(no subject)

Saw The Hobbit last night. Would give it a B-. Considering the immense emotional weight that The Hobbit carries rooted deep within my soul it would have been very difficult for it to score highly, and certainly not with the additions, modifications and motley patchwork required to stretch the story across three 3-hour films. The movie is not the book, of course, and comparing the two directly, while satisfying on a nerd-OCD level, is otherwise fairly futile. But every little difference twanged upon the aforementioned emotional roots like an out-of-tune banjo player at a Bach concert, not to speak of the extremely big differences which felt more like a serrated blade drawn across the shrieking face of my childhood.

Jackson played it quite broad, and you could see the story popping rivets and straining at the seams where the first third of the Hobbit's plot was shoehorned, twisted and jammed into a standard three-act Campbellian hero's journey plotline. To put things in spoiler-free perspective, the production team changed/added/screwed up far less when they adapted Lord of the Rings, and they handled it was much more subtlety and grace. Then again, print-The Hobbit is significantly broader than print-LotR, so complaining about a lack of subtlety may be totally missing the point.