(no subject)
Birds do it, bees do it, even educated fleas do it - let's do it, let's tell Peter Jackson why the Hobbit sucked. On five full pages.
Dear Peter Jackson,
we need to talk. I didn’t want to say anything until I was sure that you had completely lost your shit. But now I’m certain that you have. It’s about this film you made, called “The Hobbit”? The one you really, really didn’t want to do but then did for reasons only known to yourself?
Yeah, visually it’s overwhelming. Sure, it’s also visually different from LOTR - LOTR is a lot lighter (elves), the Hobbit is a lot darker (dwarves). That’s also what you get when you read the books, so you hit that feeling pretty well.
But - I’m sorry, but I have to flog the dead horse that’s already smelling funny - it’s too long. LOTR wasn’t too long. Because it’s an epic. In every sense of the word: a heroic epic. It links different people, different groups and different problems together in one huge storyline. You can make that 9 hours without boring people.
The Hobbit is not an epic. At all. It’s a very straight-forward story about one guy. That’s it. It’s no more epic than “The Wizard of Oz” or “Alice”. The whole book lended itself perfectly to one 3-hour chunk of movie material. It could have been a gem. Instead you stretched it into a piece of clingfilm. Yeah, they’re both shiny, but they’re not the same thing, you see.
Because: in LOTR your script-writers did a lovely job simplifying and cutting out everything that wasn’t totally necessary for the plot (even Tom Bombadil, and that was a good decision). They also often merged several characters into one (Glorfindel and Arwen, or Tom Bombadil and Tree-Beard, for example), and they did it well. They trimmed the source material down to a skeleton that still made sense. And they managed to capture the epicness, and the despair and sadness of the book. That was an amazing job they did.
In the Hobbit, they had to do the opposite. Because there was only material for 3 hours, and they had to make it 9. Can I ask you something, Peter Jackson? Did you really think you could take a Tolkien story, cut it up and fill the spaces in between with your or your scriptwriters’ puny little ideas, and come up with anything that would fit Tolkien’s scale?
Yeah, I’m putting the guy on a pedestal. But with good reason. You guys can’t write epic. Very few people can. Tolkien really loved those silly Beowulf-type epics, and he was serious about them. Oh, and he was also an extremely well-trained craftsman with texts - certifiedly one of the best in the world. That’s why he could pull it off, and you can’t.
All you can pull off is generic Hollywood plot bricks. During LOTR, you put in a few of those (Aragorn and Arwen gazing deeply into each other’s eyes, Aragorn falling off a cliff thought dead), but you kept it to a minimum.
In the Hobbit - where do I start? A complete non-canonical love-story with a totally uncanonical love interest (who is also uncanonical Legolas’ uncanonical love interest), taking up screen time all through the movie. Oh, and of course she has to be the standard, fighting, “strong woman” type that appeals to modern female audiences. Fuck Eowyn’s struggle to be accepted as a female fighter in Middle Earth, What’s-Her-Name can be a fighter if the boys can! And the sexiest two boys in the movie are both in love with her! Like Bella! Did you have to give the little girls a Mary Sue character to identify with? Is it too much work for them now to make up their own? (Of course, in the end she has to be rescued by Kili AND Legolas both.)
And the golden garden gnome? You know, the “Dwarves try to drown a dragon in a golden garden gnome” scene? Okay, five points for originality. Everybody who hasn’t seen the movie will suffer a broken brain from that description alone. But it’s still bullshit. And the toboggan ride through Erebor on the gold river? Could you have made that any more predictable?
And Legolas’s stunt work is totally superfluous. It’s not just that he’s not in the book - you didn’t even justify him by giving him anything plot-relevant to do. Okay, he kills Bolg, but anybody else could have done that. When he climbs up on falling bricks like Super Mario, I actually cried out loud “God, this is so bad!!” in the cinema. It’s so tacky, it doesn’t even make for decent satire.
