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

I'll admit that Smaug was kind of worth it. He looked great.

Intrigued that the most made up thing in this one, the female elf warrior, is apparently one of the stronger aspects of the film, though the Times review complained she was wasted in a by the books (if not by *the* book) love story.

― Josh in Chicago, Friday, December 13, 2013 2:53 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

u do know this whole thing is made up right

I thought it was all based on that Zeppelin song, which I thought was itself ripped off from a 200 year old folk tale?

Tolkien listened to nothing but Zeppelin while writing the Hobbit back in the 30's

the action scenes were slicker but also a bit too close to 'yoda bouncing off the walls with a lightsaber' for me

There's more of this kind of thing in Smaug, like the barrel chase scene which is filled with impossible movement by the characters. I enjoyed wallowing in it though, and, to me, this one looked a lot better than UJ did. Martin Freeman's really good, but not enough of the focus is on him - too many characters, dammit.

I rewatched the LOTR films, and as I commented to a friend, wow, fans really dodged a bullet. They could have been utterly terrible, but instead the acting, effects, direction - everything was absolutely just right. Didn't even need to impose any caveats

Most of the acting is about school-play standard. Bloom, elrond, galadriel appallingly cast/performed, everything after rohan a butchered mess that misses any grace or gravitas from the book but hey! adds werewolves! paths of the dead a disney ride intro. Elves all just camp chancers afaict. Any alteration from story/script from jackson and mrs clangs across the ears and the flow.

And he got it far, far more right than he has even tried to do here.

Imagine if lucas hadnt prequelled his own work, but idk say blade runner or w/e. Jackson is a fraud who should prob be up on charges of some sort.

nah I disagree, and not because Ian McKellen understands how to treat the material. Legolas is a boring role and so is Aragorn; the difference is that Viggo Mortensen makes Aragorn into the only watchable boring superhero in franchise film.

whether you agree with any of it or not, john dolan's epic slam of jackson's LOTR is a pretty entertaining read:

http://www.exile.ru/articles/detail.php?ARTICLE_ID=7168

the real dodged bullet was stuart townsend.

McKellen, Lee predictably great. Frodo, aragorn, sam, theoden all good. Gollum well negotiated. Oy vey the rest.

reading that dolan article is a blast, for sure, but agreeing with his perspective really requires seeing those books as sacrosanct. no way in hell was Lee bad casting for Saruman.

Gollum's definitely gonna show up in the next movie, right? Vengefully emerging from a cave or something. He's too important as a face of the franchise.

Cheers jd that was a v satisfying read (tho yeah i didnt agree with all of it by any means)- the rage/offence taken is about right tho.

i believe gollum narrates the second film to baby frodo (now his godson) and the third one is just three hours of merry and pippin dancing

Gollum leaves the caves, changes his walk, starts talking normally, is faramir, crowds minds blown, gandalf drops pitcher of ale on floor, everyone from new zealand in one last crane shot, fin

whether you agree with any of it or not, john dolan's epic slam of jackson's LOTR is a pretty entertaining read:

http://www.exile.ru/articles/detail.php?ARTICLE_ID=7168

― (The Other) J.D. (J.D.), Friday, December 13, 2013 8:08 PM (12 minutes ago) Bookmark

dolan's cool

Tolkien's generation was so far superior to us that even now we feel it, and hate them for it.

<3

He might be the only person ever to openly, gleefully diss Christopher Lee.

Only to praise "fine actor" Sean Bean a few graphs later.

yo that guy hates on Christopher Lee so fuck him forever

Real talk

Truth but cmon guys focus PETER JACKSON

Tolkien's generation was so far superior to us that even now we feel it, and hate them for it.

holy shit this might be the on the moniest thing i ever read

At the focal point of all this kitsch is the actor Jackson offers us as Frodo: an epicene waif who looks creepily like Winona Ryder in Little Women. His one schtick is looking troubled, opening his huge, empty eyes to an extent seen only in the heroines of Japanese animation.

laughed so hard my neighbor upstairs pounded on floor

I think one reason I want the Hobbit to be good is I always thought Frodo was kind of a dick but Bilbo seemed like a generally chill dude

