The Lonely Mountain song was really lovely.

And come on! Hedgehog! Although I agree about the camera shots lovingly framing Radagast's bird poop hairstyling.

One of the things I liked least about LotR was the dwarf-tossing Gimli humor bits. Just puerile and stupid. And this movie had a lot of fart-jokey stuff.

Hedgehog Resurrection would make a great band name.

Reading Suela's post, and I agree with pretty much every word.

I think what's missing is the tone of innocence, which I think couldn't have been there when shot in this order. Bilbo's innocence (I missed the line where he sees his first mountain and assumes it's The Mountain and everyone kinda chuckles, because it's such a good way of exhibiting how little he knows about the outside world, and it's a great metaphor for us and how we live our lives.) and the innocence of the story as a whole. It's a journey, but it's just not a grand scale epic like LotR is, but because we're getting it after the fact, I don't think Peter Jackson could have made a sweet film about self-discovery when people were expecting ott cgi.

But because the action got shoehorned in, they lacked the emotional hook that Tolkien would have given them. And stuff like the trolls becomes much more disturbing when they personify them so much, and then there's violence against them. I much preferred the bit where they get tricked into bickering with each other until dawn.

Those are parts of a much younger story, which LotR was not, book or movie, and which now the Hobbit movie cannot be.

I have no significant investment in Tolkien. I watched the LotR trilogy and enjoyed them all (for excellent acting and scenery and general grandeur and ambition of it all), tried to read the books and got stuck in book 2. Never read the Hobbit. Would I enjoy this movie? Does it have narrative cohesion and flow well enough to appeal to those who only know the vague outline of the story?

I think what's missing is the tone of innocence, which I think couldn't have been there when shot in this order.

I found that the tone of innocence was far more there than I'd thought it would be.

You're probably right, it's there more than it could have been. But somehow I wish there was more. Maybe Suela's term, whimsy.

In other news, do any of you know where I left my Silmarillion? Because I can't find it. Ebook time? Is there an ebook Silmarillion?

Amazon has a Kindle edition of the Silmarillion. [link]

Some asshole (a professional movie critic no less) in my timeline compared "The Hobbit" to "The Phantom Menace."

Okay, even if I think "The Hobbit" is garbage when Beau and I see it tomorrow, ain't no possible way PJ fucked up that badly.

Ain't no way. Too many critics seem to enjoy doing an Armond White on movies and don't really know (or what to seriously assess) whether a movie is BAD or not.

Some asshole (a professional movie critic no less) in my timeline compared "The Hobbit" to "The Phantom Menace."

Yeah, no. It doesn't piss on the original by undercutting it. And the cast is uniformly good. But PJ does seem to have fallen in love with his technology to the detriment of the story.