Why The Hobbit was Disappointing and How I Hope It Will Get Better

Last week when The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey came out on DVD, I was eager to watch it again. I had been less than thrilled when I saw the movie in the theatre, and this time, I tried to approach with lowered expectations, hoping that it wasn't as bad as I remembered. Unfortunately, after watching it again I have to admit that The Hobbit just isn't the movie I wanted it to be. However, it's only the first in the trilogy and I have hopes that Peter Jackson will really shine in the next two.

All of that being said, I'd like to present to you the three big reasons why I'm forced to admit that The Hobbit is not a good movie, and a few thoughts on why I hope the next two will get better:

1. Peter Jackson fell in love with his special effects.

I'm going to call this the George Lucas syndrome. It's like Peter Jackson decided that just because he can do something with computer animation, then it must be included in the film. This resulted in the special effects being used to in a jarring, awkward way. The battle scene in the goblin cave looked like a video game. CG characters (the Goblin King, Azog) made me think of Jar Jar Binks. Entire mountains came to life, just so the animation department could show off. And don't even get me started on the heavy handed way some actors' faces were airbrushed to try and make them look a decade younger.

In The Lord of the Rings trilogy, the special effects were used subtly, and helped immerse the audience further in the world that was being created. In The Hobbit, the opposite happens. The special effects jump off the screen, demanding notice, and jarring the audience out of the story. And speaking of the Lord of the Rings, that brings me to my second point...

2. Reminders of the other trilogy were too frequent and kind of awkward.

When I say reminders, it usually was a moment recreated in too faithful detail, awkwardly shoehorned into the narrative of this new movie. There's the scene where Gandalf gets all scary and deep-voiced in Bag End for no reason. Ian Holme and Elijah Wood were brought back just to remind us that the other movies existed. There's the time Azog and his goblin crew are hanging out at Weathertop. In fact, the entire subplot with Azog was invented, with the only reason I can see being that it resulted in our band of protagonists being chased by a baddy for the second half of the movie in the same way it happened in The Fellowship of the Ring. And don't even get me started on the super fakey way the ring falls on to Bilbo's finger, in exactly the same fakey way it fell on Frodo's finger.

And the one moment that should have been recreated just as it was shown in the original trilogy was altered in this movie. In the Fellowship of the Ring, there is a flashback of Bilbo finding the ring. When Bilbo finds the ring in The Hobbit, the situation is completely different. I'm not looking for perfect repetition, I would have been fine with the same general idea. Instead, the moment happens under completely different circumstances. Anyone who has seen The Fellowship of the Ring -- a group also know as the entire audience of The Hobbit -- will notice the discrepancy and be pulled out of the story by it.

3. The movie is too long and moves too slowly.

This isn't an uncommon problem for Peter Jackson. King Kong, anyone? In The Hobbit he was given room to do whatever he wanted with the movie, and what he did was pad out the run time with unnecessary scenes and action sequences that were basically just CG love fests. As much as I love the songs from Tolkien's books, I don't think they really add that much to a cinematic experience; we don't need twenty minutes of various dwarven choruses in the first half-hour of the movie.

I think the problem is that The Hobbit should not be three movies. The story is not that long or complex, even with extra material from Tolkien's appendices. Three movies are too much, and three three-hour movies verges on the ridiculous. The Lord of the Rings was excellent despite its run-time because there was so much material in the original source. Peter Jackson was forced to make cuts and not include things and as a result every scene was in the movie because it helped the story move forward. With The Hobbit, the opposite is true. There simply isn't enough source material to keep the film going when you have so much time to fill. What you end up with is a movie that feels bogged down in parts, and bloated action sequences that exist just to show off the special effects.

All of this being said, I am keeping a small hope alive that the next two movies will be better. There are some really excellent performances in the movie. Martin Freemen, in particular, is the perfect Bilbo. The best parts of the movie are the times when he is given room to shine; his scene with Gollum, for example, could not be improved upon. Ian McKellan is, as always, excellent, and the actors playing the dwarves do a great job of conveying each character's individuality instead of just coming across as a mass of indistinguishable beards. With such a strong cast, even a movie with significant problems is enjoyable.

We all know that Peter Jackson can make excellent movies. Even his less stellar efforts are still good, it's just that we've come to expect gold from him every time. I know I'm about the millionth person to raise these points about The Hobbit, and I just hope that he listens to some of the feedback and uses it constructively. The Hobbit tells a great story, and we haven't even gotten to the good parts yet. I'm still going to let myself hope that the rest of the trilogy will bring the awesomeness of Middle Earth that we all love.

