Hobbit Redux

OK, This is going to be a long one so sit down and grab a drink.  I have been meaning to write this one for a while.  On December 14th, me and several of my lab mates all went to the Rave IMAX theater over in Hoover to catch the first of the Hobbit trilogy (gods it pains me to write that).  As I stated before I was a little worried about this movie and I would love to say that all of my worries were unfounded and that I loved the movie...but I can't.

As I have said, I have read, reread, and loved 'the Hobbit' since I was hobbit-sized.  I understand the problems with making it into a movie, really I do.  As mentioned earlier, the book was originally a bed time story Tolkien read to his children when they were young.  The dangers were easily overcome, the humor was broad and the only thing you had to worry about with adventures is them making one late for dinner.  It is, for the most part, a travelogue of Bilbo's journey.  In fact, the book is subtitled "There and Back Again".   Unfortunately this type of story does not lend itself well to grand spectacle trilogies.

The movie decides to cover the first half of the book (Hello movie 3 that consists of a 3 hour Battle of Five Armies) and starts off in the "future" with Ian Holm's Bilbo talking to Frodo on the day of the Great Party from Fellowship of the Rings (FotR).  Bilbo explains the history of Erebor and the coming of the dragon, Smaug.  The movie then moves into the familiar opening from the book with the set up for the "Unexpected Party".  The movie ends with the party being dropped off at the Carrock by the Eagles of the Misty Mountains after their flight from the wargs and goblins from "Out of the Frying Pan".

Everyone knows that if you are going to cover that area of the book their are certain...high points, that you simply MUST cover to call yourself the Hobbit.  They are:

1. The Unexpected Party of dwarves that drop in unannounced and disrupt Bilbo's life
2. The Trolls and the parties rescue by Gandalf with the discovery of Orcrist, Glamdring and Sting
3. The parties arrival in Rivendell, with Elrond decyphering the map of the Lonely Mountain
4. The capture in the mountains by the Great Goblin
5. Bilbo's finding of his "Magic Invisibility Ring" and riddle contest with Gollum
6. The parties capture in the fir trees by goblins and wargs and their escape with the help of the giant eagles.

Peter Jackson hits every single one of these highpoints...and then screws up everything else.  I hate to be one of "those guys" that always talk about how the book handled things and how the movie messed it up, but given Jackson's track record of staying at least CLOSE to the imagery the author outlined I feel the radical changes he brought to the story really warrant the discussion.

First problem

In the book, part of the humor of the dwarves not wanting Bilbo along because he is inexperienced, is that THEY are inexperienced.  The book quickly point out that the only dwarves who survived the arrival of Smaug were children out playing in the field or older dwarves were away on business and that the survivors have spent their lives working as blacksmiths or coal miners and now want to use their limited wealth to "reclaim" the traditional family home...but they have no idea what they are doing.  You can see it all through the book.  When they start discussing their plans for how they are going to deal with Smaug it comes down to 'we will get to the mountain and then figure something out'.  There IS no big plan for how to do this.  The dwarves send Bilbo to the troll fire because they feel anything is better than being wet and cold..even capture by trolls.  They blunder and they bluster but they are quite honestly, just as new to this whole thing as Bilbo. The whole reason they had gone to Gandalf was because they did not know what they were doing.  Yes, Thorin is a warrior, but it is never mentioned in the main body of the book.  I had read the book at least 10-15 times before I realized that Oakenshield was not Thorin's last name.  It is in one of the appendices where Tolkien spells out how he "earned" that name not in the main body of the book.  He is introduced as "Thorin Oakenshield".  If a man has a first name like Thorin, would you really be surprised that Oakenshield was his last name?  Really?  Over the course of the book Bilbo changes and becomes the experienced leader of the group, the dwarves for the most part never change.  They have grown old working as common laborers and are too set in their ways to realize they are making mistakes.

In Jackson's movie, the dwarves are all supremely skillful warriors and have every right to be upset to be saddled with a no account like Bilbo.  Jackson makes it perfectly clear they are all excellent warriors by spending 15 minutes of screen time going through that appendix I mentioned showing the battle where Thorin earned his name.  It is a gory scene full of blood, mayhem and mutilation.

This is actually a recurring problem through out the movie.  In an effort to appeal to as wide of an audience as possible, Jackson has appealed to none.  The movie is too violent for younger kids, to silly for adults.  Maybe I am wrong.  I probably am.  Of the people that I saw the movie with, 3 had never read the book, 1 had just finished it and 1 had read it a while back.  All of them loved it.  I guess I was just expecting a movie about the book.