The LOTR trilogy alternately annoyed and bored me, but I'm quite enjoying The Hobbit so far. The Desolation of Smaug is absurdly overblown and padded to the point of incoherence, but nowhere near so chaotic and tonally uneven as An Unexpected Journey. While I at least half liked that film's cheerfully juvenile cruddiness, I can't say I miss it here. McKellen and Freeman are great, the dwarves and other supporting players generally good, I loved the Silvan warrior maiden, and Smaug ("SMOG", dammit!) is the single best thing to come out of Jackson's stab at Tolkien. That and The Fellowship's crawl through the Mines of Moria, yeah. I did start to get a bit fatigued about 2/3 of the way through, at the approximate six-hour mark, but the action, visuals and melodramatic complexities kept me involved through the end. Also, I saw the film in high-frame-rate (HFR) 3D, which was both strange and fascinating. The technology affords a breathtaking level of visual detail and smoothness in 3D motion, but in return, it cruelly shatters the illusory "reality" of cinema. I was rarely able to escape the sense that I was watching actors on fabricated sets.

fpd u for warrior maiden

man, that dolan thing goes on forever (just like jackson, lol). stupid high zing quality ratio though.

I'm with him on the elves at least. Tolkien's elves are way more rounded that Jackson thinks they are. They may be sad and sublime figures, but they still spend their nights getting drunk and making up terrible songs.

Are there any elf songs in this one? Because I refuse to see it unless there at least three. Unabridged.

Were the elves in the novels as humor-immune and regrettably coiffed as Jackson's?

No, they're supposed to be "merry" -- that's Tolkien's favourite word -- but also melancholy. They're celebrating their last days in Middle-Earth. Jackson just saw the pointy ears and decided to make them Vulcans.

No elf songs, sorry.

Saw this last night, in 3D, loved it. Admittedly I'm pre-disposed to like this sort of movie. Wizards and dragons and dwarves and orcs. The times when it was like a videogame i didn't care because I love videogames! Barrel scene was great fun, and there was a lot of fast comedy violence maybe not Dead Alive level but there was a spot where i realized all the LOLz in the audience for several minutes was due to impaled orc antics!

I told my non-moviegoing friends last night: there are more trees in this movie than any other movie released this year. Another reason i liked it.

Really amazed at whoever made the 'Star Wars Prequels' comparison, the originals definitely had their weak spots and were flooded w CGI. Also no LOTR Jar Jar.

Love the bit in this where (SPOILER) Gandalf is looking into Sauron and it is the flaming eye from the first movies but oh wait it's actually a silhouette in front of a bunch of fire (SPOILER) it was kind of cheesy but definitely a cool thing to see!

the originals definitely had their weak spots and were flooded w CGI

The original Star Wars were flooded with CGI? Flooded? Huh? How do you figure? CGI barely existed c. Star Wars-Jedi.

Smaug ("SMOG", dammit!)

my dim recollection from my days as a tolkien nut is that it's supposed to be pronounced 'smoug.'

dolan's wrong a lot of the time (he hates george orwell!) but i would read that guy on anything.

No, they're supposed to be "merry" -- that's Tolkien's favourite word -- but also melancholy. They're celebrating their last days in Middle-Earth. Jackson just saw the pointy ears and decided to make them Vulcans.

― jmm, Saturday, 14 December 2013 18:10 (Yesterday) Permalink

Jackson's elves are flat-out Aryan psychopaths

Well the original Star Wars weren't flooded w CGI i meant the original LOTR trilogy there.

Oh, no doubt there. The question is, why are the effects in "The Hobbit" imo inferior to those in "LOTR?" It's been, what, a decade? Surely there's been some progress. And don't get me started on the frame rate change, because I saw the first "Hobbit" in straight-up 2D and it did not look good. I mean, it looked Hollywood CGI fine, but I suppose I was expecting something less ... tacky? Less threadbare ?

Anyway, rewinding a bit: LOTR trilogy:original Star Wars trilogy::The Hobbit: inferior unnecessary Hobbit trilogy.

I haven't seen the new ones in 2D, because I think the idea of them in 3D is such a big reason for them. They are unnecessary but going to the movie theater is an unnecessary experience anyways, we have the LOTR DVDs if we want to relive any of that. So why the new ones?

Essentially I feel like Peter Jackson is just punking the industry, or doing something similar to yeah maybe what the 70s American independent dudes were up to wrt DIY b-movie blockbusters, pop versions of arthouse trash. I think the Star Wars analogy is pretty smart one and can probably be read into a lot further than I want to even start with for fear of disappearing into a nerd black hole from which I will never return. But yeah here's a filmmaker with admittedly trashy ("Bad") taste
creating (at the most cynical level) something in-between a Disney ride and the original "Clash of the Titans".

