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

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

His family, too, often.

His kids in LOTR:

http://fantasiadomain.com/lotrcameo/images/special-jackson-1.jpg

Same daughter now:

http://media.monstersandcritics.com/galleries/3773796_14062/importimagesource=MCpeter-jackson(1)55085.jpg

Time flies.

Eh, he just did that with CGI and perspective and shit.

i thought jackson's 'king kong' was pretty fun. i'll see 'DOS' bc i thought the first hobbit film was pretty breezy (while also forgettable.) looking forward to more hitler youth elves.

his kids are so cute

I've been thinking more about the elf problem, and to me it emblematizes one of the deepest differences between Tolkien and Jackson: the fact that almost none of the historical teleological stuff from Tolkien's novel makes it into the movies. Dolan's right when he says "If you can't do the elves properly, you can't do LOTR." The elves are the most explicit instance of Tolkien's teleological thinking: they're in the process of undergoing a necessary decline, one that marks the necessary end of their particular epoch in Middle-Earth and the beginning of a new epoch in which man is sovereign. Hence magic and mysticism are on the outs, enlightened civic rule as represented by Aragorn is on the ins. There's a persistent sense, never wholly explained, that this is an inevitable change, and it complicates the idea that The Lord of the Rings is purely escapist. It's a fantasy world in the process of disenchantment. I don't get much of a sense of that from Jackson's movies. They're just fantasy. And his elves don't have the mixture of happiness and sadness that's needed in order to make Tolkien's point.

i like the lotr movies bunches as old-school adventure movies and i'll prob always prefer them to the books cuz that prose but jmm otm there, that sense is totally lost. that's why i watch primcess mononoke tho.

the primsiest primcess of all

that sense is totally there, especially in Rotk imo. NB. i never read the books

I totally misused "on the outs" in that last post. :\

LOTR (the trilogy) is pretty sick if you wanna watch some cool humans totally wail on some shit orcs

also hardcore elephant takedowns iirc

good post jmm
Men the final thread of second song of ea iirc, surprised ilx isnt all over elves and valinor as superior early work

God his king kong was a piece of shit

Like I remember ppl complaining that the orcs in lotr coded black, but then the same dude goes and makes a film where actual black ppl are basically orcs

Gandalf looks SUPER old in this

― Emperor Cos Dashit (Adam Bruneau)

not bad for 3000 or w/e

I saw this in 3D HFR on opening night just like the last one, was roughly as annoyed by it as I expected to be.

still looking forward to the first HFR animated feature

This movie was better than the first Hobbit movie because this movie had a dragon in it. 7/10

Yeah that was pretty much my reaction too. Three fuzzy hobbit toes/five

Two and a half neck beards out of four

What they said. Elaborate fanfic but a big fuckoff dragon, so I'm happy.

I thought I'd got over my "Peter Jackson stop fucking with the sacred Tolkien formula" fanboy gripes for the last one, but they came back with a vengeance. Gandalf's subtle way of introducing the dwarfs to Beorn is one of my fave bits of the book and what does Jackson replace it with? Them running straight into his house and slamming the door literally in his big beary face. Like he's gonna give them a warm welcome after that. Other stuff: Mirkwood and spiders were alright, Sauron was alright ("Sauron is just alright with me"), barrel riding was alright. Whole of Laketown was pretty tedious and made the film feel much longer than the first one, and yeah there was a dragon but Jackson managed to make it er... drag on. Molten gold scenes had my eyes pretty much rolling out of my head.

Dragon covered in melted gold was pretty awesome.