Film: The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (2013)

[dimejinky99]

He was and he wasn't. He knew LOTR. Was unfilmable as it stood, and in that changes and omissions, various and numerous would have to be made but his big thing was that it never be 'Disnified'. I think, or like to think, that'd her appreciate the effort to make it look so well and they did capture a lot of the spirit of the story and some of its central themes, but if he were to ever have seen it, he'd probably have a heart attack before Frodo and Sam had even left the Shire.

Quote:
....too 'Disnified' for my taste: Bilbo with a dribbling nose, and Gandalf as a figure of vulgar fun rather than the Odinic wanderer that I think of...

[dimejinky99]

This entire thread is well worth a read. All news to me. C.S. Lewis and Tolkien went to see Snow White twice?!

Well worth a read.
http://forum.barrowdowns.com/showthread.php?t=18117

[Self]

Saw this in 3D today. I usually avoid 3D, but timing is everything. Holy CGI. Was it that bad in 2D? I don't hate blatant CGI like a lot of people do, but in parts it felt like I was watching the kids play a video game. Still liked it well enough, except the ending. Seemed really abrupt. Like, Back To The Future II abrupt. I still haven't forgiven Mike J. Fox for that.

[bada]

There was only one Back To The Future movie. Two and Three are just lies made up by the devil like dinosaurs.

[Mecca]

I really didn't notice any bothersome CGI in this like I did in LOTR.

[Self]

Huh. Maybe it was the 3D, then.

[Mecca]

I saw it in 3D as well.

[Self]

Dude...

[Self]

Like I said, it didn't ruin anything for me. But, it was blatant.

[Jorge]

You're blatant.

[Self]

No. I'm subtle and and affable, jerkface.

[Jorge]

You're right. I apologize.

[Self]

I'm sorry, too.

On a lighter note, during one of the more serious points in the movie, when Gandalf was running around trying to find info on Sauron...the whole theater was muted when my father let out a rather loud, "I really like his hat!"

I love my dad.

[Mecca]

Like I said, it didn't ruin anything for me. But, it was blatant.

you mean the scenes with the dragon?

[dimejinky99]

I'm sorry, too.

On a lighter note, during one of the more serious points in the movie, when Gandalf was running around trying to find info on Sauron...the whole theater was muted when my father let out a rather loud, "I really like his hat!"

I love my dad.

I laughed out loud at that:)

You can buy gandalfs hat on the wetaworkshop site.

[stip]

Like I said, it didn't ruin anything for me. But, it was blatant.

you mean the scenes with the dragon?



I dislike 3d, and there were scenes where i had to angle my head slightly to line things up. I also wear glasses so I had the glasses on glasses thing going.

Regarding the stuff with Smaug towards the end, I like the dwarf chase through the mountains, and think it was appropriate for these characters. The movies, and the source material really, ram home in a pretty heavy handed way the whole 'power and greed corrupt' theme--and it's not just that it makes you evil. It destroys what is best in you and diminishes what is most exemplary within you

This plays out in a number of ways in LOTR related to political power and possession of the ring. In the Hobbit we really see it with Smaug and Thorin in response to their greed and lust for gold. In theory Thorin is an inspiring leader (we could see more of that, I agree) who engenders this really deep loyalty from the people who follow him. But as he gets closer to reclaiming the treasure horde we see him start to lose that, and he's willing to sacrifice his friends in the name of the wealth that undid his ancestors. We even get a scene where Balin (that's the old guy, right?) explicitly points it out to us.

The same thing happens with Smaug--as soon as there is even a chance that bilbo might escape with some of his wealth he loses his shit and his cleverness, his cunning, his intellect, all that stuff is consumed by his lust for it. Knowing that Thorin is there just makes it all worse, because in Tolkien's aristocratic world kings have power just by virtue of being kings. The fact that it's just a handful of dwarves who can't possibly harm or threaten him is irrelevant. The king being there not only challenges whether or not his hold over the horde is legitimate, it actually threatens it in some quasi-mystical way.