Second problem

The constant "reminders" that there is a whole LotR trilogy out there.  The bit where Ian Holm is talking to Frodo in the beginning was nice, and it should have been enough.  Instead, we are treated to Saruman and Galadriel joining Elrond in Rivendell, mentions of Sauron, Bree and several other people and places...and none of them are in the source material.  They are all purely there to set up things in LotR.

Third problem

Ego.  Pure and Simple.  Radagast (shiver) the Brown, the stone giant "Transformers" having a fight in the mountains, the darkening of the story, the addition of Azog "The Defiler" and of course the running time, all point to a Jackson who has let his ego get away from him.  Honestly I see a lot of similarities between this and the the other prequels we have all had to endure - Lucas' Star Wars prequels.

Pros:

1. The cast was excellent.  Ian McKellen and Martin Freeman were perfect as Gandalf and Bilbo.  The dwarves, the with exception of Thorin and Fili and Kili were pretty much cardboard cutouts, but that had a lot more to do with the script than with the actors playing the parts.  Even in the books there was not much to differentiate the different dwarves in the party..other than Bombur being fat.  The movie has the same problem.  There are 13 dwarves to force the need for a "Lucky Number".  If their were fewer dwarves we could have actually had some character development from them..but then they would not need Bilbo.
2. The special effects were stellar.  Whether it is the hall of the Great Goblin, Rivendell, or the first encounter with Gollum, the effects were pretty seamless.
3. I really enjoyed the "History Lesson" about Erebor.  The book leaves it up to the song of the dwarves to tell you of their home, Bilbo's lesson made it a little easier to see.  However, rather than making the coming of the dragon about the toys and gold, Jackson decided to make it about the dwarves somehow being wicked which did not sit well.  That and he had a LOT more dwarves escape.

Cons:

1. Everything else.  No Really.

Couple of other things to mention

As I said we saw it in IMAX in Hoover.  I highly recommend seeing at least one big budget Hollywood movie in this format.  The huge screen just sucks you right in.  That is not to say it was without problem.  The main issue I had with the whole setup is the sound.  I do not know if the movie itself is loud or if the movie theater just had their amplifiers turned to 11, but I am lucky I did not suffer permanent hearing loss in there.  Our sound engineer mentioned after the movie that we were hitting 90-100 dB pretty consistently.  

Finally as a bonus for paying to see the movie in IMAX we were treated to the first 9 minutes of "Into Darkness", the second Star Trek movie from J.J.Abrams.  I thought the movie looked like a lot of fun.  I have already thought of ways to make it another "research outing" for the lab.  I still don't know who Benedict Cumberbatch is playing - though everyone else seems to think it is obviously Khan.  I am leaning that way but the shots of him in a Star Fleet uni just makes me pause.

Finally Healthy-ish

Wow.  Did not think I was ever going to get over that bout of the flu.

I get a flu shot every year.  I have done it for the past 15+ years, September rolls around and I start thinking about flu shots.  If Halloween hits and I have not gotten one yet, I go to the doc-in-the-box and sit down for 5 minutes and let them poke me with needles.

A lot of people tell me this is crazy.  They point out they THEY have never gotten a flu shot and THEY have never gotten sick..so I should be fine without one as well.  Talk about messing up cause and effect.  Just because THEY haven't caught the flu does not mean I will not catch the flu.  Come on, I am smarter than that.

Anyway, I got the flu shot back around Halloween same as always and figured all was good....until the trip back from the U.S.S. Alabama.  Kevin was driving back that Sunday and my throat was sore. Woke up Monday to aches and pains, figured they were from sleeping on a 70 year old battleship so I popped a couple of ibuprofen and went to work.  When I came home from work I still felt like crap so Paula insisted I hit the Doc-in-the-box again.  Went down, they did the cotton swab up the nose test and yep, the flu.

I mentioned I had gotten the flu shot and was told that this year the flu that hit was a different strain than the one in the flu shot, so the flu shot was a waste....and yet I did not get my money back.

They ordered me home and here I have been since then.  I had already planned to take a couple of weeks off from work - the school closed all offices between Christmas and New Years' anyway, so it had just cost me 3-4 days of leave, but instead of resting and getting some much needed housework done I have spent the last 10-12 days lying in bed feeling like crap.  All of that broke yesterday.  Actually woke up and I could breathe which was a great feeling.  I still have a very bad cough and my nose is a little more clogged than I would like but considering how I have felt I will take it.