I finally want to read The Walking Dead

I've really enjoyed watching The Walking Dead. Normally I don't get into blood and guts stuff -- the storyline often ends up being secondary to the violence. This show, though, is more about character development than squeezing as many blood soaked moments as possible into an hour.

As much as I've liked the show, I haven't really felt the urge to read the comic books upon which the show was based. The first season was compelling, but I didn't have the desire to dig deeper, and the second season was kind of boring for long parts. Definitely not the kind of thing to entice me to further reading.

The third season, though, has been different. The story arc that juxtaposed Rick and the Governor is the best thing that ever happened to this show. First, you are wondering if the Governor is really all that bad. After all, he's not doing anything Rick isn't doing. However, we get a slow reveal throughout the season and each week the writers let us peer deeper and deeper into the Governor's twisted psyche. Meanwhile, Rick is losing control of his mental state, all because he is trying to act like the kind of man the Governor really is. A man that Rick definitely is not.

I know that the season's not over -- we still have to fight the "war" between the prison and Waterbury -- but it feels like Rick's character journey, at least, has reached its destination. His call to arms in the last episode was the polar opposite to the ultimatum he delivered at the end of season two. It was an admission that the path he'd been trying to follow since he killed Shane was not right. He is a completely different person than he was at the beginning of the season, but he is much closer now to being the person he was at the beginning of the show.

It's this kind of interplay between characters, as well as a bad guy who is both believable and scary, that makes me want to delve into the story behind the show. If this kind of thing can be developed within the limitations of the TV format, then I'm dying to find out about what the writers of the comic book got into.

Plus, I hear there's more Michonne in the comics. And Michonne is my favorite badass zombie killer. I would love to see more of her.

Christmas with the Cat

My cat hates Christmas. She has a long history of destroying things - for example, she is doing her best to kill the only houseplant I've ever been able to keep alive for more than a month. But with the addition of the Christmas tree into our living room, she is having more fun than a cat should have causing chaos.

She loves the satin tree skirt, and she has developed quite a routine. She pushes all the presents aside so that she can lurk comfortably and enjoy the silky texture, and then she claws at the fabric until she ends up underneath the whole thing. Once she finds herself there, she freaks out and bolts across the room. All this activity usually causes the train that goes around the tree to jump its track. I'm just glad it's only little Lego men on that train, because many a rail-related disaster has been caused by the cat's careless actions.

And of course she can't leave the ornaments alone. There is one kind in particular that hangs and swings just right that she loves to bat around and chew on. After I moved all of those ornaments higher in the tree, she started attacking anything that is low hanging. We've gotten to the point where the only decorations that are less than three feet off the ground are the plastic ones she can't break. Most of those just happen to be covered in glitter, so the cat is twinkly most of the time now, too. She's a black cat, and it's quite entertaining to see her walking around, full of cat-like dignity, with blue and white sparkles all over her face.

The worst part is how she deals with the tree itself. When she started chewing on the branches I wasn't too worried; after all, how much damage can she do to a fake Christmas tree? Then, she started climbing. She learned how to maneuver herself into the tree and hang out on the nice, evenly spaced branches. At first, she stopped at the bottom row, but lately she's been getting bolder, going about halfway up and then just sitting there. She watches us from between the fake fronds and twinkly lights, secure in her new lair, planning world domination or whatever it is that cats think about. I'm just waiting for the inevitable moment when she tries to jump out of the tree and ends up tipping the whole thing over.

So, I guess maybe the problem isn't that my cat hates Christmas. Maybe the problem is that she really, really loves all the lovely new Christmas-themed toys I've put out for her, and I just don't appreciate the ways she shows her holiday spirit.

Drug Addled Writing

My boyfriend is making me feel like a slacker. Here I am, trying to do a month's worth of blogs, and only getting entries written about half the time, and he's clacking away on his iPad every night night showing me up. While I'm reading before bed, already guilty because I'm consuming the written word rather than producing it, he's sitting next to me making the guilt worse.

He recently discovered that anyone can create a wiki, and he's hard at work creating a community based on the elaborate stories he and his friends have been making up for and about each other for the last 20 or so years. It's pretty interesting stuff. Even though I'm jealous of his productivity I'm having fun reading it all. Because I haven't been thinking about this stuff for years, I like to think I provide a valuable outside viewpoint.

The really irritating thing, though, is that he's doing all of this while he's drugged up. He takes ambien to help him sleep and, as anyone who's taken that drug knows, after a certain point in the evening you can be awake and (apparently) functioning but you won't remember anything about what happened the next day. Every night after he takes his pill, he writes for a while and creates pages on the wiki. And then, every morning he gets to open it up and see what new things he wrote while in the ambien blackout. It's like he has a ghostwriter doing all he work for him.


