March 14, 2013: The Hobbit

I was a bit tired when I got up this morning but not too bad.  Got up around seven and got showered but had some issues come up and I had to log in and deal with them before leaving the house.  The morning ended up, as often happens, being so busy that there was no way for me to make it into the office.  It was a crazy morning, I never had a chance to pop my head out of the office except to make another cup of coffee every forty-five minutes or so.  Much of it was spent on the phone so I just kept the office door closed much of the morning.  Francesca actually forgot that I was even there.  Dominica was surprised to find me at home when she got in from the office.

Dominica worked only a half day physically in the office but worked all afternoon from home.  She was taking a shorter week this week because of all of the work that we did over the weekend.  We are all really tired from that.  That was exhausting.

I worked a really long day today.  Starting before eight and not quitting until after seven.

The Hobbit released early to the AppleTV tonight and Dominica could not wait the five days that it takes for it to be available on BluRay.  So after a bit of discussion she bought it so that we could watch it tonight.  The kids did not want to watch it, no big surprise, so Dominica and Francesca ordered some dinner from Joe’s and then ran out to hit up a Redbox to pick up some movies for the kids.  They got back before the food arrived.

At about seven we kicked off The Hobbit on our living room movie theater.  It’s nearly a three hour movie and with a house full of kids the interruptions were fast and furious.  I opened a bottle of red dulce wine and Dominica, Francesca and I polished that off in no time.  Emily played video games on my office computer and Madeline took the kids into Dominica and my bedroom and watched movies with them in there.  Francesca lasted about halfway through The Hobbit before heading off to bed with Clara.

So far I think that this, the first of three installments of The Hobbit is better than I had anticipated based on having read the book and truly not enjoyed it but it also struck me, now seeing it with Peter Jackson’s pacing and the visual aids to put people and places together, just how much Tokien simply took what he had already written and wrote it again as The Lord of the Rings, just written better.  It really is the same story told twice.  Similar characters, similar situations, similar pacing, similar situations, similar storyline… everything.  In many cases it isn’t even that they diverge, many of the characters, even, are the same completely.

So the movie was good, but it wasn’t awesome.  I love the series but mostly because it is done so well, not because I think that Tokien’s writing deserve this amount of care and attention.  There are so many other works that I would like to see done to this scale that just are not treated as well.  It is sad.

Now we have to wait until Christmas before we can see the extended version of The Hobbit and a while after that, I think, before we can see the next film in the series.  It made for a fun evening though and did a good job of showing off our living room theater which performed really well.

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