About my plans.  I plan to post several articles I have thought of over the next couple of days.  Originally I had thought to predate them so they showed up as having been written during my illness, but I don't really see the point in that.  I wrote them now, I am the only one reading this and it is not like I will forget I was sick..I just reminded myself.

Where have I been

Yeah I know, the blog is barely a week old and I am already failing to post as often as I had promised myself I would do.

It has been a busy week so I have plenty of stuff to put up here and talk about - last Friday we went and saw the Hobbit and on Saturday the scouts camped out on the U.S.S. Alabama down in Mobile.  Both are posts just waiting to happen.  So what is stopping me?  Well following the trip down to Mobile I was diagnosed with the flu and I have been coughing up a lung for the last 4 days.

I promise to post a ton once this illness is over but for now, half of what I write will be gibberish.

The Hobbit

An event I have been waiting for for the last few years is fast approaching.  This coming Friday is the release date for "The Hobbit".  I, and the rest of my lab, have planned an outing to see it at a local IMAX movie theater.  We are all on "Hobbit Lock Down" avoiding as many of the sneak peaks as we can before actually seeing the movie.

How we are actually seeing the movie is kind of a funny joke.  We have set up a task assigned to everyone in the lab to "Research high frame rate 3-D projection on large format screens".  Sounds technical and almost plausible until you explain that you are seeing the Hobbit in 3-D IMAX.  I would love to take credit for talking my boss into going with us, but honestly it was simply a matter of asking him.  He laughed and thought it was an incredible idea, so there we are.

My first experience with J.R.R. Tolkien's children's bedtime story is a dim memory of my father reading the book to me before going to bed as a child.  Since dad was in the Navy, getting him home long enough to read anything to me was a treat, and this book definitely stood out.  Anyway after several starts and stops I am reading the book to my son as a bed time story and he loves it almost as much as I do.  We lay down in bed, and I begin to read from my Kindle edition.  I don't really have a set number of pages or time that I read to him, I read until I get tired of reading aloud.  I guess it should make me happy that the last two books I read to him are now his "favorite" books of all time.  Guess it also helps to pick really good books to read to him.

As far as movie versions go, shortly after my dad read it to me, Rankin and Bass released a cartoon version of the Hobbit that was actually VERY good.  To this day when I think of Bilbo or read the books I think of the Rankin and Bass versions.  We just don't mention their follow-up of the Return of the King (I mean how can you hope to jump past Fellowship and Two Towers).  It took Peter Jackson coming along to give us a good version of Lord of the Rings (LotR) and so when he announced he was doing a movie based on the Hobbit I was very excited...for about 2 weeks.

Then I started thinking how the books are so dissimilar.  It was really brought into relief by listening to a great podcast series by Dr. Corey Olsen at Washington University.  Dr. Olsen talked about how the Hobbit was written as a bedtime story for kids, while LotR was written when Tolkien's kids were much older.  Thematically they are extremely different.  The Hobbit is light and jokey while LotR is dark and dangerous.  Dr. Olsen even pointed out the strange visualization Peter Jackson used to show how things looked to Frodo when he put on the "One Ring".  The problem is Bilbo wears the ring for about half of the Hobbit and so doing something like those visuals just will not work.

Then came the news that Jackson was making not one Hobbit movie but THREE.  Here is a book with less of a story than any of the LotR books and yet he is taking three times as long to tell it.  I might have seen two, you break them at Beorn's before they go into Mirkwood forest and everything is good and people can get behind it.  Now it sounds like the last movie is going to be nothing more than a long drawn out Battle of Five Armies and voyage home.  Not sure how that is going to play.

Introductions

OK.  Who am I, what do I do, and why is any of this important?

Who I am?
This is probably the easiest.  I am David Brown.  But of course it is never that easy of a question is it?  I am a husband, a father, a middle aged college student (more on that later), a fan of college sports, and at least for the last few elections I have been a Democrat in a state of Republicans.

Starting at the top, I am extremely happily married to my wife Paula.  She drives me up a wall at times, we fight and we yell, but in the end she is the most supportive person I have ever met.  As for the father, well I have probably the worlds most perfect son, Xander.  Yes, I know everyone feels that way about their child, and I am not saying that my son is perfect...but he is close enough.  He is equal parts Paula and I and is one of the more loving children I have been around.