Or that scene where Legolas says he doesn’t want to go back to Mirkwood, and suddenly his dad is all “’kay, then you go find some hobo called Strider someplace up north”. Just to make absolutely sure the audience will get the hint. Whoo-hoo. That scene looks as forced as a llama with constipation trying to take a dump. Also it has no relevant information. Everybody who has seen LOTR knows that Aragorn and Legolas go way back. So what is it for?
But the worst thing is when you don’t come up with anything at all. You know, when people stare into space meaningfully for more than 10 seconds in a row. Or that endless scene where the dragon threatens Bard “I’m gonna do you in! No, seriously! I’m gonna do you in, and your child too! There’s nothing you can do about it! Honestly! I’ll kill you! For realz! You betcha!” - which is long enough to give Bard the opportunity to mcgyver up a makeshift windlass, using a child and a rope. By the way, a little less of those Bard kids, please. They’re really only there to be saved from certain death every two minutes. In fact, I think they had more screen time than the hobbit himself.
On a lighter note: I have to compliment you on the wargs - the wargs in LOTR were pretty obviously based on hyenas, not wolves. The Hobbit wargs were better. Sadly, what you decided to put on top of them is lazy, off-the-shelf work.
Yup: What the fuck did you do with those orcs? In LOTR, orcs were played by people in 19 kilos of silicone foam costumes and a ton of make-up. They moved like people weighed down by 19 kilos of silicone foam. Or - they looked like they might be crippled, mutilated, ugly elves. Which is what orcs are.
Your new orcs are completely CGI. And since hair and clothing are a real pain in the arse to animate, apparently, you made them look like shaved maggots. Unfortunately, they look nothing like your old orcs. They move nothing like your old orcs. Their facial expressions are nothing like the old ones. They don’t even seem to belong in the same universe. If anything, they look like the unfortunate cousins of Michael Bay’s Ninja Turtles.
What were you thinking? Was it laziness? Or just the feeling “everybody‘s using CGI, so we have to
sprinkle it everywhere too or we won’t be cool”?
There was one moment where I nearly got a dainty ladyboner: when Thorin drops Azog under the ice of the frozen lake to kill him. That was such a wonderfully anticlimactic villain death, I nearly shed a tear. But (yawn) he had to still be alive and break through one foot of ice and propel himself into the air and jump at Thorin. So predictable.
Oh, and these big-ass worms that suddenly appear during the battle of the five armies but then don’t do a thing? Except scare people? Not only do they look suspiciously like the worms that eat Andy Serkis in “King Kong”, but I also wonder why the hell you put them in there in the first place. Did you have plans for them? Why do you insert non-canonical monsters if they don’t do anything? On that note: Why do you insert canonical monsters if they don’t do anything? I’m talking about the bats which do nothing but fly around and look big. Except serve as air-taxis for Legolas (non-canonically). In the book, they have barely one sentence. So little that I had to look up if they were even in the book. What were you trying to do - make the audience think of the flying monkeys of the Wicked Witch of the West?
And while we’re on the subject, can we talk about the Wookie for a moment? Yeah, you know the one I mean, Beorn. Who, in the book, is described as a fat, jolly, hairy, loud man. Basically Santa. You, instead, gave us Beorn the Misanthropic Swedish Wookie. Why? It’s totally arbitrary. It’s as if you were deliberately trying to be edgy. “This is not a children’s movie, y’all! So let’s take out the fat jolly guy and put in something that’ll make the Girl With The Dragon Tattoo crowd and the Star Wars crowd both listen up!” - Well, if it’s not a children’s movie, MAYBE you should have told Martin Freeman. But we’ll come to that later.
I’m impressed by Cate Blanchett. There’s this slightly silly scene where she saves Gandalf and then does a pretty pieta pose with him. Cute. Then the necromancer appears, and she dives into the frame from below with her hair hanging over her face. I wanted to burst out laughing because she looked like the girl from “The Ring”. But Blanchett sold it. Nice work. What happened next - the necromancer goes out in a strobe light sequence - was terribly disco. I hope there were no epileptics in the audience, that’s all.
