Annie, Bernadette, and Bilbo

I went to see The Hobbit with my childhood neighbors and awesomesauce friends Annie and Bernedette last weekend. Super duper exciting. 

 

As kids they lived up the street from me and we were all home schooled, so a serious majority of our childhood was spent playing outside in some form of dress-up or another. They owned a big-old-records-right-to-a-vhs-tape-video-camera and that thing was more precious to us than the box of old skirts we wore in every conceivable fashion. We spent months on end filming our own version of LOTR. And yes, yes it was every bit as amazing as you'd imagine. Between the three of us we have read the Tolkein's books pushing a dozen times, but this is the first film we've been able to all go see in theaters together. So it was wonderful: the chatting, checking up, window shopping, and finally movie watching. (Although our low-battery-phone-photo-taking skills are less wonderful).

It's balck and white because we were all funky pink/grey

Hobbit: Unexpected Journey is big and beautiful and quite well done. There is still as part of me that thinks The Hobbit would fit better into one single long film better than three still really long films. But who knows, maybe parts 2 or 3 will surprise me.  Although it is honestly not my favorite of the Lord of the Rings films, The Hobbit is nowhere near as bad as the horribleness that was Phantom Menace, Clone Wars, and barph-gag-too-awful-to-remember-the-name-of-other-film. But anywho, back to Middle Earth. Besides the fact I think The Hobbit does not lend itself as well to film-version-ing, my main complaint would just be the brown wizard, Radagast: the whole bird-poop-on-the-face-make-up should have gone the way of the stabbed-Frodo-green-puss-face-make-up and been scrapped when someone looked at what they just filmed and noticed that bird-poop-on-the-face is distractingly disgusting. But on a positive note: I liked the dwarfs, and I loved the dwarfs singing. The casting for Bilbo is spot on, the game-o'-riddles scene is perfect, and I was also tickled that they included the "Out of the frying pan into the fire" line. All in all I liked it and there is a good chance I'll go see it again (anyone up for 3-D version?)

Far over the Misty Mountains cold

To Dungeons deep and caverns old

We must away ere break of day

To seek the pale enchanted gold

We must away ere break of day