This is the nature of the world that the books are situated in. The screenplay and direction is pretty faithful to that. It may be stupid, but that's the source material. That's the problem with the dwarves, too. Tolkien's characterizations are hideously weak to begin with, but at least in LOTR the major characters are differentiated by race and story arcs. The Hobbit basically has 3 characters. It has Gandalf, Bilbo, and Thorin. The other dwarves are utterly interchangable (they have different color cloaks, which is about the extent to which Tolkien thought about them), and exist soley so Thorin has people to lead and the principle characters have people they can save. They're bumbling and pathetic, and that's all the story asks of them. So Jackson et all are in a tough position--there's no room in the story for these people to be characters unless you give them something to do (the acting is fine), but every time you do that you end up weaving in new stories that can't help but feel less important to the main arc.

So its a problem, but its a limit imposed on Jackson by the story that I think he can't really be blamed for. After watching the two movies it became much clearer to me that the interchangable nature of most of the dwarves (there's the fat one, the old one, the tough one, the wise one, the sexy one, the brother of the sexy one, one is a healer for some reason, and 5 others I can't even pretend to recall), wasn't really the problem. True we don't care about them but we don't need to care about them. The story doesn't depend on it, since most of their interactions are as a pack of dwarves, rather than differentiated individuals. The problem in the first film was the pacing, the fact that precious little happened, and that what did wasn't all that exciting. Really the only excellent parts of the first film was the bilbo/golumn exchange and the fight in the burning trees. there were far more memorable scenes and sequences in this second film


1. The ringwraith crypt was cool
2. I really enjoyed the necromancer/gandalf conflict
3. The reveal of the wood elf city/prison, etc was nicely done. We already knew Rivendell
4. The spiders were well done
5. I really enjoyed the barrel sequence. It was absurd, but it was also largely shot that way
6. Bilbo and Smaug was fantastic
7. I liked the feel of laketown. Not sure the politics was necessary, but I think that is also setting up a payoff in the next film, so we'll see
8. I enjoyed seeing Smaug rampaging through Erabor, in part because of how it turned him into this seething violent engine of destruction.
9. I liked watching Tauriel.
10. I liked the running fight with Legolas and Tauriel with the elves. Legolas is still largely featureless, but he's a bit more savage here, and since his only role seems to be to kill things in slick and graceful ways, it works a bit better.

There really wasn't anything I didn't like, other than perhaps some of the cuts during bilbo and smaug. But that was more because that was the best sequence in either film, more than any issue with what they were cutting to, and I never felt, when they got back to B+S, that it had lost momentum.

That's pretty much most of the film

[dimejinky99]

Fair points.

[Self]

Like I said, it didn't ruin anything for me. But, it was blatant.

you mean the scenes with the dragon?

Actually, no. I think it was the worst during the barrel scene. The movements during the fighting really reminded me of playing video games with the kids.

[McParadigm]

Saw this in 3D today. I usually avoid 3D, but timing is everything. Holy CGI. Was it that bad in 2D? I don't hate blatant CGI like a lot of people do, but in parts it felt like I was watching the kids play a video game. Still liked it well enough, except the ending. Seemed really abrupt. Like, Back To The Future II abrupt. I still haven't forgiven Mike J. Fox for that.

I thought the effects on this movie were okay, ocassionally great...way better than the last one, where they were so bad it was almost comical.

But I still thought that the best and scariest looking orc in the whole thing was the guy in make-up for the interrogation scene, and I still really miss the days when CGI was used to enhance already developed effects, and when filmmakers still remembered that special effects are most powerful when you can immerse yourself in them and forget that they are and effect. They've gotten so good at those things, but it's like they go for "textured cartoon" instead of "really there."

Speaking of "textured cartoon," that introduction all of the sudden of a second-in-command orc, who pretty much just looks like the other guy but maybe a little stupider still makes me roll my eyes.

[Leatherhead]

Still haven't seen this. Really enjoyed the first Hobbit, still excited to see this one. I think I'm more lenient on movies today than I used to be.