And by the way: “Send Galadriel to Lothlorien, so she can recover from this epic disco inferno in the peace of the forests”? You noob, don’t make it sound like Lothlorien is basically Middle Earth’s Sanitarium For Exhausted Elves. She’s lived there for centuries. With her husband Celeborn. And she popped out a few children there, too. Elrond is, in fact, her son-in-law, and Arwen is her granddaughter. This granny has been around Lothlorien for a while now. You really don’t have to explain why she’s living in a tree.
You had a lucky hand with Gandalf and the dwarves. These people can act, and their costumes give them individual identities. It was also a nice idea to leave the barrels open during the escape from Thranduil’s palace. “12 closed barrels floated down the river and the dwarves inside had a crappy time” is a nice scene in a book, but it doesn’t make a good scene in a movie. So the barrel-hunt between orcs and elves and dwarves was a good idea, cinematically.
A really bad, bad, bad, BAD idea was casting “ol’ one-trick-pony” Martin Freeman in the title role. Look, I get it: he’s the go-to guy if you need someone for the I look cute and I have no idea how I got into this mess parts. Problem is, he plays them all exactly the same. And while his voice is alright, his facial mimics are a prime example of hopeless over-acting.
I know, I know. Elijah Wood was just as wooden as his name when he played Frodo. But he was only some 18-year-old squirt at the time, so I’ll cut him some slack.
Freeman’s acting deficiencies become really painful against the background of the dwarf actors. Also, he’s the only one who plays as if his audience was seven. Batting his eyelashes with astonishment and puffing his cheeks with embarrassment, he seems to think he’s on Sesame Street. Why didn’t you tell him that this was a movie for people over 12? Apparently nobody filled him in on the joke. Maybe the other actors didn’t like him. Maybe he didn’t notice what kind of a movie it was, considering he played all of it in front of an empty green screen!
But on to the dragon. Visually, again, there’s nothing wrong with it. The nictating membrane in the eye was a nice touch, I give you that. But what the FUCK were you thinking when you cast the actor? “Hur hur, let’s take the two guys from Sherlock as antagonist and protagonist, people will see the joke and giggle!” Or what? I didn’t find Benedict Cumberbatch convincing as Sherlock, so I didn’t expect much from his dragon performance. But what a miracle: he still managed to underwhelm me! His Smaug voice sounds like he really wanted to sleep in, but you dragged him into the studio and forced him to do the part half-asleep. Without coffee.
And the necromancer parts? They reminded me of the pseudo-Russian gibberish the Russian war minister speaks in “Doctor Strangelove”. More importantly, it sounds totally different from any other characters who speak Black Language. Does Sauron have a funny accent? Like Pilate in “Life of Brian”? And nobody points it out to him because he’s the boss hog?
Look, I’ve seen the German version. There, Smaug is voiced by some total nobody. Some theatre actor called Sascha Rothermund. Why do I know his name if he’s a total nobody? Because I looked it up after seeing the German version. Because I was impressed. That guy really nailed “Smaug being a scary monster” as well as “Smaug being a slimy silver-tongued devil who talks people into mistrusting others”. And that’s just what it boils down to: German overdub versions are usually terrible compared to the original. But if your German voice sounds better than your own - honey, that’s the point where you have to start asking yourself the hard questions. WHY didn’t you just let Leonard Nimoy do it? No matter what he’d have come up with, it couldn’t have been worse than Cumberbatch’s generic half-assery.
Do us all a favour, Jackson, and next time you make a movie - don’t cast any leading roles with guys just because your teenage daughter has inappropriate dreams about them, okay? The only thing that’s worse than thinking with your genitalia is thinking with someone else’s genitalia.
You made a good decision in LOTR when you said “The source material is so famous, we don’t need famous actors, so we can just concentrate on finding someone who will play their part well.” Okay, you tossed in Elijah Wood and Orlando Bloom for the heartthrob factor, both of whom couldn’t really act (in Orlando Bloom’s case: he still can’t). But you didn’t toss them in as a tongue-in-cheek hur hur, let’s put in these famous people! joke. They weren’t famous. They just seemed like they could pull off their parts.
