Hobbit watching

Before I launch in ...

Suffering from bugs, which is affecting my temperament. So I'm snappy due to generally lacking any energy. Yep. It's manflu - lol. (chesty bug that's causing me to make the scary sounds when trying to clear my throat - you know the type I mean !)

Still ... the only thing good about the trip out today was the company.

Back to chill out now. I'm not feeling like gaming (I may attack Moo2 again in a bit) so it's chill out time to music accompanied by Yogscast videos now and livestream later. That's where Moo2 will come in, I'll have that on in the foreground while chuckling to the livestream people being irreverent.

To be honest, if it's a choice between what's typically on telly and watching Yogscast livestreams, I'll generally choose the livestreams. Telly has descended into repetitive garbage these days and is rarely worth watching past a quick update on the news channel. That is before that news channel coverage hits its repeat cycle. The online videos tend to be far more entertaining. It's not about the progress they make, it's about the fun along the way.

Anyway - about today's run to see Hobbit. Best thing about it was the company. The Crazie mob I hang around with are among my most trusted people in the world. We all have our own flaws. But they're our flaws. We own them, share them, amuse ourselves with them and help each other with them.

Before, most of the gang went shopping in the Mall. I'd already had enough of a dose of that on Friday so I joined later and hibernated a bit longer with my bugs. We had lunch in the local Frankie & Benny's.

I have to say - if the best eating place around a big shopping centre is the Pizza Hut, there's something seriously gone wrong. I wasn't particularly impressed with the F&B offering today, my usual fallback staple is Hunter's Chicken (chicken wrapped in bacon with cheese and barbecue sauce) but somehow F&B managed to ruin that. Mind you, I should have had the fish. I aim to have fish once a week to keep the thyroid healthy but have run out at home.

Reminder - I have bugs which are colouring my opinions ... so using the word "ruined" is probably a bit strong. At least it wasn't charcoaled, just drowned in some weird substitute for cheese. It was a £15 meal, artificial substitutes are not acceptable. If you compared that anti-cheese with my dayglo hat, I'm not sure which would have been more dayglo.

Hobbit ?

I have to be brutally honest here. The Hobbit is a single book. The Lord Of The Rings is a trilogy. There is no reason that the Hobbit should have been made as 3 films. They're just adding in filler that stretches out the films without adding anything. I understand the end of the second film just leaves 20 pages of the book for the third film.

It's a decently made film, sure. However, there's a lot of filler in there. The whole book should have been just the one film. There's a reason I haven't bought the blu-ray of the first film yet and that contrasts to me pretty much pre-ordering the dvds of the Lord Of The Rings.

Peter Jackson has always made films that are overlong. He's being indulged in that. He's being indulged in that again, as the Hobbit films will break the records again. I have a feeling that whatever he goes into next after Hobbit 3 will bomb. Or will it ? As a society, we seem to indulge and reward in irrational things. Like overlong films and certain sports that call themselves professional (cough - football) but are anything but.

Hobbit 2. Yeah. Well made film but these films aren't "The Hobbit". It's another story entirely. We're being asked to sit through stuff for 30 minutes that could have been a 1 or 2 minute update.

And I can feel my bugs colouring my opinion again.

I actually kind of enjoyed the movie but ... it's not the movie of a book by Tolkien called The Hobbit. And that's what it pretends to be. I'll not rush out and buy it on blu-ray when it gets released. I'm not even convinced I'd watch it repeatedly like I did the LOTR trilogy. Perhaps if a condensed version was made.

Should you go see it ? As always, my advice there is - follow your own opinion. There's plenty of films that I bypass in the cinema and check them out for free* when they come to the small screen. Films with a certain epicness like Hobbit 2 and Pacific Rim benefit from that big screen cinema scale.

*(there's a small matter of a Sky Movies subscription ...)

So the advice is - if you want to see films like this and award the indulgence of the director, go right ahead. Form your own opinion, one of the biggest problems in this world is when we adopt the opinions of others without the benefit of the context behind what formed that opinion.

Last thought for today - I'm seeing reports of the weather disruption on the news ... If you're travelling over the break, stay safe ! Stay calm too. The biggest danger to you is ... you ! We can do daft things at times. I talk from experience - muahaha.