As far as the student thing goes, back in 2007 I decided to go back to school to pursue my M.B.A.  I studied and took the GMAT exam and started attending classes at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (U.A.B.).  I finished that degree in 2010 and 6 months later I was crazy enough to actually start a Ph.D. program also at U.A.B, this time in Engineering.  I am about halfway through with the coursework part of that degree, but I am still trying to figure out what my research is going to cover.  That is the thing some people just don't understand about Ph.D. programs.  In the 3-4 years you are actually studying the course work your idea for your dissertation changes about half a dozen times as different things become interesting.

College Sports?  That's easy enough.  I finished my bachelor's degree at Ohio State and grew to love their sports teams.  My folks had brought me up as Alabama Crimson Tide fans, but something about Ohio State just won me over so in a state where everyone seems to be "Roll Tide" or "War Eagle", I am a "Go Bucks!"

The Democrat thing?  Not really anything too interesting there.  I felt the Democrat was a better candidate than the Republican.  I don't tend to vote along party lines because I don't want someone else to make up my own mind on who the best candidate for me is.  I was up visiting my parents shortly after the election and they both were talking about a judge (who they liked) who had lost her seat in the last election.  They felt it was a shame because the judge was a "good judge".  The judge was a Democrat and the Republican candidate had won.  I asked if they had voted for the judge and they both said no, they had voted straight Republican party.  Neither one of them saw the humor in that.

What do I do?
Well I have spent the last 20 years working in one form or another in the computer industry.  The majority of the time I have worked as the I.T. Director for some small law firms here in Alabama.  Trust me, the job title makes it much more appealing than it actually was.  I mean can you really call yourself a Director if you do not have staff?  I was basically responsible for everything to do with the computer and phone systems.  That changed about the time I started the Ph.D. program last year.

I was working for a firm here in town and they decided to outsource the I.T. responsibilities. I had cleared the school work with them before starting but they decided they did not like it anyway and so I was looking for work.  Luckily my adviser for my program had an opening for a programmer/analyst in a computer lab at U.A.B. and he offered me the position.  I am not truly a programmer, true to my roots I am much more of a jack of all trades/project manager.  The group I work with is great and I am learning a ton - probably more than I learn in the classes I am taking.  The pay is not the best, but a huge perk for me is free tuition so it works out well in the end.   I will write more about the lab I work in, trust me.

Why is this important?
It isn't.  As I mentioned in the last posting, this is for me to get my thoughts out of my head and onto paper.  A big problem I have been experiencing for the last few months is an inability to shut off my brain at a decent hour so I can get some sleep.  Maybe writing out what is rattling around in there will help.  That is the goal at least.  I do not know if anyone will ever read this besides me.  If you do, enjoy it or not, read it or not, just know that it really wasn't meant for anyone but me.

Yep...I started another one

Call me a glutton.

This marks the fourth or fifth time I have actually sat down and started a blog.  I always sit down with the best of intentions.  I am going to blog about my experiences, or talk about my hobbies or one of..well four or five different things.  After about a year of writing I tend to get discouraged because ...well I just do.

Anyway, once that happens the posts get farther and farther apart until I just...Stop.  But here is the thing...while I am writing, my mind is clearer.  I sleep better.  I work better.  My mind isn't as cluttered.

So here is the deal.  I am going to write and not just that, I am going to try and write about 3-5 times per week.  I just finished a class that basically said that the more you write, the better you write.  Seems kind of logical.  I mean if you play basketball every day, you might never get to be as good as Michael Jordan - I mean initial talent does have something to do with it - but you will get to be the best player that YOU can be.

What will I write about?  I am not sure I really know.  That class I just mentioned had a component called "Free Writing".  Basically sitting down with a pretty broad topic and regurgitating everything about that topic.  Spelling, punctuation, coherence never really was important, it was about getting your thoughts out of your head and onto the screen/paper so that you could do something with them.  Thoughts that are locked in your head are easily forgotten, things you actually have written down somewhere have a tendency to stick around.    So I figure this blog will be a lot like that.  I will pick a topic - a TV show I just watched, a book I read, class for that day - and I will spend 10-15 minutes writing about it.

Now don't get me wrong - this free flow writing was never my strong point.  Spelling, punctuation and actual coherence were just too important to me to make it work.  So I will have a general theme, I will go back over it and clean up any glaring mistakes, I will spend about as much time cleaning up what I am writing as I do actually writing it.

First up..an introduction