When filming the Hobbit, you could have used the same principle. After all, not only is it a famous source material - you are also famous now. People would have twice the incentive to see the movie, even if they’d never heard the names of the actors! But no, you decided to make the Hobbit one big insider joke for the Sherlock crowd, and produced… really, nothing but that.
While we’re talking about the hur hur, let’s put in famous people for a joke problem: did you really have to have that obligatory Stephen Fry cameo? I mean, I adore the guy as much as everybody does, but it seems that every bloody movie out there has to have a Stephen Fry cameo in it. Sometimes they make sense (Mycroft Holmes, The Book in H2G2), sometimes not so much. In this case, the problem is, he’s just so… he’s just so “Look, it’s Stephen Fry in a wig”. He’s totally putting you out of the story. For the whole, uh, 3:25 minutes he’s on screen.
And one more thing you could have just kept where the sun don’t shine: Alfred the unnecessary slimebag who does nothing for the plot. Except provide the sort of comic relief Mel Brooks would find tacky. Was he played by your nephew or something? Because it sure looks like you only included that part to make sure the actor can make ends meet.
So, what it boils down to is this: WHY did you take on a job you didn’t want to do?
You could have made a great Hobbit movie. Instead you made 3 bad ones. And I think you knew from day one. You fucked up. It’s sad that your movie will keep better people from trying their luck with the Hobbit for the foreseeable future - nobody will want to make another Hobbit movie any time soon.
But what’s saddest of all is that we now know: you’re not a great director. We now know that LOTR was brilliant by accident. You didn’t make it brilliant through your amazing abilities of bringing together the right people. You just lucked out, and when your luck left you during the Hobbit, you didn’t have much to fall back on except average Hollywood boredom.
But let’s finish on a positive note: At least it’s over now! “One last time” indeed. Fingers crossed.
PS: I hate HFR. It makes the Hobbit look like East Enders. Fuck you.
Dear Peter Jackson,
we need to talk. I didn’t want to say anything until I was sure that you had completely lost your shit. But now I’m certain that you have. It’s about this film you made, called “The Hobbit”? The one you really, really didn’t want to do but then did for reasons only known to yourself?
Yeah, visually it’s overwhelming. Sure, it’s also visually different from LOTR - LOTR is a lot lighter (elves), the Hobbit is a lot darker (dwarves). That’s also what you get when you read the books, so you hit that feeling pretty well.
But - I’m sorry, but I have to flog the dead horse that’s already smelling funny - it’s too long. LOTR wasn’t too long. Because it’s an epic. In every sense of the word: a heroic epic. It links different people, different groups and different problems together in one huge storyline. You can make that 9 hours without boring people.
The Hobbit is not an epic. At all. It’s a very straight-forward story about one guy. That’s it. It’s no more epic than “The Wizard of Oz” or “Alice”. The whole book lended itself perfectly to one 3-hour chunk of movie material. It could have been a gem. Instead you stretched it into a piece of clingfilm. Yeah, they’re both shiny, but they’re not the same thing, you see.
Because: in LOTR your script-writers did a lovely job simplifying and cutting out everything that wasn’t totally necessary for the plot (even Tom Bombadil, and that was a good decision). They also often merged several characters into one (Glorfindel and Arwen, or Tom Bombadil and Tree-Beard, for example), and they did it well. They trimmed the source material down to a skeleton that still made sense. And they managed to capture the epicness, and the despair and sadness of the book. That was an amazing job they did.
In the Hobbit, they had to do the opposite. Because there was only material for 3 hours, and they had to make it 9. Can I ask you something, Peter Jackson? Did you really think you could take a Tolkien story, cut it up and fill the spaces in between with your or your scriptwriters’ puny little ideas, and come up with anything that would fit Tolkien’s scale?
