Special treat! Guest post by my girlfriend.
I have never read a J.R.R. Tolkien book and have never seen a movie other than the past movie trailers. So I come in on the first one, the first book - The Hobbit. It's a great movie and I love the way that Peter Jackson took the style from Lucas and presented the first in the series...as the last. WORKS FOR ME! Now I will understand the old stuff that shows every other season on popular cable channels.
I remember as a child in 1977 my father was head-over-heels into this Hobbit crap. He spoke of it, read the books and we had this extremely fantasy driven Tolkien calendar that hung in our kitchen. No one paged forward to the next month as the spell would be broken. After the year was up, he took it down and cut the images off to keep if he chose to frame later. Not sure where they went but they were truly a piece of work even with a slight glaze of kitchen Chinese/Italian excrement coating them.
Also that year, my father handed me a book in the Tolkien series and said with much gusto, "Here you go. I know that you are going to love this book. It is excellent. You may have a hard time with it now but come to me and I will help you with it. You are going to love it, I did." It was The Simarillion and I was 7...in the second grade. The year before I had learned to read with Dick and Jane Books and was, at this time really getting into the Little Toot and Curious George series'. So I took the book, shoved it into my bookcase and went off to climb a tree or play in the creek.
So yes, watching The Hobbit last night brought up the total disinterest that I had over the books that were shoved in my face as a child. The ones I still have not read. But once it started, I was hooked. The HD threw me into fantasy overload and I bet it was ten times better on the screen. But alas, we redboxed it.
The movie was vivid and dramatic it told of a fantasy land that I wish I could see. I know parts were shot on location. But where? I want to know now and will go to research the background on it. And there is more. This story ended with another beginning and another. It looks like Jackson has taken The Hobbit and stretched it into a mini series of three! Come on special effects! They will get better and you know this guy will use power, influence and $ to get it right.
I guess I have taken my movie review down a different path. I like the knowledge and inter-workings of a movie. After all, my father was a director and producer and this is what he showed me as a child. Like a surgeon, he carefully opened up the skull and showed the brain to me - how it worked. That's what I like. That's what I want to know. The entire movie shows me that Peter Jackson really loved the series as well and like my father could never have done, showed us his version of a much loved series of books.
