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.