Cloudy, with a chance of Eagles

[oloriel]

Right.
Due to LJ being under attack once more (yawn), I missed my annual Happy New Year post.
So,
have a very happy, healthy, creative and delightful new year
belatedly.

I also missed the Professor's birthday toast. Now my fan card really will be revoked for good*.

Oh wait, I missed the birthday toast because I was at the Cinemaxx, FINALLY WATCHING THE HOBBIT. Maybe I may keep my fan card after all?

So. My cinematic experience, the first since Pirates of the Caribbean 4: On Stranger Tides. What have I become.

On the technical side, I'm afraid this was a disappointment. The Cinemaxx advertises that you get to see The Hobbit with state-of-the-art technology, but obviously that only goes for the 3D HFR theatres. We went for good old 2D, which was grainy, blurry, disconcerting and, often, nausea-inducing. (Ironically, we'd decided for 2D because we were afraid that the 3D would be, as it so often is, blurry and nauseating...)
Of course, that's not the film's fault.

Further impressions will go under the spoiler cut, just in case.


On the whole, I found the pacing of this film terribly awkward. It was a mixed bag, really, made up of lots of theoretically brilliant puzzle pieces, but it felt as though they had been put together by someone who wasn't entirely sure where they were going. This did make the movie long-winded in some scenes, and I say that as a fan; I can understand why less passionate cinema-goers felt bored on occasion. The Erebor scene could've used some trimming, even though I loved the glimpse into the past of the Dwarven kingdom, and the stone giants and White Council made even me look at my watch.

That said, the puzzle pieces themselves really were brilliant (aside from the stone giants and the White Council). So much love and attention went into the design and cinematography, and it really shows! I loved the shout-outs to the past and future, which is no surprise. New Zealand is still stunningly beautiful, which is no surprise either.

Some random thoughts that went through my head during the film:

- Thranduil's facial expressions really made me roll my eyes. A lot. Also, as they've now established that Thorin has a personal reason to dislike Elves and the Sindar in particular, I'm pretty certain they won't do the Doriath flashback I was hoping for.

- Unexpected Party: PERFECT.

- They managed to incorporate a couple of songs without making it Disney-ish! I'm impressed.

- I really appreciate that they managed to give each Dwarf his own personality. I mean, it's still not like I could immediately say which Dwarf is called what or anything, but they managed to turn that heterogeneous, generic Dwarven mass that was in my head into 13 distinguishable individuals, which must have been no small feat.

- Yay, Sting without the blade inscription! See, the blade inscription was something that really bothered me in the LotR movie trilogy, because as a reader of The Hobbit I knew that Sting didn't come to Bilbo bearing that name, but that Bilbo himself chose that, so the runes on the blade saying "Yo, I'm Sting" [paraphrased] were just stupid. In this one? THERE IS NO BLADE INSCRIPTION, JUST THE WAVE DESIGN IT WILL LATER FOLLOW. So Bilbo added that later! Now it makes sense and that makes me happy!

- Radagast was less jarring than I'd expected from what I'd read and seen in the Art & Design book. Still more discworldly than I'd have imagined him, but not as disturbing as I'd feared.

- CALACIRYA SHOUTOUT! No, seriously, that was a perfect allusion in all but name.

- The Elvish (but also the Orcish) felt sort of awkward and pastede-on-yey. Not sure whether they pronounce it so awkwardly in the original, or whether they made the German voice actors repeat them and they botched it, but NO REAL PERSON ENUNCIATES LIKE THAT.

- White Council: Nobody actually takes Saruman seriously, do they? Also, how on earth is Galadriel doing that thing with her gowns, I'm not sure whether I find it beautiful or stupid.

- Some of the Rivendell design felt really over the top, and not in a good way. The houses were nice, but that "solar" (lunar?) where Elrond discovered the moon runes? That was way beyond ridiculous.

- I really watched out for the reported Fëanorian stars around Elrond's council "chamber", but I'm afraid they're rather ambiguous - they don't actually have that clearly distinctive shape. Might be any eight-pointed star, really. Oh well. I WANT TO BELIEVE.

- Dwarves saying things like "Good Heavens" or "Oh God". Um... not quite? "Sebastian" the Hedgehog. Um... no? The Trolls having names like "Bert" or "Bill" I personally already find jarring, but Tolkien at least chose Saxon-ish names for them. But Sebastian is Greek. Or Latin based on a Greek/Near Eastern place name. If you have no idea what you're doing, don't do it.

- Also, Radagast is not "an Istari". Unless Saruman means to imply that Radagast is multiple people (at least three)? Look, I see how Quenya and its tons of cases can be confusing, but the difference between singular and plural is actually pretty straightforward.

- In Goblin Town (at the latest), I wish Gandalf had said something like "DO I HAVE TO SAVE YOU ALL THE TIME? CAN YOU GUYS NOT, LIKE, STAY SAVED FOR A MOMENT?!" Seriously, it was Gandalf to the Rescue! all the time! Until it was Eagles to the Rescue, of course. It seems I'm not alone.

