Barbie shows up the critics who claim she is a bad role model who stereotypes women as dumb and unfit for employment in male-dominated fields by beginning her 2012 presidential campaign immediately following the election. I come in this store at least once every two weeks and I never saw this display until [yesterday], November 29. Today is 15 days from then, I am aware. I haven’t even had a chance to turn my last calendar page yet, with all the unsatisfying futile time-eating rubbish about. I can’t wait to see what month it is.
Vote for Barbie(R) If corporations are people, registered trademarks might as well be, and they might as well run for president.
Also, I heard there was a movie about hobbits being made. Hobbits are regular people who just happen to be short and have a funny name and are skilled at having books about them get turned into expensive films. I thought I had from last April or the year before some big dumb thing written about from it but it turns out to only be a paragraph. I probably thought pah I will finish this later when I have more time. It was the “pah” which doomed the idea, I suspect.
Searching my hard drive for hobbit-related imagery I only pulled up “Hobbit Mario,” a pointless and effort lacking super mario bros. edit in the bland tradition that some gork had put on the internet at some point, so hopefully we can have this entry resolved with a minimal amount of visual distraction.
Back now in April or a year before I inadvertently became aware of a hobbit film, I went through various information about it, regarding changes to the script and actors reprising their roles from the Lord of the Rings series. I momentarily thought “oh that’s neat that Christopher Lee changed his mind about portraying Saruman in the The Hobbit movie,” for an earlier report had suggested he didn’t want to get on an airplane and go back to New Zealand at his age. And then I remembered that he isn’t actually in the The Hobbit story at all. And then I saw that Frodo and Legolas, who also weren’t supposed to be present, had signed on to appear, and it started to remind me of the Star Wars pre-sequels, which were so incapable of developing interesting characters or situations that every scene or so hey look it’s Jabby the Hutt or boy howdy it’s Chewbaccy! They have nothing to do with the story, but the story isn’t any good anyhow so look gee it’s R2D2! Forgive this film’s faults by remembering better movies this director has directed! Because you’ll pay to see it however awful it is!
It already, as of now in April when I wrote this has a 500 million dollar budget; higher than the gross of all but the most successful movies in history. This thing would have to take in half a billion dollars of revenoop even to justify its existence, never-mind make a profit.
I tried to figure out who had been cast as Bowman, the bard, who is brought into the story toward the end moments before suddenly doing something important. As long as we’re changing stuff up, could we bring Bardy in sooner so his significance makes more sense? No I think they’re going to cut him out altogether and have Legolas take his place. It’s not enough that he gets to take the place of the multiple archers who kill the evil elephant in Return of the King and by the way also die in the process? He gets to [do something], too?
I understand wanting to compensate for the lack of characterization in the book, among characters that are allowed to live, anyway. Mr. Tolkein, the writer, liked nothing better than to introduce a villain and kill him in the same chapter. In The Hobbit he actually would kill the villain and THEN tell us who it was. By the way that Goblin who just got slain abruptly after appearing was the great king of all west goblins and was cousin to the other king goblin I killed earlier and has 7 CMA awards and crochets in his spare time. Well now he’s dead. Good work.
As for non-villains, JR introduces 11, I think, dwarves at the start, and then he realizes that he can only think of five distinct dwarf personalities. Thorin, the head dwarf who is obsessed with being a dwarf, Ballin, the more sensible dwarf, Bomburo, who is fat and resents the other dwarves for resenting his fatness,
Feely and Key Lee who are small and function as one character, and all the rest, essentially. Dwarves are short anyway, but these two are smaller than most dwarves but still bigger than hobbits, I surmise. Even pairing them up doesn’t alleviate the clear superfluousness of half the cast because that still leaves three pairs that have no purpose. Two of them start the story with tinder-boxes, which are used for starting fires, but they LOSE their tinder boxes and so become generic “this guy and that guy.”
On the other ehh, this mere jrr token acknowledgement gives more personality to the rabble than a generic label of “the crew” or “the others” would. Maybe they are supposed to be unimportant, but they’re still PEOPLE, goshgrabbim. I think my point is that instead of adding more people we should do more with the people we already have.
Also, this is to be TWO movies? Hobbit had the largest print and sparsest pages of the series, so how does it get two movies? How much of the running time will be the dreary chant-songs that the book occupies chapters worth of space with? How much extra, unnecessary screen time will Gollum get? How much of it will be the gang stopping and feasting for a month every time they meet someone Gandalf knows?
And eat it too, I suppose!
Alright, I see. I didn’t post it because it was stupid. Fortunately, I regularly post stupid things; I merely try not to. I expect to see the film this weekend with family members because I realized that’s the only use I am as company: doing things that don’t require any personal interaction or input. Even if a decent amount of people hypothetically had shown up at my famous art show I wouldn’t have much to say to them apart from “hey I am the person who made that over there.” Thankfully, I can say that in my life time I have made something.
and this wasn’t worth ten minutes! MY ten minutes; I realize you hacked and distributed this in 7. And now I’ve contemplated my response to this imagery for 20 minutes. This will make great mandatory extra deleted scene footage for the dvd release. In fact I should delete it right now.
This imagery was worked into the background on a website where I attempted to look up showing times, with the left on one side and right on the other. Which of these prominent figures is The HoBBIT? Which of them is supposed to be relevant for more than 20% of the story? Which of them is supposed to be in it at all? I get the impression the filmmakers wished they had been making a different film. Or the advertisers wished the filmmakers had wished that.
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I am not quite back in control yet; I nearly had something for Friday but could not bring it into a functionally stupid phase
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A Dragon out for a day of relaxation sez:
Two movies nothing, it’s being split into three. Though their justification is that the films will contain more extra scenes to tie it in with the LOTR proper (and generally actually showing stuff that was only alluded to in the book itself).
I thought it was a bit bloated overall, but still enjoyed it. Has that same solid Middle Earth feel to it. But then I remember I’ve read none of the books and am basically a fraud.
Also, mind that 48FPS nonsense. It can make for a strange sort of day.
Rororivis sez:
Here’s how strange I am: I tried to read The Hobbit twice in the 1990s and finished it neither time, and only had the interest to do so several years after the subsequent decade’s middle-earth-themed movies were made. I only got to reading the books those were based on last year, I believe.
Mr. Tolkien also wrote other stories about middle earth so I wonder how much of the extra content is based on those and how much is “this movie really needs more Beorn.”
Additionally, after several hours of pondering I am still unclear as to the significance of 48 frames per second. I assure you my emulators run NTSC mode at full speed.
A Dragon out for a day of relaxation sez:
Apparently the movie is just based on The Hobbit, LOTR, and whatever came with those two directly, since Jackson and co. don’t have the rights to adapt anything out of Tolkien’s other Middle Earthian properties.
Copyright is a strange, strange world all its own sometimes.
Rororivis sez:
Even with $500 million and all the union-breaking they couldn’t afford another book? I suppose those all got more expensive after the first round of movies. Or maybe the owners just don’t want to sell them. I’ve already read too much related material without finding that out.
I should see about making a film adaptation of copyright. Nobody owns that, I hope.
PurpleSpace sez:
I would vote for a lighthouse, but not those stripy lighthouses as they are silly.
I recall that most of the dwarves that didn’t get any characterization died in the book, so it all worked out in the end!