An old b-movie about dinosaurs or UFO's would kill most of its screen time with footage of people walking. In these new "Hobbit" 21st century 3d b-movies, screen time is also filled with lots of rollercoaster sequences that are probably the biggest source of gripe with these movies. It feels like CGI overload, and it is. However soulless it feels, I think in 10 or 20 years we will look back on it and see really interesting idiosyncrasies that we now take for granted from such sequences.

The thing is, that barrel scene feels SO much to me like something out of "Dead Alive", Legolas taking the place of Lionel and Orcs taking the place of zombies. The comedy was very potent, and that scene earned the most successive LOLz from our audience. It was slapstick but incredibly brutal, and if you take your dwarves and elves and orcs too seriously to allow for that kind of fun, well, too bad for you. The editing in this scene was the best in the entire LOTR series.

The effects _are_ inferior to LOTR because he's probably a bit tired of it all by now, and the pressure is off anyways so it's easier to get creative. The Gandalf scene with the spoiler Eye of Sauron did look like something I would make on After Effects, but I thought it was still cool and the only thing better would be, what a better lens flare effect added or something? Who cares? Also Gandalf looks SUPER old in this which is weird but that would be cool if PJ took an opportunity to do some regeneration sequence in the next film or something.

Actually, i want it to be a 3-hour realtime documentary of the fight with Sauron. That would be incredible.

Sauron Smaug

damn these fantasy names

Oh yeah and the barrels thing did look kinda shitty cos it's trying to be 3d and the water looked bad in 3d. The Gandalf FX scene and maybe a few others seemed to have something wrong with the framerate, I wonder if that is maybe due to down-converting from 48fps?

The question is, why are the effects in "The Hobbit" imo inferior to those in "LOTR?" It's been, what, a decade?

― Josh in Chicago, Saturday, December 14, 2013 7:40 PM (41 minutes ago)

imo they aren't. the best creature & action moments in the desolation (smaug himself being the best example) are superior to anything in the original trilogy.

The creature effects, or at least some of them, I concede. Gollum was great in the first Hobbit, I'm sure the dragon is good in this one. But the scrotum king in the first one, when I came across the scene again on cable, was this uncanny-valley mix of incredible and incredibly fake, like these glimmers of "real" were popping out awkwardly from this crap CGI costume the actor was donning. The action scenes in the first Hobbit were the fakest of the fake stuff, imo, perhaps because Jackson abandoned his practical sets and models for entirely computer generated stuff? Dunno.

An old b-movie about dinosaurs or UFO's would kill most of its screen time with footage of people walking.

And lest we forget, Jackson's meh "King Kong" remake took a 100 minute classic and larded it up into an 187-minute monster. Though once again, Kong himself was impressively rendered. Dinosaurs, too, iirc. But man, I can't imagine Jackson's (forgotten?) "Kong" has been viewed twice by anyone other than Jackson himself.

Meantime

http://www.ign.com/videos/2013/12/12/the-stars-of-the-hobbit-read-the-ballad-of-bilbo-baggins

I can't imagine Jackson's (forgotten?) "Kong" has been viewed twice by anyone other than Jackson himself.

Oh I've watched it several times. Once you get past the strange and draggy first act it'd very consistently entertaining.

Unfortunately, that first act is part of the movie. Only parts I remember, besides Kong's hypnotic fur, is the terrible casting of Black, the director's cut scene where Andy Serkis gets eaten by that horrifying maggot creature, and the further realization that Naomi Watts can act well in anything. Point being, a la "The Hobbit," it's Jackson taking something short and simple and stuffing it full of ... stuff.

Has Jackson made a habit of making Hitchcock/Stan Lee type appearances in his films? That is him that is pretty much the first face you see in the film isn't it?

Quite enjoyed that though it does leave me wondering where certain things came from. A budding romance for one, don't remember reading about that in the book.

Do wish I didn't have to wait another year to find out how they handle the last part.

& I liked King Kong, Got the expanded box set though not sure how much of it I've watched.

Yeah, looks like it: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001392/#actor

http://media.screened.com/uploads/0/4968/511368-peter_jackson_as_albert_dreary_in_the_fellowship_of_the_ring.jpg

yes Jackson gives himself a cameo in every movie