- Goblin Town was so absurdly over the top that I actually found it fun.

- Riddles in the Dark was perfect.

- The Aquilae Ex Machina amused me way too much. It really is like I said in that one shoddy comic back in the day, the Eagles are totally the "Sea Turtles!" joke of the Tolkienverse.²

- Some of the Big Moral Moments were laid on a bit too thickly, I think. That said, Thorin's manly hug for Bilbo was still kind of awww!-inducing.

- LOL, a production manager who worked on this film is called Arwen Munro. I bet her parents are really thrilled now. XD

There was more, but it has now slipped my mind. So I'll leave it at that, and possibly add more later.



On the whole, I liked it all right. But I do have a slight headache from the bad quality of the theatre, which is annoying. In the olden days (TM), we used to say that this or that was a film you just had to see in cinema. These days? If it didn't take so bloody long, I'd indefinitely prefer a BluRay on our home TV set.

- - -
*I actually have one, in that I have a membership card of the German Tolkien Society. They don't easily revoke that one, though, as long as you pay your membership fees and don't criminally misbehave.

²The text, in case anyone really wants to know, goes: Panel 1: Fingolfin: "But... how..." - Fingon: "Eagle." - Panel 2: Beorn: "And why did the Orcs not get you?" - Gandalf: "Eagles, my friend." - Panel 3: Elrond: "How did you escape?" - Gandalf: "Eagle." - Panel 4: Elanor: "But why did you not fall off the Eagles' backs?" - Sam: "Because we roped ourselves to them. ... with Hobbit hair OFF OUR FEET."
If you don't get the joke, you should watch Pirates of the Caribbean some time.

Comments

[oloriel.livejournal.com]

Well, I didn't find it as bad as 5 Filmfreunde did. ^^ That review actually made me feel all defensive. It wasn't that bad! And while I did find the pacing akward and the pieces badly linked, I think if you'd removed everything PJ added, you'd still have (at least!) 1 1/2 hours of film, so turning it into more than one film can be justified if you want to give the story some more scope than Schuppenlurch wegen Eigenbedarf rausschmeißen. The question is just whether it has to be 3 x 3 hours, and whether one couldn't have matched the pieces together better...

Such things just don't bother me that much, but maybe just it's not my nickpit fandom.

I think it's an obsessed linguist thing, not a fandom thing. Somewhere in Book I of ASoIaF, there's a throwaway mention of some girl named Bethany. Bethany's a place in Palestine. (Like Sebaste, btw. COINCIDENCE? ;)) How the hell would someone in Westeros end up named after a place in Palestine? Heck, when I was a kid, I was really annoyed that the evil witch in The Little Mermaid was called Ursula. Even as a kid, I didn't get why you'd name a sea-witch "little she-bear".
...
I may be the only person who finds that sort of thing really annoying. No, wait, khamura and shadowbrides also stumbled across Sebastian, so there's at least three of us! :D

So this awkwardness and using cliches somehow fitted in.

The awkwardness, yes, and I quite share your idea about how dwarf friends would make up. XD Which is why Thorin's hug, while kinda cute, felt so OOC. Noble - yeah. Willing to admit he was wrong? - Well, he does that in the book after SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER, so, apparently. But hug?
And, well. The cliches were just fine, I just don't think everything had to be spelled out like it was. Give viewers some credit, PJ, whoever manages to pay attention to a three-hour film will also manage to figure out the not all-that-subtle message. :P

I don't think it HAS to be seen in 3D, either - but I do think it has to be seen in reasonably good quality, and I'm kind of hoping that the equipment in the 3D theatres, being more recent, will perhaps be less lousy than it was where we went. :P

[chili-das-schaf.livejournal.com]

Oh, I didn't think that! They just explained the whole stitched-together-issue very well and so I saw where it came from. I also can't understand that they disliked it so much. Usually mine and their tastes in movies align pretty well.

IDK, with names I'm just not that easy to bother. I mean, in HP nearly everyone is named after what they are which is rather fun and quirky but makes no sense when you look at the biographical backgrounds of the characters. I grant authors the freedom of "sounds pretty" there. I can totally understand when in a so heavily linguistically imprinted work like Tolkien's people are bothered. I have the advantage of ignorance here ;)

Our 2D copy was, fortunately, really good and I will see it with all the fancy tech stuff for comparison.

[oloriel.livejournal.com]

Strangely, it doesn't bother me in HP, either. Perhaps because it's done consistently, so it's clear the author is just doing it for the fun of it (or for the sake of not having to find completely character-unrelated names that fit their age, family, social status etc!). So there, at most I roll my eyes at so completely over the top things like "Xenophilius Lovegood". Or at "Are you f*cking serious?" - "Yes, that too." jokes...
In ASoIaF, in contrast, Martin has actually done a good job of giving all the Westeros people Saxon-ish names, even coming up with such strokes of brilliance as "Samwell". And then there's Bethany. :P