Brother Date

Allen's been wanting me to go see The Hobbit: Desolation of Smaug since before it came out, but since I so did not love the first Hobbit movie (and since it came out right in the middle of a mind-blowingly crazy holiday season), I made no promises. I wasn't keep on giving up $12 and three hours of my life to go sit through a movie that I probably wasn't going to like.

But life is a little calmer now, and my budget isn't quite so tight... and Chris and Natalie went to see it over the weekend and Chris raved about it... plus, the ticket price had come down to $6 for a matinee showing at the really nice theater up the road - the one with the big plush oversized armchairs with electronic recliners - so I told Allen last night that if he still wanted to go see it, I'd go with him today after I dropped Abigail off.

It was a nice brother date. :) He was all stoked about paying for his own ticket now that he has a job, and we also discovered that the chicken tenders were milk and egg free, so we were both able to have a late breakfast/early lunch while watching the movie in total chill mode. And then after the movie we decided to drive around to the Target and Wal-Mart in that town to see if we could find any early seasons of Dr. Who (we couldn't. But I found season 3 of Warehouse 13 on sale for $12, and this adorable mug for $1.50, except in orange (I recently discovered I don't have as many mugs as I thought I did, which makes serving hot chocolate to everyone at a party difficult. Also, I discovered when I put this one away that I didn't have a single orange mug. Not. A. One. Which obviously needed to be rectified immediately!), and I needed a new candle, and had my eye on one, and when I took it to checkout it was clearances at $1.48. So, score. Good shopping trip.

What wasn't so great? Um... the movie. ;) I mean, I kind of liked it better than the first, but only because the first one broke my heart over how awful it was, and by the time I saw the second, I was mostly resigned to it being awful. I'm not someone who feels like a movie has to always exactly follow the book (because translating one medium into another doesn't always work that way) but I do think that if you didn't want to translate the book in the first place, why did you choose to make a movie out of it?! It's puzzling to me. Like Maggie said, it would have taken less effort to write a new script about a band of dwarves reclaiming their lost home and treasure than it would have to butcher the Hobbit. And quite frankly, the pace of the movie felt to me as though Peter Jackson were saying to himself, "Let's hurry up and get through what's actually written so we can put in some stuff that I think would be more fun!" Disappointing, especially because I was so, so impressed with his work on Lord of the Rings.

(And that's another one of my problems with the movie - instead of starting fresh, it's like Jackson's so afraid we'll forget he directed the wildly-successful LOTR movies that he feels the need to remind us every couple of minutes. The Hobbit is so much more than a prequel to the LOTR, and yet it sort of feels like he's just using this as a vehicle to get to play with this work and characters again. :(  )

It was fun seeing Evangeline Lilly on the screen, though; I loved her character in Lost! And, confession, I love watching elves fight. I mean, I love watching it like some people like watching dancers. They make killing look beautiful. ;)