago) Bookmark

http://i.imgur.com/TVF1a.jpg

just saw this

it was SO BAD

like, really the opposite everything that worked about the LOTR movies. Paceless, graceless, jumpy and overstuffed. Everything charming about the story comes off wrong somehow, and everything that was just made up for the movie was borrrrring and generic. What a trainwreck. And they're committed to two more? Yikes.

ok so I thought I was too cool for Hobbit, but I finally saw this today and mostly loved it!

It felt a bit more overtly cg'd than the LOTR movies, that was the only thing stopping me from losing myself completely in the movie. And in ways I can't really explain except parts of it looked really computer-game like? But Martin Freeman was really lovely as Bilbo, loved the Goblin King/Bazza Humphries -- Humphries did some great stuff with the voice I thought -- and Sylvester McCoy as Radaghast was really great, he had a very Jim Henson-esque playfulness that I just loved, he felt like a character out of The Dark Crystal.
The goblin battle felt like it dragged with all the collapsing bridges and whatnot, but the final scenes were quite thrilling and I loved that final shot of smaug in the gold coins.

It made me want to go back and read the Hobbit, definitely. It's such a pure fantasy-adventure story, the movie reminded me how much fun it was reading the book the first time.

I adored the LOTR flicks to the point of sitting through all the extended versions, all the extras, everything... but this I couldn't get into after a weekend of trying. As for the next 6 hours, let me know if they manage to shoehorn Farmer Giles of Ham in there.

i went to the library today & borrowed the Hobbit :D

the book's great, i reread it right after seeing the movie (which i also kinda dug while wishing it were an hour shorter and, yes unfortunately, looked less like a fucking computer game as designed by thomas kinkade) and if anything it seemed better than when i was a kid. can't think of a better adventure story.

Rad this version if you can, it's got a wealth of information: http://www.amazon.com/The-Annotated-Hobbit-J-R-R-Tolkien/dp/0618134700

sure phil, I will RAD that version

:)

Annnnnd...new trailer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbOEknbi4gQ

We finally get the Cumberbatch speaking as Smaug at the end.

hey, I never actually said anything on here about how wholly enraging I found the first Hobbit movie to be, did I

I mean it just fucking went on and on and on with all these cutesy scenes that were tolerable at first but kept happening and dragging on, to the point where I started being all "OKAY I GET IT, JUST GET TO THE FUCKING DRAGON" and then they did and THE FUCKING MOVIE ENDED

Oh shit, not looking forward to Elves in Love subplot.

Please tell me the movie is 4 hours long, because there's a lot of story to tell.

Man, Cabbagepatch is more ubiquitous than Jessica Chastain.

this looks like torture, not even bloomps can save us

I am currently considering tearing off my own face rather than watching this movie

Pretty sure I'm going to spend the next few moths saying how it looks shit, then go to the cinema and actually enjoy it quite a lot.

It already looks like twice as much of everything that was just unbearable about the last one.

We finally get the Cumberbatch speaking as Smaug at the end.

― Ned Raggett, Tuesday, October 1, 2013 10:21 AM (2 hours ago) Bookmark

it sounds like they applied a dubstep drop filter to his voice

i'll watch this, it looks like good clean fun

Wizards and elves and stuff. I'll probably see this, and in 3D no less.

Second film is a taut 2 hours and 40 minutes

wish they'd stop rushing thru this story

one hopes that in this one the thrills n spills sequences will at least feel like something is at risk, since big fucking dragon etc

what in the world is going to be in the third movie? is that where they're adding in new stuff?

2nd breakfast, elevenses, etc

The battle of Five Armies is hours and hours.

The Battle of Five Hours

the first on screen battle projected in real time

Remember how the cartoon Hobbit had a higher dwarf death count than the book? I bet this is the same -- a lot of expendable characters there.

They should have expended some of the dwarves before they began shooting. Full dwarf qty was not a point where they needed to adhere strictly to the book.

would have hung together so much better with like 6 fkin dwarves

Snow White only had seven. Who is Bilbo to think he's better than Snow White?

Let the spiders chew up a few imo