Yeah, I’m putting the guy on a pedestal. But with good reason. You guys can’t write epic. Very few people can. Tolkien really loved those silly Beowulf-type epics, and he was serious about them. Oh, and he was also an extremely well-trained craftsman with texts - certifiedly one of the best in the world. That’s why he could pull it off, and you can’t.
All you can pull off is generic Hollywood plot bricks. During LOTR, you put in a few of those (Aragorn and Arwen gazing deeply into each other’s eyes, Aragorn falling off a cliff thought dead), but you kept it to a minimum.
In the Hobbit - where do I start? A complete non-canonical love-story with a totally uncanonical love interest (who is also uncanonical Legolas’ uncanonical love interest), taking up screen time all through the movie. Oh, and of course she has to be the standard, fighting, “strong woman” type that appeals to modern female audiences. Fuck Eowyn’s struggle to be accepted as a female fighter in Middle Earth, What’s-Her-Name can be a fighter if the boys can! And the sexiest two boys in the movie are both in love with her! Like Bella! Did you have to give the little girls a Mary Sue character to identify with? Is it too much work for them now to make up their own? (Of course, in the end she has to be rescued by Kili AND Legolas both.)
And the golden garden gnome? You know, the “Dwarves try to drown a dragon in a golden garden gnome” scene? Okay, five points for originality. Everybody who hasn’t seen the movie will suffer a broken brain from that description alone. But it’s still bullshit. And the toboggan ride through Erebor on the gold river? Could you have made that any more predictable?
And Legolas’s stunt work is totally superfluous. It’s not just that he’s not in the book - you didn’t even justify him by giving him anything plot-relevant to do. Okay, he kills Bolg, but anybody else could have done that. When he climbs up on falling bricks like Super Mario, I actually cried out loud “God, this is so bad!!” in the cinema. It’s so tacky, it doesn’t even make for decent satire.
Or that scene where Legolas says he doesn’t want to go back to Mirkwood, and suddenly his dad is all “’kay, then you go find some hobo called Strider someplace up north”. Just to make absolutely sure the audience will get the hint. Whoo-hoo. That scene looks as forced as a llama with constipation trying to take a dump. Also it has no relevant information. Everybody who has seen LOTR knows that Aragorn and Legolas go way back. So what is it for?
But the worst thing is when you don’t come up with anything at all. You know, when people stare into space meaningfully for more than 10 seconds in a row. Or that endless scene where the dragon threatens Bard “I’m gonna do you in! No, seriously! I’m gonna do you in, and your child too! There’s nothing you can do about it! Honestly! I’ll kill you! For realz! You betcha!” - which is long enough to give Bard the opportunity to mcgyver up a makeshift windlass, using a child and a rope. By the way, a little less of those Bard kids, please. They’re really only there to be saved from certain death every two minutes. In fact, I think they had more screen time than the hobbit himself.
On a lighter note: I have to compliment you on the wargs - the wargs in LOTR were pretty obviously based on hyenas, not wolves. The Hobbit wargs were better. Sadly, what you decided to put on top of them is lazy, off-the-shelf work.
Yup: What the fuck did you do with those orcs? In LOTR, orcs were played by people in 19 kilos of silicone foam costumes and a ton of make-up. They moved like people weighed down by 19 kilos of silicone foam. Or - they looked like they might be crippled, mutilated, ugly elves. Which is what orcs are.
Your new orcs are completely CGI. And since hair and clothing are a real pain in the arse to animate, apparently, you made them look like shaved maggots. Unfortunately, they look nothing like your old orcs. They move nothing like your old orcs. Their facial expressions are nothing like the old ones. They don’t even seem to belong in the same universe. If anything, they look like the unfortunate cousins of Michael Bay’s Ninja Turtles.
What were you thinking? Was it laziness? Or just the feeling “everybody‘s using CGI, so we have to
sprinkle it everywhere too or we won’t be cool”?
