The Hall of Fire

So I was thumbing through the children's "Hobbit [movie] activity book" at the grocery store, and on one page it said "Dwarves are very proud of their beards. The longer the beard, the more impressive the dwarf!" I don't have a problem with Thorin's beard length, but it made me l...

I am somewhat concerned by the Morgul blade plotline. It's definitely a canon break, but if they execute it well I probably won't mind too much. (I even like Osgiliath, so I'm pretty flexible!) I sort of agree on Bilbo becoming a fighter too early. But he only succeeds because he surprised the behea...

Wasn't Martinez pretty hard on the LotR movies, or am I thinking of someone else? I would say Jackson, Armitage, and everyone else have done a good job both making Thorin a character you'll root for and hinting at his flaws that will be so important in film 3. I do think they could have dialed back ...

And it's not like Voldemort is the only bad guy - Harry Potter generally has one or two lesser villains per book, and they usually play a role in the climax (haven't seen the movies though). With that said, I feel like even Lurtz was a more interesting villain than Azog. Maybe because he didn't over...

After a second viewing, I still don't like a few of the Radagast jokes, but as a whole I feel like they did his character pretty well. I can accept the Saruman "mushrooms" line if I think of it as Saruman hiding his real contempt behind petty reasons. I don't mind the burping because they ...

PJ says the barrel escape is "relatively early." Does this mean we'll be through Beorn, Mirkwood, and Thranduil/Legolas Tauriel pretty quickly? Well, I guess in movies this long, "relatively early" could be more than an hour in.

It's interesting how, on one hand, Jackson gets a lot of flak from some Tolkien fans for overdoing the action (which I agree with in certain scenes, but I think it's sometimes exaggerrated). And then on the other hand, non-fans will sometimes criticize him for "too many dwarf songs" or &qu...

Having just seen the movie a second time, I liked it a lot more. I still have some issues with it (and some are bigger than any of the problems I had with LotR when it first came out), but the story seemed to work a lot better now that I knew what changes were coming. Also, while parts of the soundt...

That's interesting. I think I'll wait to see it again before I read Rateliff's review.

Doesn't Tom Shippey like them as well with some qualifications?

There are some things they could have done differently with Frodo, but I like Wood's Frodo overall. On my rewatch of the trilogy this year, I was particularly impressed by his performance in RotK (besides "Go home, Sam"). I'm not a fan of the old Bilbo/Frodo scene in The Hobbit though - wh...

It occurred to me that the people complaining about PJ/Philippa/Fran not using Saruman's "Radagast the Bird Tamer, Radagast the Simple, Radagast the Fool" are kind of missing the point. The writers knew that line. They knew they had the rights to use it. They chose not to. Not because the...

I like Malick (though I don't know him that well), but I'm pretty sure that barrnig a super truncated story, his take on LotR would leave audiences completely confused - even readers!

But why wouldn't painting a deep, wide, rich and layered world, on top of the drama, be appealing to audiences? I would say that this is just what PJ did with LotR (jury is still out on The Hobbit) - not perfectly, but mostly quite successfully. The secondary world of the LotR movies really did cap...

And the stone giant sequence...WTF??? Peter (and everyone else involved with the writing) WHAT were you thinking?? You know, most of the time I can pretty much accept Peter Jackson's lack of subtlety and enjoy his style, but the stone giants are one place where a lighter touch would have REALLY hel...

Considering the bad jokes that made it back into the RotK EE, there's a chance we'll be seeing it yet!

But yeah, I liked the Goblin King too.

He's referring to how the Goblin King bursts through the bridge before they all fall down.

Yep, Bilbo's moment of pity was fantastic. When I said Riddles in the Dark was one of PJ's best scenes ever, I was including everything with Gollum.

Didn't Liv Tyler also think that Arwen just shouldn't fight and it actually degraded her character? I would put Osgiliath under "dubiously conceived, well-executed." The scene with the Nazgûl over the parapets (and no, Frodo is not "offering" the ring!) is visually stunning, one ...

I think they overcooked Thorin's anti-elf hostility, but I liked him overall. He had the right mix of stubborn pride and nobility. I'm going to say that I actually kinda enjoyed the Goblintown stuff in a purely hedonistic, non-Tolkienesque manner Yeah, I agree with this. I'm kind of mixed on Radagas...

Seriously though, I think a lot of dwarf character development was edited out because you can see little bits of personality for the other dwarves that match the descriptions given in writing or by the actors - Nori being a bit greedy and underhanded, Dori being "fussy" and mannerly (at le...