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So, it's been a week since I saw The Hobbit and I figure I should write something somewhere about how I felt about it. The short version: I liked it a lot.

Now, speaking of 'short'. A lot of the criticisms about this movie has to do with the length and inclusion of material outside of the immediate scope of the orginal novel. I can aboslutely see why people have these problems, but Im gonna try to explain why I, after 170 minutes in the theater, still was ready for more.

When I first watched Fellowship of the Ring back in 2001, I didn't immediately love it. It was okay and I was happy to have watched it, but it didn't make much of an impact. It was only when I watched the Extended Edition almost a year later that I finally fell completely in love with that movie. I ended up having the exact same experience on both of the sequels and it became clear that when it comes to Middle Earth,  I'm not looking for the tight, bare minimum version that'll appeal to as many people as possible. I want as much Middle Earth time as Peter Jackson can get away with giving me. And since these three movies are the last chance I'll get to have him adapt anything from Tolkien, I want him to cram as much of it in them as he's able to.

Now, about the movie itself: Liked most of it. Loved The Riddles in the Dark, Radagast, The Whte Council and the performances (especially Martin Freeman and Ian McKellen. My least favorite parts were probably the first song where the dwarves are throwing plates around and the Stone Giants sequence.

Also, I can't wait to buy the EE of this one.

I really liked the last one, but this looks so blue and dark and angsty (with big angry action), which is not what I want from these new Star Trek movies.

Don't give me a dark middle chapter type movie, give me a big goofy fun movie with some interesting underlying ideas. The last one was just fun to watch, and there's nothing here that looks fun.

I'm pretty sure the Goosebumps book Welcome to Camp Nightmare was pivotal in really kickstarting my interest in genre fiction. I still to this day have a vivid memory of staying awake until the middle of the night so that I could finish that book as quickly as possible.

And then, when I actually got to the ending it absolutely blew my mind:

Lost is probably the closest a tv show will ever come to feel like it was made specifically for me. And if it weren't for me having been a huge Buffy the Vampire Slayer fan since the age of 13, it would be my favorite tv show of all time. It's absolutely not perfect, but it's an ambitious pulpy drama and I wouldn't want it to be anything else than it is. I love it, warts and all.

See, this is where I just have to admit to being weird. None of the four shows first mentioned here fundamentally disappointed me on a plot/mythology/mystery/whatever level.* I think part of it is just how I approach my enjoyment of fiction. I tend to be more plot focused early on and then as the story moves forward and I become more invested in the characters, the plot becomes much less important to me. When it comes to ALIAS I'm not even sure what central mystery you're referring to. Admittedly, it's been like 5 years since I watched that show, so I might be misrememberering, but I suppose the central mystery there would be something like "what's up with Rambaldi?". Which is a question I'd put as only slightly more interesting than "what's the island?".

Now, about The X-Files. While the mythology episodes tended to be the least interesting episodes of that show and I always was a bigger fan of Mulder & Scully than the show itself, I do think I ended up being fairly satisfied by how it all turned out in the end. I do think the series finale is a horrible episode of television that spent way too much time explaining and connecting dots that didn't need to be explained or connected and not nearly enough time being an actual episode of The X-Files though, so I guess the finale itself disappointed me.

Anyway, my point is really just that if a work of fiction has managed to hook me in the first place, it's gonna take a lot to reverse that opinion and make me not like it. Which is probably a character flaw on my part, but whatever

*Heroes on the other hand is crap and beyond Company Man I never really knew what people were getting all excited about.

Anyone looking for a quick runthrough of what the Lost writers knew when (in the context of telling the story of the show's origins) should read this excerpt from Alan Sepinwall's book The Revolution was Televised:

http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/867 … igins-lost

On topic of unpopular opinions: I think having a big detailed plan for where your story is gonna go beyond what you're writng right now is vastly overrated. By this I don't mean that you shouldn't think ahead, you should just be wary of locking yourself in too much. Especially when writing television.

The ones that immediately come to mind are:

Giant Bombcast
Idle Thumbs
Writing Excuses
Penn's Sunday School
Kevin Pollak's Chat Show

While there are some other ones I occasionally listen to, these are the ones were I'll at least listen to any episode once.

Sorry, but I have to contradict your theory. While I like TPM, I can't stand Transformers or Adam Sandler movies. Haven't seen Prometheus yet though.

I like Dollhouse.

I don't like MST3K.

I like both the Lost and BSG endings.

I don't like Inception.

I like the Prequels.

I don't like Lord of the Flies (Just read this last week, so it's fresh in my mind).

I like Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip and I like The Newsroom.

I don't like The Big Lebowski.

I don't like Goodfellas AT ALL.

I was a couple of years too old for Pokemon when it first came around, so I never got into it at all.

Probably didn't help that I didn't own a Game Boy.

But would people care if Jamie Lee Curtis showed up? Sure, she probably fits better in terms of her history with the genre, but I don't think anybody loves her as much as most movie fans love Sigourney.

There's of course also the part where Sigourney actually still has a solid acting career 

I guess Leia is my favorite Disney Princess now.