The Hobbit (2012)

Agreed. And Kìli is just wrong. He looks like he's been photoshopped in from a cologne advertisement. Everyone else looks great!

God, I hate that poster. They look like muppets.

This is not a joke.

OMG I am tempted to go to Denny's. This is not a joke, either.

I am fucking DYING. This is amazing.

I once made a man eat at Denny's, just to watch him die.

Sometimes you just have to say What the Fuck.

Yeah... actually. Me too. That looks pretty good, if a bit gimmicky.

You have got to be kidding me. Shire sausage? What the hell.

Once you go hobbit sausage, you never go back!



Or so I've heard...

They missed an opportunity for "What's taters, precious?" hash browns.

Okay, this is pretty funny (courtesy of Brian Rubin). This is the actual safety video now being shown on Air New Zealand flights.




I like that Sauron rides coach.

That was awesome.

I cannot like that video enough.

Singing dwarves!

As of last Saturday I have attained a rare and dubious achievement. I, gathered with some fellow nerdly friends, watched all three LotR movies in one day. We started at 9:30am and finished around 10:45pm. And we didn't half-ass it either...We watched the blu-ray special extended editions which are even more extended than the regular dvd extended edtions.

Holy crap, there was so much new material. For anyone who thought they gave short shrift to the confrontation with Saruman after the ent battle, it turns out they shot just about everything that could have gone into that scene but had simply cut it for time.

All geek mockery aside, it was a lot of fun. I hadn't watched any of the films in a couple years and I'd never seen the blu-ray extended scenes before. I hope The Hobbit films are as lovingly crafted in fine detail so we can do this again in a couple years.

I was not aware that the extended editions have been extended even further on Blu Ray. Guess I'll finally have to splurge on those! That will give me a reason to do another one of those session you described. About 4 years ago I watched all 3 extended DVDs in one day. Started at 11:30 and ended at 10pm or something... That was quite long session!!

I was contemplating rewatching them before heading to the Hobbit too...

The OST for the first movie is available for streaming. I quite like it, but as far as movie scores go I'm no connoisseur.

I'll also be rewatching the LOTR movies before I see the Hobbit. Good to know that I'm not the only one who planned to do that.

It would be great if there was a Trilogy Tuesday campaign before The Hobbit's release. I would certainly attend, especially if it was the extended editions.

I waiting for Hexology 'Hursday after all three of the Hobbit movies are out, so I can spend an entire day watching all six extended editions/dying of a bedsore.

If you want to be hardc0re you'll include the full credits. For the special edition blu-rays there was still 20+ minutes showing on the runtime when we hit the end of each movie. (Apparently even the credits are extended on that version.)

I'm sure that I've read this already and that my brain has glossed over it, but this book, this one, lone book, is a trilogy now?

Well then.

Are you sure about this? Everything I've read says that the blu-ray extended versions are no different content-wise from the DVD extended versions.

Yes. In large part because the book has more action per page than the LOTR series and they "fill in the blanks" on the White Council and the ongoing battle with Sauron.

Also because it's a cash cow.

ROFL... After looking up the details per Blackadar's post it looks like all they added for the blu-ray is credits. The run times are about 15 to 20 minutes longer on each movie (over the dvd extended edition) but per wikipedia:

My apologies folks, looks like I was mis-remembering after not viewing the movies in a couple years. (Though I have watched each of the extended movies multiple times.) Well, what can I say? It was certainly a different experience watching them all in a row.

Mostly this, I suspect. I could see them doing it as a two-parter, if they really wanted to be completionist and include every scene from the book. There's even a natural place to break it, midway through the book. Three movies, though... I'm still skeptical. I can't see how they could fill that much screen time without inventing a lot of new material, and that's where the LotR trilogy typically stumbled. I suspect that they are going to spend a lot more time on the Battle of Five Armies than the book did, but other than that, I'm not sure.

I thought it was more than just The Hobbit, though, that they were also shooting stuff from the LOTR appendices and part of some other Tolkein book. Also, if you film stuff that happened "offscreen" in the book (Gandalf going for councils, etc) that would add a lot, similar to what they did with the Song of Ice and Fire books for the HBO series (shooting a bunch of stuff with Robb that the reader never "saw", etc).