There was one moment where I nearly got a dainty ladyboner: when Thorin drops Azog under the ice of the frozen lake to kill him. That was such a wonderfully anticlimactic villain death, I nearly shed a tear. But (yawn) he had to still be alive and break through one foot of ice and propel himself into the air and jump at Thorin. So predictable.
Oh, and these big-ass worms that suddenly appear during the battle of the five armies but then don’t do a thing? Except scare people? Not only do they look suspiciously like the worms that eat Andy Serkis in “King Kong”, but I also wonder why the hell you put them in there in the first place. Did you have plans for them? Why do you insert non-canonical monsters if they don’t do anything? On that note: Why do you insert canonical monsters if they don’t do anything? I’m talking about the bats which do nothing but fly around and look big. Except serve as air-taxis for Legolas (non-canonically). In the book, they have barely one sentence. So little that I had to look up if they were even in the book. What were you trying to do - make the audience think of the flying monkeys of the Wicked Witch of the West?
And while we’re on the subject, can we talk about the Wookie for a moment? Yeah, you know the one I mean, Beorn. Who, in the book, is described as a fat, jolly, hairy, loud man. Basically Santa. You, instead, gave us Beorn the Misanthropic Swedish Wookie. Why? It’s totally arbitrary. It’s as if you were deliberately trying to be edgy. “This is not a children’s movie, y’all! So let’s take out the fat jolly guy and put in something that’ll make the Girl With The Dragon Tattoo crowd and the Star Wars crowd both listen up!” - Well, if it’s not a children’s movie, MAYBE you should have told Martin Freeman. But we’ll come to that later.
I’m impressed by Cate Blanchett. There’s this slightly silly scene where she saves Gandalf and then does a pretty pieta pose with him. Cute. Then the necromancer appears, and she dives into the frame from below with her hair hanging over her face. I wanted to burst out laughing because she looked like the girl from “The Ring”. But Blanchett sold it. Nice work. What happened next - the necromancer goes out in a strobe light sequence - was terribly disco. I hope there were no epileptics in the audience, that’s all.
And by the way: “Send Galadriel to Lothlorien, so she can recover from this epic disco inferno in the peace of the forests”? You noob, don’t make it sound like Lothlorien is basically Middle Earth’s Sanitarium For Exhausted Elves. She’s lived there for centuries. With her husband Celeborn. And she popped out a few children there, too. Elrond is, in fact, her son-in-law, and Arwen is her granddaughter. This granny has been around Lothlorien for a while now. You really don’t have to explain why she’s living in a tree.
You had a lucky hand with Gandalf and the dwarves. These people can act, and their costumes give them individual identities. It was also a nice idea to leave the barrels open during the escape from Thranduil’s palace. “12 closed barrels floated down the river and the dwarves inside had a crappy time” is a nice scene in a book, but it doesn’t make a good scene in a movie. So the barrel-hunt between orcs and elves and dwarves was a good idea, cinematically.
A really bad, bad, bad, BAD idea was casting “ol’ one-trick-pony” Martin Freeman in the title role. Look, I get it: he’s the go-to guy if you need someone for the I look cute and I have no idea how I got into this mess parts. Problem is, he plays them all exactly the same. And while his voice is alright, his facial mimics are a prime example of hopeless over-acting.
I know, I know. Elijah Wood was just as wooden as his name when he played Frodo. But he was only some 18-year-old squirt at the time, so I’ll cut him some slack.
Freeman’s acting deficiencies become really painful against the background of the dwarf actors. Also, he’s the only one who plays as if his audience was seven. Batting his eyelashes with astonishment and puffing his cheeks with embarrassment, he seems to think he’s on Sesame Street. Why didn’t you tell him that this was a movie for people over 12? Apparently nobody filled him in on the joke. Maybe the other actors didn’t like him. Maybe he didn’t notice what kind of a movie it was, considering he played all of it in front of an empty green screen!
