"...hobbit-hole, and that means comfort." Stop there, Peter.

Went to to see the Hobbit.  At the very moment it started, the lights came on, and strobe lights started flashing and it dawned on all of us that it was a fire alarm.  So it took a little time for everyone to realize that we should get up and leave.

Interesting, you'd think with the events of the last week, people might have been scrambling for the exits...

Anyway, in a very leisurely and haphazard way, we all left out the back exits.  By then, I was fairly convinced that it was probably a bomb threat.  (After 9/11 the Mt. View mall had two or three threats...)  By the time we circled to the front they were letting us back in with the words "False Alarm."

Did an employee see an umbrella and think "Gun!"  ?

Would love to know what that was all about.


Anyway, the movie soon started.

So....bunny sleigh.  Really?  (Linda loved the Thumper moment...)

The orcs in the mountain (shouldn't they be goblins still?) were how I had always visualized them, though the "white" orcs were a stretch again.

The scene in the beginning did go long, but for true LOTR's fan that was just right and proper, cause that's how Tolkien starts all his books.

I could do without some of the "low" humor, though it fit better here than in LOTR's.

Rivendell will be inspiration for decades of Renaissance Fairs.  Damn hippies.

I enjoyed it immensely, probably more than I did Fellowship, which at the time was a bit of a headturner to me because I had just reread the books and had a hard time just taking it in.

This time I knew more or less what I was getting into.

What kind of tickled me was how much I got right in FREEDY FILKINS, without having read the book in 40 years.  There were little bits and pieces that showed up parallel that I didn't think I had remembered, but obviously my subconscious had.

This is a world at 14 years old that I would have gladly lived in, and today's 14 year olds in an odd way have a chance to do almost that...


My main problem with these movies is the unfortunate need to embellish, when it isn't necessary.

There was a perfect example of that at the very beginning.

Here's the famous start of the Hobbit book:

"In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.  Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort."

So the movie repeats that word for word until the last word.  (In my head I was repeating it as they said it.)

So the ending in the movie isn't the single word "comfort" but a bunch of other extra and unnecessary additions -- all of which added up to "comfort."

So it bothered me.  Comfort is a perfectly good word.  Succinct and to the point.  Actually, the right word.

I sure these movies would be just as good if not better if they didn't try so hard to ramp it up all the time.