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The Hobbit

Dwarves akimbo!

So before I tear into this bitch, I have to say a few things about my thoughts and feelings leading up to the film. If you want to skip ahead to the part where I talk about the movie itself, feel free.

I went into this movie half-cocked with a year's worth of behind-the-scenes footage and hype. It's risky to emotionally invest yourself in a movie before seeing it, and it's a risk I don't usually take because of past disappointments.

Before I even entered that theater, I established with myself that I would stop going to the cinema all together if the movie sucked. A bit extreme, you say? Well, I don't really consider going to the movies a fundamental part of my life (a fact my fellow film maker friends find baffling). I could probably abandon the cinema-going experience entirely barring those few spectacles full of promise that come so few and far between.

So why was I such a faggotronic fanboy for The Hobbit from the off? It was a conscious choice. I'm not necessarily a huge Tolkien nut, and when I originally saw Lord of The Rings, I don't think I appreciated it as much as I do now. I'm a bit older now. A bit fatter. I have become interested in the film-making process. I relish in all the intuitiveness and hard work that goes into making these sumptuous slices of movie magic. No other film series has better demonstrated the phrase "for love of the craft".

That's why I chose to be excited for this film, to follow it closely, to get nerd boners every time a new video blog was released or a tidbit of news came to light. It's because I missed that wholesome feeling of getting excited for something and having it pay off. It made me feel like a kid again, feel like I did before I became this jaded cynic whose rose-tinted glasses have taken on a more fecal hue. I made myself vulnerable to this piece of media, and I came out of that theater with a feeling of wholly legitimate satisfaction. It was damned refreshing. 

Okay, here's where I talk about the actual movie... 

I saw it at the standard frame rate, not 3D, because I wanted to judge the film on it's merits as a narrative before I got all caught up on visual gimmicks and - to a lesser extent - because it was the biggest mutual criticism heralded by nearly every reviewer.

I can say without a doubt that I will be seeing this film a second time in 3D and 48fps, because there is so fucking much to take in. That I've only seen it at half it's viewing potential has made me voracious to see more. Gollum's scene in particular was stunning, and I need to see all the crisp nuances in that little guy at the full intended frame rate.

The Plot 

Not much can be said about the overarching plot as it's taken directly from Tolkien and I'm in no position to criticize or scrutinize his work in any way. There is something to be said of Jackson's interpretation of the story, and how he has folded in material from Tolkien's appendices.

I never felt that Jackson's inclusion of Tolkien's "extra" material was out of place or upset the flow of the main story. He throws in a few direct references to LOTR which, while very evident, were not forced and created a sense of continuity that I understand was absent from Tolkien's collective work.

One of the biggest criticisms of The Hobbit so far has been that it's "too dark" despite lighter tone of the novel. What these critics may not understand is that Tolkien went back and re-wrote large chunks of his world canon (which he had not yet fleshed out when he first wrote The Hobbit), and these stories (The Appendices) contained some stuff that was pretty fucking dark. Darker even than Peter Jackson's weighty adaptation.

Many of the scenes added to the main story came from Tolkien's Appendices. This includes the dwarves' unfortunate brush with the draconian, fire-breathing asshole known as Smaug, as well as another much smaller (but just as nasty) asshole named Azog. I feel like the inclusion of these scenes was very necessary to establish the motivation of both the dwarves and their enemy. However, the actual inclusion of said enemy (Azog) is a bit of a gray area for me, and I'll explain why...

Tolkien wrote Azog as a far more conniving and brutal motherfucker than we see in the film. Instead of beheading Thror in battle like we see in the movie, he actually beheads him inside Moria, and chucks the severed noggin - beard and all - onto the front steps with 'AZOG' carved in his fucking forehead. The dwarves in Tolkien's lore would have never let such a rat bastard as Azog slip away from battle with as little as a severed arm. They run the scumbag down and decapitate him like the bitch he is, and stuff a bag of gold in his mouth that he had originally given to one of the dwarves as a "fee" for delivering his message of war.

This is where Azog's son, Bolg, comes into the picture. Bolg swears revenge on Thorin and his kin, and this is his motivation to meet them in battle at the end of The Hobbit. So my question to Jackson is... why change it so Azog was alive when his role could have easily been filled by his son? Not only would it have been more accurate to Tolkien's Appendices, it would also have created an interesting son-of-the-hero versus son-of-the-enemy dynamic. The younger generation fighting for the honor of their fallen kin. Would have been much cleverer at any rate.

The Characters

Martin Freeman makes a great Bilbo. At times, it felt to me like he wasn't getting enough screen time, and that his character was being neglected a bit. Arguably, the same problems occurred with Frodo in Fellowship, so perhaps this is just the pace at which Tolkien writes his protagonists. They don't really get going until halfway through. In the case of The Hobbit, Bilbo finds his place near the end of the film, setting him up for bigger and better things in part two.

Jackson stated from the get-go that one of his biggest fears about doing The Hobbit was the troupe of thirteen dwarves. Many of the dwarves were seldom mentioned and of little consequence in the highly Bilbo-centric novel. Jackson took care to give each dwarf the spotlight, if even for a only a few seconds.

There was some lack of characterization, the focus falling on the same three or four dwarves while the others stood around with thumbs up their asses (and axes in their foreheads). Still, each dwarf is very distinct from the next, and you'll have no trouble telling them apart. My faves were;

Balin - The lovable old guy. I'd say he's the dwarf equivalent to Gandalf in their group dynamic. He gets plenty of screen time and some great dialogue. He also kind of looks like Robin Williams.

