The Fellowship of The Hobbit

I remember the first time I read The Hobbit I was thrilled to discover that there was even more of the story than I'd heard numerous times on the book-on-tape version I had. I had a lot of trouble getting to sleep as a child (and as an adult) and I'd listen to my The Hobbit cassette while trying to get to sleep. And in the car on long drives. And sometimes just because I was bored. 

So eventually I borrowed a copy of the book from the library and suddenly I realised that my cassette tape had left bits out. There were new bits I hadn't heard before and I felt both betrayed (my cassette tape was wrong) and excited.

But mostly I was disappointed because those new (to me) bits of The Hobbit? They... kind of sucked. I found myself skimming over them to get back to the actual story because elves are boring.

So I think part of my enduring love of The Hobbit (compared with The Lord of The Rings which I don't care for at all) may be partly an enduring love of a clearly and soothingly voiced abridged version. I haven't read it in a while and I am pretty sure that I still like the book a lot.

This afternoon my husband and I went to see The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. It's part one of a three film epic and I'm disappointed because I still think The Hobbit is a story which is improved by removing things, rather than adding them. 

As Leonard Nimoy says: perfection is achieved not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. (Actually Antoine de Saint-Exupery might have said it, but I can only hear it in Leonard Nimoy's voice). The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey could have had quite a lot of stuff taken away.

I met a guy at a meetup event once who was studying filmmaking and so we got to talking about movies when discussing films that I thought were great I often commented on the pacing. He laughed (but in kind of a delighted way, I think) and told me that he'd only ever really talked about the pacing of movies with his fellow students. I don't know, I think that if you can watch a movie without being bored or confused then someone in editing has done a pretty good job. Pacing killed The Hobbit for me, I was bored through most of it. So that was pretty disappointing. I really enjoyed my favourite scenes from the book ("Good Morning!" and the riddle scene) but... pretty much everything was too long and it felt like Jackson was just showing off for the sake of it. Huge fancy scenes devoted to something that could have been a quick cut-away during dialogue, fight scenes that just went on for way too long. Ugh, oh well.

I have pretty high hopes for an amateur re-cut 120min version of all three films once they're all out on DVD though. That could be really amazing. 

Suresh's comment was that he wasn't sure whether the film was LotR: Episode 1 or LotR Fan Fiction. What do you think?