But on to the dragon. Visually, again, there’s nothing wrong with it. The nictating membrane in the eye was a nice touch, I give you that. But what the FUCK were you thinking when you cast the actor? “Hur hur, let’s take the two guys from Sherlock as antagonist and protagonist, people will see the joke and giggle!” Or what? I didn’t find Benedict Cumberbatch convincing as Sherlock, so I didn’t expect much from his dragon performance. But what a miracle: he still managed to underwhelm me! His Smaug voice sounds like he really wanted to sleep in, but you dragged him into the studio and forced him to do the part half-asleep. Without coffee.
And the necromancer parts? They reminded me of the pseudo-Russian gibberish the Russian war minister speaks in “Doctor Strangelove”. More importantly, it sounds totally different from any other characters who speak Black Language. Does Sauron have a funny accent? Like Pilate in “Life of Brian”? And nobody points it out to him because he’s the boss hog?
Look, I’ve seen the German version. There, Smaug is voiced by some total nobody. Some theatre actor called Sascha Rothermund. Why do I know his name if he’s a total nobody? Because I looked it up after seeing the German version. Because I was impressed. That guy really nailed “Smaug being a scary monster” as well as “Smaug being a slimy silver-tongued devil who talks people into mistrusting others”. And that’s just what it boils down to: German overdub versions are usually terrible compared to the original. But if your German voice sounds better than your own - honey, that’s the point where you have to start asking yourself the hard questions. WHY didn’t you just let Leonard Nimoy do it? No matter what he’d have come up with, it couldn’t have been worse than Cumberbatch’s generic half-assery.
Do us all a favour, Jackson, and next time you make a movie - don’t cast any leading roles with guys just because your teenage daughter has inappropriate dreams about them, okay? The only thing that’s worse than thinking with your genitalia is thinking with someone else’s genitalia.
You made a good decision in LOTR when you said “The source material is so famous, we don’t need famous actors, so we can just concentrate on finding someone who will play their part well.” Okay, you tossed in Elijah Wood and Orlando Bloom for the heartthrob factor, both of whom couldn’t really act (in Orlando Bloom’s case: he still can’t). But you didn’t toss them in as a tongue-in-cheek hur hur, let’s put in these famous people! joke. They weren’t famous. They just seemed like they could pull off their parts.
When filming the Hobbit, you could have used the same principle. After all, not only is it a famous source material - you are also famous now. People would have twice the incentive to see the movie, even if they’d never heard the names of the actors! But no, you decided to make the Hobbit one big insider joke for the Sherlock crowd, and produced… really, nothing but that.
While we’re talking about the hur hur, let’s put in famous people for a joke problem: did you really have to have that obligatory Stephen Fry cameo? I mean, I adore the guy as much as everybody does, but it seems that every bloody movie out there has to have a Stephen Fry cameo in it. Sometimes they make sense (Mycroft Holmes, The Book in H2G2), sometimes not so much. In this case, the problem is, he’s just so… he’s just so “Look, it’s Stephen Fry in a wig”. He’s totally putting you out of the story. For the whole, uh, 3:25 minutes he’s on screen.
And one more thing you could have just kept where the sun don’t shine: Alfred the unnecessary slimebag who does nothing for the plot. Except provide the sort of comic relief Mel Brooks would find tacky. Was he played by your nephew or something? Because it sure looks like you only included that part to make sure the actor can make ends meet.
So, what it boils down to is this: WHY did you take on a job you didn’t want to do?
You could have made a great Hobbit movie. Instead you made 3 bad ones. And I think you knew from day one. You fucked up. It’s sad that your movie will keep better people from trying their luck with the Hobbit for the foreseeable future - nobody will want to make another Hobbit movie any time soon.
But what’s saddest of all is that we now know: you’re not a great director. We now know that LOTR was brilliant by accident. You didn’t make it brilliant through your amazing abilities of bringing together the right people. You just lucked out, and when your luck left you during the Hobbit, you didn’t have much to fall back on except average Hollywood boredom.
But let’s finish on a positive note: At least it’s over now! “One last time” indeed. Fingers crossed.
PS: I hate HFR. It makes the Hobbit look like East Enders. Fuck you.