Booze Revooze: THE HOBBIT: An Unexpected Journey

From the juiced-box (not so much) and the soundtrack: Neil Finn – Song of the Lonely Mountain (extended version)

[Press 'Play' for The Hobbit version of South Park's Lemmiwinks' Song]

Can you believe it? The Unexpected Journey started here 2 full days before the US when The Hobbit strolled into Yeaman first. Don’t believe me–believe the random cell phone shots i took.

Ramblings: A Hard Hobbit To Break

Final Proof: 2½ Shots and/or 5 Shots

[us poor slobs]

and / or

[for the cool geeks]

You know how you get drunk with Jacob and Wilhem Grimm, the Grimm Bros.? They start off all serious and dark and sit on the corner of the booth and they don’t say much but then they start pounding that mead and really quickly they start singing off key these songs from their homeland that aren’t as cute as they think they are and then they start talking together super quickly about all their wicked fairy tales but the problem is that it’s all talk. They just sit there babbling about the story and it’s kind of a let down because you feel like they’re giving you spoilers even if they’re the ones that wrote the stories but it’s a hell of a lot better to read the stories than hear these over excited drunks telling you what happened. At the end you kinda wished they’d just shut up and showed you the story because when the tale comes second-hand, you feel used. That’s exactly how The Hobbit makes you feel.

“Hey little boy, you want some candy?”

Just my luck, i wanna hurry up and post this to score a scoop and i find i have to write two reviews. The first one is for us poor slobs who aren’t fans of Tolkien, never read The Hobbit, and prefer the theatrical versions of the Lord of the Rings Trilogy to the snooze-fest of the Director’s Cut (which wasn’t even cut). The second review is for the LotR geeks who could hack into my computer at the drop of a pointy wizard hat at a cosplay convention.

Us Poor Slobs:
The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey was pretty fucking expectable, if you ask me. i’m told by people who tell the difference that The Hobbit is a children’s reader compared to the other books of the Lord of the Rings Trilogy and Peter Jackson came out with a children’s film here. Think Madagascar in Middle Earth. Think Witch King and the Chocolate Factory. The Wizard of Oz-giliath. It’s so simple, it’s kind of annoying, like the way Bilbo talks as though he’s the host of a kiddy program on Sunday mornings.

Super Cool Geeks:
The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey was great. It follows the book closely and Peter Jackson did a marvelous job capturing the joyful innocence that permeates the Tolkien classic.

Cocktail Weenies at the Troll Party

Us Poor Slobs:
And the kiddy movie isn’t even a problem for me, hell, there are some great fucking kiddy movies, but this one is too dialog heavy to take a kid to because all we get is story telling and not story except suddenly 1 or 2 minutes of soft core violence that’s too hard for kids anyway. It seems every character we meet has to relate an anecdote of something that happened to him and i ended up feeling like a guy in the checkout line waiting for the talkative housewife in front of me to stop blabbing to the curious cashier so i could get a move on to something more interesting than the not so super market.

Super Cool Geeks:
The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey rocked. The adventures of lovable dwarfs and Bilbo Baggins come to life through their words, and as their tales unfold we become enveloped in their lives so that it feels like we are there, sitting beside them, listening to them recount their stories just for us.

“They cut the power because we didn’t pay our electric bill.”

Us Poor Slobs:
Maybe the problem is i saw this in 2D, but that can’t be it either because the scenery was great and the special effects were amazing. i couldn’t tell where reality ended and the movie began as far as the landscapes, and the Middle Earth cityscapes looked so cool i wanted to visit them for reals. These are beautiful paintings, artistic even, but the problem is we want to see some movement in them. There is the charm of the previous movies here, but not the magic.

Super Cool Geeks:
The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey was brilliant. Peter Jackson creates special effects that lift the genre out of Middle Earth and carry it to heaven. The worst part of the movie is the end because when the credits roll you remember you don’t live in the world you’ve been a part of for the last 2 hours.

“That’ll sure put some magic in the old wand.”

Us Poor Slobs:
You know how everyone was wondering if Jackson could make 3 movies from 1 kids book, when the LotR was 3 movies from 3 fat books? Well, instead of making one, single great fucking classic genius crowning glory film that people would be talking about for centuries, he’s gonna make 3 ‘meh’ movies.

Super Cool Geeks:
The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey was awesome. We were afraid of setting our expectations too high, when now we realize we could never have set them high enough.

Buzz Kills (Watch Out for Spoilers)

Sex:0 Shots

Of the 36 main characters listed on the IMDB page, only 1 is a woman.

Cate Blanchett

Cate Blanchett Bar None Wallpaper – Click on the Shot for a Wallpaper

Though the drawers are pretty empty for this post, i do have some shots of Cate stuffed in them at the bottom down there.

Silken Butterflies

Uncredited in the movie but credited, thank God, on IMDB is the super lovely Renee Cataldo. You wanna know which Goblin she was? The hot one.

A Smoke

Drink: 1 Shot

With all the not an awful lot of anything going on in The Hobbit, there was also not an awful lot of drinking. The beginning had some drunken dwarfs but if you’ve ever been to Florida for spring break, this won’t be anything you haven’t seen before.

Drinking [his] wine when the dwarfs crash Bilbo’s place.

Mr Gandalf, a drop of wine as you requested. With a fruity bouquet.

Dwarf handing Gandalf a doll’s tea set cup of red wine

Dwarfs chugging and spilling beer and burping

A Smoke

Rock & Roll: 0 Shots

You know you’re in trouble when the most exciting part of the movie is the preview for Star Trek Into Darkness that came on before the movie. OK, i’m being overly a dickhead but it’s because i missed out on the LotR movies when they came out and saw them on my tablet and thought the looked really cool and so i was hoping i could make up for it with The Hobbit and i couldn’t.

Yes, there were some action scenes and some of them weren’t too bad but there were too few and they were too predictable. i can’t fault them for being too short but i can fault them for being too far apart.

Oh, there was one funny thing and that was the wizard Radagast who they show getting high to chill out and make a reference to his doing too much ‘shrooms.

That’s it for the rock. Not for the music, though. Oh that it were. Prepare your mind for the blowing it’ll get when it witnesses not 1 but 2 musical numbers from the dwarfs and then another one from the fucking goblins. Is there not enough suffering in the world already?

Boring Technical Crap

Written by:

J.R.R. Tolkien – (novel “The Hobbit”)
Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens, Peter Jackson & Guillermo del Toro – (screenplay)

Directed by: Peter Jackson

Starring

Cate Blanchett – Galadriel
Renee Cataldo – Goblin
Ian McKellen – Gandalf
Martin Freeman – Bilbo
Richard Armitage – Thorin
Hugo Weaving – Elrond
Christopher Lee – Saruman
Andy Serkis – Gollum
Sylvester McCoy – Radagast

Bottom Line

Fans will always be fans and there’s nothing that Jackson can do to disappoint them. He could’ve made fucking Battlefield Middle Earth and everyone would be talking about his genius. Those of us outside the ring, though, will find the movie a little slow, unevenly paced and too soft for adults and too harsh for kids. Fans will think that too, but they won’t admit it.

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You could also check out the fucked up reviews by some guy named Saint Pauly over at WTF: Watch The Film