Although, now that I think of it, having someone else do all the work for me sounds like a pretty sweet deal. Especially since it would be me doing it, so everything would be done the way I like it. I wonder, maybe he'll loan me one of those pills and I can try it out...

My Cat Acts Like a Toddler

This evening my cat got her head stuck in a plastic bag she stole from the garbage. As I was chasing her down to extricate her from her mess, I realized that in some ways cats are like toddlers. Obviously, cats are waaaaaay less work than an actual toddler, but there are undeniable similarities.

People with toddlers baby-proof the house so the kids don't get into things that are dangerous or messy, and I've had to do the same thing. All over the house, things that used to be stored out in the open are now tucked away into drawers and other non-cat accessible areas. We haven't had to put those baby locks on the cupboard doors (yet), but we no longer get take for granted that anything we leave out will be in the same place when we come back for it. It doesn't help that I crochet, so there is a lot of yarn that used to just be laying around. Now it's all tucked away so that the dumb animal doesn't eat it and mess up her guts.

Then there's the whole toilet issue. Again, I'm not comparing litter box maintenance with changing diapers, but I am dealing with the animal's poop on at least a daily basis. Also, I swear that she finds us and situates herself as close to use as she can before she passes gas. I have lived with cats before, but I had no idea that their farts smelled so bad until Thud came around.

Christmas is another thing that presents similar challenges to people with cats in the house as it does for those with toddlers. Earlier this week I decorated my Christmas tree, mostly with delicate glass ornaments. I distributed them with an eye towards balance and beauty, and the tree looked lovely. I'm glad I took a picture when I was done, because the next day half the tree was re-organized. I had to remove all the ornaments from the bottom branches because the cat was attacking them rather vigorously, and I was afraid she was going to bring down the whole tree. Now that there aren't any shiny things that she can reach and destroy, she's started chewing on the tree itself. I haven't lived with a toddler in a while, do they do that too?

I never get too exasperated with the fuzzy-faced critter, though, because she's sure to do something adorable before too long. And as soon as she does, I'm whipping out my camera like a sucker, trying to capture the moment of cute before she goes back to being a terror. I have a feeling that many parents of toddlers feel the same way.

Hobbitses and Legoses, Precious

I am getting a very special birthday present this year. Peter Jackson is giving me a movie I've been excited about for a long, long time. The Hobbit's release date is the day before my birthday, and I am looking forward to it more than I probably should.

Tonight I got a little fix to help hold me over until the movie comes out. Lego, in its infinite wisdom, made several sets based on The Hobbit. We bought the ones that were released yesterday (no waiting for Christmas here!) and the boyfriend, the kid and I spent the evening around the dining room table, putting together Legos. It was downright heartwarming, in a geeky way.

Personally, I spent a couple of happy hours building Bilbo's hobbit-hole. It looks great - it really is a good set - and there are so many great touches. There are even stickers in the set that turn normal lego blocks into miniature reproductions of the actual maps from the book.

Maybe Legos aren't quite as exciting as finally seeing the actual movie, but we had a lot of fun, anyway.

Breaking in a New Computer

Getting a new computer is kind of a bitter-sweet experience. I mean, your old computer may be slow and half of the programs you need don't work very well, but it's familiar and you know exactly where everything is. Your settings are the way you like them and you don't ever have to type a web address because your browser knows them all. I, for one, find myself resisting getting a new computer - or doing what is needed to fix the old - just because it's so much work getting everything back to normal and tweaking all the setting to be just how I like them.

Well, I got my comeuppance for that attitude this week with a vengeance. My work computer has been slow and buggy for months now. It's about two years old and wasn't that great of a machine to begin with; it was just a basic laptop that could do the types of things I needed. Last week, though, it quit doing some of the crucial things I need to do my job, so I finally had to call IT in to fix the problem.

First, they did a whole system reset (I think that's what they called it) which erased all my settings, icons, favorite, bookmarks, etc. After that, I spent all day putting things back the way I like them. I tweaked settings and tried to remember all my bookmarks. I even did Google searches to remember how to do the obscure changes I had discovered ages ago and never thought of since.

Actually, I wasn't working on it quite all day. A couple of hours before quitting time, one of the IT guys came in and said that they were going to have to re-image the machine - it just wasn't going to work otherwise. Basically, everything I'd done that day to make my computer work the way I wanted it was all going away and I'd have to do it all again.

At this point, I'm more than happy to have them do what they have to do to make sure I can use my computer. After all, they already deleted the favorites and such, and there is no getting them back. I just wish that they had told me they I would have to do it all again before I spent the time fixing things in the first place.

I guess I'll just have to console myself by doing my job on a computer that doesn't randomly freeze up, crash, and generally works smoothly. I think I'll be fine.