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Dec. 17th, 2012 08:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shadowkat1. The problem with the heat in the building is I live with three men...sigh. They keep fiddling.
2. So..My bro took his daughter (age 8) and one her friends (age 8) to the Hobbit, and was very upset and disappointed. He'd just read the book to his daughter and was well expecting something more in line with the animated version or the play version that I appeared in way back in 1981, which was only two hours and a fairly straight-forward adaptation of the book.
Apparently, Peter Jackson found that version sort of boring, and well got ambitious.
He railed about the film to my mother, who as a result now has no interest whatsoever in seeing the film - dang-it. Wish she'd told me on Friday, so I could have seen it this weekend - although, not sure I'd have managed it - no time. Dang brother. His reaction? The film was three hours long with a lot of material that was not even in the book, and the film was scarier and more violent than the book - and if he'd known, he would never have taken his daughter to it. She attempted to reassure him - by reminding him that she had taken us to Exclaibure in 1981, at the ages of 9 and 13 respectively or thereabouts. And that was worse - it had a sex scene. (Actually it was a violent rape scene in the first 15 minutes...Uther raping Igraine, while Merlin murmered in the background.) My parents apparently didn't think a fantasy could be well so...adult at that time? We dealt with it well or better than my parents did at any rate - both squirmed throughout the movie.
Hmmm...it's admittedly been a while (25 yrs) but I remember the Hobbit being fairly violent and not exactly a children's book. More pre-teen (I read it at 12/13 years of age or however old you are in the 6th grade). Granted, I know that Jackson added a bunch of material from Tolkien's appendixes. Things most people haven't read. Mainly because it requires a somewhat industrious and obsessed reader to hunt down and read the appendixes - which aren't in the Hobbit, they are at the end of the Return of the King and the Lord of the Rings books. Plus, very small print. Personally, I'm curious about the appendixes...because I haven't read them, and it would make The Hobbit new and shiny to me - I don't need it to be like the book or play or animated film versions - I'm fairly low maintenance when it comes to film adaptations, apparently. As long as it adds something new to the party, I'm happy. But my brother went into the film not expecting to see anything but what was in the actual book. How he managed that I don't know. Was pretty common knowledge - all the reviewers mentioned the added material and it's been a controversy for about a year now.
Still is a controversy. So far on my flist - only![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
selenak liked it. Everyone else...not so much.
2. So..My bro took his daughter (age 8) and one her friends (age 8) to the Hobbit, and was very upset and disappointed. He'd just read the book to his daughter and was well expecting something more in line with the animated version or the play version that I appeared in way back in 1981, which was only two hours and a fairly straight-forward adaptation of the book.
Apparently, Peter Jackson found that version sort of boring, and well got ambitious.
He railed about the film to my mother, who as a result now has no interest whatsoever in seeing the film - dang-it. Wish she'd told me on Friday, so I could have seen it this weekend - although, not sure I'd have managed it - no time. Dang brother. His reaction? The film was three hours long with a lot of material that was not even in the book, and the film was scarier and more violent than the book - and if he'd known, he would never have taken his daughter to it. She attempted to reassure him - by reminding him that she had taken us to Exclaibure in 1981, at the ages of 9 and 13 respectively or thereabouts. And that was worse - it had a sex scene. (Actually it was a violent rape scene in the first 15 minutes...Uther raping Igraine, while Merlin murmered in the background.) My parents apparently didn't think a fantasy could be well so...adult at that time? We dealt with it well or better than my parents did at any rate - both squirmed throughout the movie.
Hmmm...it's admittedly been a while (25 yrs) but I remember the Hobbit being fairly violent and not exactly a children's book. More pre-teen (I read it at 12/13 years of age or however old you are in the 6th grade). Granted, I know that Jackson added a bunch of material from Tolkien's appendixes. Things most people haven't read. Mainly because it requires a somewhat industrious and obsessed reader to hunt down and read the appendixes - which aren't in the Hobbit, they are at the end of the Return of the King and the Lord of the Rings books. Plus, very small print. Personally, I'm curious about the appendixes...because I haven't read them, and it would make The Hobbit new and shiny to me - I don't need it to be like the book or play or animated film versions - I'm fairly low maintenance when it comes to film adaptations, apparently. As long as it adds something new to the party, I'm happy. But my brother went into the film not expecting to see anything but what was in the actual book. How he managed that I don't know. Was pretty common knowledge - all the reviewers mentioned the added material and it's been a controversy for about a year now.
Still is a controversy. So far on my flist - only
selenak liked it. Everyone else...not so much.![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2012-12-18 04:55 am (UTC)The basic gist is that the Hobbit was initially a little story he told his kids, that was unrelated to the Silmarillion, which he'd been working on at the time. His publishing company told him they'd publish the Silmarillion after he did a sequel to the Hobbit, which his how he started on LotR, and part way through, decided they all occurred in the same universe.
So the LotR appendices wind up including major timelines (among other things, talking about where people were while offscreen), histories, linguistics, calendars and such...
It's kind of the dividing line between people who just like to read the books and people who are obsessives. The Tolkien obsessives love the Appendicies and stuff beyond possibly even more than the actual books, perhaps because of what having all the external backing material says about Tolkien as a storyteller and world-builder.