I re-watched the extended Fellowship last weekend, and it actually didn't hold up as well as I thought it was going to. When these movies first came out I was afraid they were going to suck, and when I saw them I was amazed and thought they were awesome. Seeing them with more perspective, though, they're very good but have significant flaws. Several of the actors are either not that good (Legolas, Sam), or at least don't do a very good job here (Aragorn, Galadriel). Others are very good, though -- both wizards, Boromir...Frodo, Merry, Pippin, and Gimli do well with the generally weak material they're given. The direction and script are really problematic, in my mind. Great production values, but it's too over-the-top in a lot of places (Gandalf booming and darkening when he yells at Bilbo, Galadriel turning into a tornado when offered the ring, too many way-long slo-mo shots of people being upset or happy, etc) and already Jackson's problem of "They're dead! Psyche! They're fine!" starts cropping up. It's a terrible shame the way the hobbits and dwarves are written almost purely for laughs rather than being the three-dimensional, cool races they were in the book. Even the elves are sorta weird, with this pompous, portentious speech pattern and weird stylized fighting in the flashback sequences.

It's still a big achievement as a movie, don't get me wrong. It turned out about 500 times as good as I would have expected or had any right to hope for, and the top-notch production values (costumes, props, makeup, sets, EVERYTHING is amazing) and great special effects carry a lot, especially when combined with a few really good performances. But I remembered these movies as being nearly flawless, but re-watching, there's a lot of stuff about them that is too bad.

Really? For me, Elijah Wood is the Mark Hamill of LOTR. Hint -- that is not a GOOD thing.

Totally agree on Legolas, though.

IMO. Each book in the LoTR trilogy could have been split into 3 movies. Now that would have been exciting

Agreed. When I first heard that Jackson was splitting The Hobbit in two, I thought it was a very silly thing to do. But I've changed my mind: if HBO can squeeze out 11 hours from each Game of Thrones book, there's nothing odd about Jackson taking 6-9 hours to do The Hobbit. After all, they're filming it all at once, as if it were one mega-budget mini-series. It's just the folks down in marketing who are slicing it into three chunks for public consumption.

Too many viewings and the enjoyment of the qualities diminish enough that the excesses become too much to bear. That's why I hadn't watched any of the films for a couple years and at this point it's a known quantity best viewed in the company of other enthusiasts. If something like the half-dozen false endings of RotK are going to stick in someone's craw then they can spare themselves (and others) from sitting through it.

For my part, they're definitely too heavy on melodrama. The scene at the very end of Fellowship where Sam almost-drowns swimming after Frodo is just awful to me. I can't watch that scene without it interrupting my immersion to take a moment and think "Jeebus, this is over indulgent".

Also, I really dislike the fighting scenes with Gimli. There is no heft to the swing of his obviously-weightless wiffle axe. It doesn't look like he could crack a walnut when he swings it, but then the orcs convulsively throw themselves down like I do when my toddler pretends to shoot me with her lego gun. By comparison they did a much better job with the hobbits and their quick little blades. I hope they fix this with the dwarves in The Hobbit.

From what I remember (and I could be wrong), John Rhys Davies didn't want to do much combat training and it showed.

Good thing John Rhys Davies pretty much only does the close ups.

I made a pwomise, Master Frodo. A pwomise.

Apart from the awful additional Jackson dialogue, I thought by far the biggest problem with the film version of LOTR is that I wasn't sure why Frodo was entrusted with the ring when Sam was clearly a much better hobbit for the job.

If you don't understand that, then you don't understand the books.

It's my view that the movie cuts, or changes, the elements which show you why Frodo (and not Sam) is carrying the ring. Take for example when he encounters Faramir.

What parts of the movie do you think put this across?

Gandalf basically expended Frodo by giving him the Ring. Sam, as the strongest of the hobbits, had the task of supporting Frodo through the journey while Frodo was being destroyed and corrupted by the Ring. If Sam had the ring, he would have eventually been corrupted as well, and Frodo would not have been able to help him see the quest to its end as well as Sam could help Frodo. Some Tolkein superfan tell me if I'm right or not, this is the most thought I've ever devoted to LotR.

First, Gandalf says that Frodo is "meant to have the ring". Not Sam. It doesn't belong to Sam.
Later, in Mordor, Sam takes the ring for a short while and has a *very* difficult time giving it up. If it had such an effect on him in mere hours, that says loads why he couldn't have been the primary ring-bearer for the entire journey.