trailer & feature presentation

[aruan]

The prole finally got to see what set the world on fire last week, and sadly it was not The Hobbit, which aside from Martin Freeman's Bilbo and Richard Armitage as Thorin Oakenshield fell way short of The Lord of the Rings' high bar. Which is as patently unfair a comparison as it was inevitable, and Warner Brothers have no one to blame but

Comments

[khaleesian]

Sean and I did a whole movie postmortem over dinner in the Chinese garden courtyard at Ibn Battuta (it was not 40 degrees, chalk one up for A-D) and we decided (as among the sternest critics around) that Hobbit didn't suck as bad as we expected it to, but was still waaaaaay too f*ing long and Peter Jackson has an eye for the beautiful visual but is very workmanlike at designing plots, etc. I.e. bloated set pieces of many minutes length (and probably hundreds of thousands of $$$) could have been replaced by 2 or 3 lines of exposition. But there were parts I approved of as distinct improvements on the book. (Thorin's characterization, the trolls) Martin was AMAZING and...yeah, well the Trek thing had me high for a while too. My absolute fave scene was the ginormous fish in the viewscreen. And Scotty. Always Scotty.

[aruan]

The Hobbit didn't suck, but it definitely suffers for all the wading in Tolkienisms and Peter Jackson's honorary position as chairman of New Zealand's tourism board. And funny you should make the point about exposition: I made a private game of summing up every other scene in a few sentences because it distracted me from the fact that movie theater seats aren't designed to keep my ass cozy for 3+ hours.

Treeeeeek. I quietly seal-clapped when Benedict appeared on screen; the woman next to me did the same for Scotty. Cannot wait!