Qt3 Movie Podcast: The Hobbit

Title Qt3 Movie Podcast: The Hobbit
Author Tom Chick
Posted in Movie podcasts
When December 16, 2012

It's the first third of Peter Jackson's prequel to The Lord of the Rings! Then it's a 3x3 of scenes in tents, which makes for a much better 3x3 than you might think..

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Hey, Tom. Unless you've chosen to take a more experimental approach to movie discussion, the audio file is corrupted from about 1:00:50 on.

Egad, so it is. Thanks for the heads-up, Taiyo. Fixed!

I only finally saw Hanna this weekend, so it was too late for it to include in my 3x3 this time out. But I liked that scene. Good character development.

So thoughts on the 3d and whether or not that affected how the film was shot? Tom started to ask about and I guess loathing prevented him from finishing the question :)

I'm shocked that nobody mentioned the point in Empire Strikes Back where Harrison Ford has to build a tent in a snowstorm after stuffing Mark Hamill into a dead snow lizard. Or Haley Joel Osment's red tent in the Sixth Sense (like bikes, also less than resistant to supernatural entities.)

This. I was thinking the same thing. Best use of an improvised tent goes to The Empire Strikes Back. Although the tent I'm thinking of is the dead tauntaun.

Nothing looked good to you? Gollum didn't? The Goblin King? The eagles? I don't know how any of those could look better. You dudes have CG standards vastly different than mine, possibly because I watch so few movies.

Which version did you see, Dave? Did you see the 48fps? Or the 24. I'm hearing from friends who saw both, and say the 24fps in 2D is vastly superior.

Regardless, Gollum looked fine I guess. He sounded somewhat like Donald Duck at the beginning of that section, which is bizarre (given how highly I regard Andy Serkis). And the Great Goblin/Dame Edna was fine too, I guess. The problem is that by that point I wasn't caring about what they looked like. By the time we got to the eagles flying majestically I couldn't have cared less about the visuals. That's the problem with the movie. If by the time we get to Gollum I'm making associations with Donald Duck, you're movie is in real trouble. Because my mind is all over the place.

Mostly it's writing, character, and pacing. By the time I get to the stuff you're referring to my arms are crossed. And since I saw it in 48, any hope of visual interest was already extinguished by how terrible the Shire looked and how the dwarf dinner scene looked like something from a soap opera.

CG standards have very little to do with it.

I'm not sure how many fps I saw the movie in. It looked like a normal movie to me, and I was at a small locally-owned theater, so I imagine it was in 24fps. But it was 3D.

You and Tom convinced me to some degree that this is a good arms-crossed sort of movie. But both of you said the equivalent of, "There's not one single thing in this movie that looks good," and you said it multiple times, without reference to writing, character, and pacing, so I took it at face value.

Yeah, okay, there, The Hobbit is a confused mess? Whatever. You say that after listing off a dozen names from LOTR and claim that confused mess of the last two movies was somehow clearer than Hobbit. The Hobbit is like the Fellowship LOTR, it's straight forward. The last two LOTR movies I have no idea what and why half the stuff even happens in them. Why did they have to leave the Ring story to go to some pointless CG battles? This doesn't happen in the Hobbit, it mainly follows the main characters.

Yo doggs this movie was terrible. I’m still on my path of watching all the movie podcast movies, but this one makes me think I’ve made a huge mistake. If you guys say the other Hobbit podcast episodes make it worth it, I’ll do it.

There is a good chance the podcast’s comedy value make the movies worthwhile, I suspect, but I have not listened to those ones myself.

Yeah I love the synopses. And how some movies get mentioned over and over for years, like Meek’s Cutoff by Tom.