Tell me I'm wrong.

Bombur - The fat one who didn't get a single line, which made me a sad panda... but he was still worth his weight in yucks, as this picture very clearly demonstrates;

Pictured: 1 ton of metric fun.

Bofur - the James Nesbitt one, whose Fu Manchu 'stache really put me off when I first saw it, but by god, he was just such a sweetie in the movie. It's those eyes. I melted during the scene where he wishes Bilbo his best when he tries to sneak off.

Rada-fuckin-Gast the Brown, motherfucker - Probably one of the best characters in a movie ever. He doesn't even have that much screen time, and he's just super charming. He needs to lay off those magic mushrooms though.

The Great Goblin - The ballsiest character in the movie. He truly was the dog's bollocks. He was totally nuts! 

Also, he looked like testicles.

 The Creatures

Here's where I can imagine Guillermo Del Taco shuffling uncomfortably during the premiere. Following the production, I've known for a while that an excess of CG was being used for The Hobbit (easily twice the amount present in LOTR). I'm a traditional FX loyalist, and I wasn't sure how to feel about it. I remembered how Peter Jackson made sweet sweet love to my eyeballs back in 2005 with the visuals in King Kong, so I tried to put my concerns away. The final result was mixed, I'd say, but nothing about it was glaringly bad. I was disappointed to find out PJ's token use miniatures (or 'bigatures') was absent from the production. 

The newly rendered Gollum was so stunning and complex that it was fucking unsettling. Not an 'uncanny valley' unsettling where they hit the mark just shy of perfect realism. No, I was unsettled by the fact that it looked so incredibly real. Real to the point where Martin Freeman - a real person (I think. I don't even know anymore) - looked more CG than the fucking CG Gollum. This is high praise, btw.

I loved the trolls. I am certain Del Taco did not. While part of me thinks they could have been realized more effectively with a blend of traditional FX and CG (as Del Taco wanted), I accept that they have to be CG to be consistent with the trolls from LOTR, and granted, the CG was spectacular. There was a sort of silly part where Tom the Troll blows his nose on Bilbo, complete with CG boogers. It felt kind of thrown in "for the kiddiez". Whatever. I still laughed. There was also a scene where Bilbo was uncomfortably close to Tom's tremendous ass, offering dangerous potential for a fart joke. Fortunately, ol' PJ went with his better judgement on that one.

Bombur & Tom the Troll. Both characters communicate by farting.

The wargs I could take or leave. In LOTR, they looked more like hyenas than wolves, and I understand that was the subject of plenty o' nerd bile. They rectified this by making the wargs more wolf-like this time around, but the new design is only "meh" at best. They threw in an in-world legitimization for the change in appearance by specifying that they are Gundabad wargs, not Isengard wargs. Chew on that, you mewling nerd bastards!

Azog was entirely CG. This may have been the only case where using computer graphics was completely unnecessary. PJ legitimized in multiple interviews that he used CG to make the characters less human in a way that wasn't possible with prosthetics. While I see his reasoning to full effect on other monsters, Azog just looked like a combination of the Engineers from Prometheus and this guy from 300, both of which were done traditionally. Meanwhile, Azog's son Bolg (remember him?) was in the movie for like two seconds, played by an actual guy in a costume. Missed again, PJ.

The goblins were great, and better embody PJ's vision of creatures with impossibly non-human proportions. Most of them were asymmetrical and moved in a way that wouldn't have been possible for guys in rubber suits.

We do get a glimpse of Smaug, but only his eye and nostril. Not worth reporting on.

The Music

Howard Shore's score is, in my opinion, what elevated the original trilogy from "very good" to "brilliant". We can watch characters spew heartfelt dialogue, die in epic battles with cartoon monsters, climb the highest highs and tumble to the lowest lows, and it would all mean piddly shit without the music.

I won't wax fanboy about Shore's LOTR score, because I'm sure we're already on the same page if you bothered to read this far.

That being said, Shore's score for The Hobbit is a bit flat. Many of the themes from LOTR are repeated, but again, I suppose they have to be. Not that I tire of hearing them, but the new themes aren't nearly as memorable.

There are a few exceptions, such as the Dwarves' theme, a brassy rendition of their "Misty Mountains" diddy which you all know from the trailers. I then found out Shore didn't actually write this song and it came courtesy of Plan 9. So the movie's most memorable motif isn't even Shore's. Weak. Radagast's theme was another good one, but it was regrettably buried in the movie's sound mixing and didn't have the same 'oomph' that it does in the album version.

In Conclusion

I have no witty closing remarks. Just go see it and let me know what you think! 

Phallictus, the unintentionally penis-shaped monster

Finished this little painting yesterday. I had no idea how phallic it looked until it was complete. I'm sure Freud would have a few things to say about this. I'm happy with how the painting itself turned out, but I'm not happy with how it scanned in. Scanners have a tendency to pick up on a lot of "invisible" texture unseen by the eye in flat light. As a result, the soft/smoky look I work to achieve is destroyed as every single dust particle and brush stroke is picked up by the scanner. I managed to negate this by softening it up a bit in Photoshop, but it's not perfect.

Unfortunately, scanning is the only option I have at the moment until I get a high quality camera (which I'm hoping to get this Christmas).

Acrylics, airbrush, graphite