The Hobbit

[A Black Falcon]

Yeah, the movie. Overall, I thought it was really good. The main flaw is that there's obviously only two movies worth of material from this book (the film is quite slow paced compared to the LotR movies and covers half of the book), so I don't know how they're going to manage to find three movies worth of stuff here, but other than that, this is great.

The big question for The Hobbit has been, though, do you like the slower pace, and all of the added stuff in this film? The LotR movies, even though 12 hours in length all combined, cut out a lot of stuff from the books. The Hobbit, in contrast, not only includes nearly everything, but it adds lots of stuff too, like Radigast's scenes. Of course as with the LotR movies they make other changes (adding orcs, adding Saruman, etc.), but that's to be expected. But returning to the issue of pace in The Hobbit, I like the slower pace, myself. I really liked that they did have room this time for stuff like the songs; it was too bad that the LotR movies cut out almost all of that stuff. The song the dwarves sang in Bilbo's home that night was moving and important to the plot, too, but I can't see the LotR movies making time for something like that. So yeah, you can see the "padding", but in this one at least, the padding's so well done that I don't care. It's great.

Oh yeah, they did stretch credulity a bit by having at least three different times when people fell from high heights with no injury... I know they were trying to add some somewhat comic bits, but... some of that stuff was going a bit overboard (in that "movie" kind of way). Ah well, it was fun anyway. :)

So yeah, overall, it's quite good, but I do seriously wonder how they're going to find three movies out of this.