Congratulations to you and the lucky lady!
Do you know whether it's a boy or girl at this point?

Yep, I'm going to snap at that bait - the book doesn't need fixing. The problems of the movie have little to nothing to do with the book, i.e., the beats of the story, but stem rather from a) the addition of numerous, highly improbable action scenes which stretch our suspension of disbelief, b) the replacement of nearly all enemies with unconvincing CGI and the resulting weightless of most of the fighting, and c) the padding out of the story with 'appendices' shit we really don't need to see (principally the Necromancer subplot and the White Council) which halt the pace almost as badly as the forced Arwen scenes in LOTR.

It's a shame though that they ultimately fail to capitalise on these spectacular and overly elaborate set pieces by not demonstrating and distinguishing the dwarven characters. Instead, they end up just being superficial crowd-pleasing events. There was one moment where Kili reacts to the possibility of having lost Fili (or maybe it's the other way around), but I was surprised by how little was done to make the dwarves interact with each other or show their character (other than, you know have Bombur do X because he's fat or Dwalin do Y because he's the fierce warrior) during the action scenes.

Mainly though, and this may age me, this film's action needs to slow down and stop having so much in the frame.

The 'media is to blame' is easy and on the face of it reasonable but the solution mentioned at the beginning isn't really practical (is it really that these events shouldn't be covered or that the coverage should be censored?) and ironically, the argument isn't really anything more than correlation=causation.

I would, London's only a 45-minute train journey from here, but work just landed a giant shit on me.

A thought occurred to me whilst I'm on this current Star Wars kick - overall the soundtrack for Star Wars is superior to those of ESB and ROTJ. That's not to put down the others in any way, but in terms of number of superb and memorable themes, I think Star Wars comes out on top. Granted, ESB has the Imperial March and the Han/Leia romance theme is good, and there are a few other great tracks, but whenever I start the Star Wars soundtrack I find myself easily identifying the scene playing and it readily conjures the visuals in a way that I can't seem to do with ESB and ROTJ (apart from at various very obvious bits like in ROTJ when the fleet comes out of hyperspace and approaches the Death Star) - even the trash compactor part is great.

Plus, it has the throne room track, which is just divine.

It's the geography of the scene rather than of the literal geography; the most obvious example in FOTR was when Aragorn crashes into Lurtz and they have their little battle, which takes place in a totally different part of the forest than where Boromir is - they just rolled a few feet away but Boromir etc. are nowhere to be seen in all the wide shots. It's this way because they did film the scene in a different part of the forest. I always seem to notice things like that, and sadly I noticed it again for the Hobbit.

Similarly, it wasn't very clear where certain characters are in a scene in relation to other characters, or how one cavern was linked to another. I had this complaint whilst watching Helm's Deep in TTT, where it's never made clear how the staircase from the Deeping Wall connects to the Hornburg, it sort of looks like it goes around the back. One moment Aragorn's running up it being chased by uruks and the next he's on the main battlements with Theoden. There's apparently this whole 'front' of the battle that's completely omitted. As for the Hobbit, at one point, one of the dwarves is clearly separated but then magically appears with the others later on. The most egregrious example of poor 'mis en scene' was the warg chase. The criss-crossing of the two groups was maddeningly vague and didn't make any sense at all. 

Often, all it needs is a good master to show what's happening, but so too do we need to return to that master after numerous switch arounds and movements in close ups have taken place. I've found PJ's presentation to be a bit muddled on these adaptations. It's not so much that he's a bad story-teller, but that he probably just lacks the required shot to complete the scene's flow in the editing room - or he's got a bad editor who's taken them out.

Addendum to add - and making sense of what's happening is made extra hard in the Hobbit due to the sheer amount of crap that's happening on the screen at any one time. Someone over there needed to tell Peter Jackson to take it down a notch. One goddamn staircase moving precariously and 3-4 goblin archers was enough to make a great sequence. Here, however, we have what looks like several hundred goblins and all manner of objects falling apart... and it's too much.

Just got back from seeing this and I really enjoyed it - I'd argue that if you were ambivalent or apathetic about LOTR then you're likely to feel the same with this one, but if you loved the extended editions then this is gold. There were some moments where I was truely awed and others still that completely surprised me.

It's not perfect, there's a song/dance routine that seems a bit out of place and there's a little too much CGI in there - orcs and goblins especially. WETA brought some superb prosthetics and make-up work to the table last time around, but here I'd say they dropped the ball.

And because CGI is being used so much more, characters perform way too much of the acrobatic heroics that Legolas was given in LOTR, which most of the time look ridiculous or fake. There's a sequence that reminded me of the Tintin movie, so improbable and fast is this chase that it becomes a cartoon (tone wise), at which point the danger of the scene becomes undermined.

Finally, geography. It's piss poor in this one. I don't mean Middle Earth, I mean the geography of the scene. This is one of the criticisms I had of LOTR as well, where either parts of a location don't flow or match well or the relationship from one part to the other isn't clear. There's one particular scene where it gets rather maddening.

All that said, those hours whizzed by and I didn't want it to finish. I think that's one of the greatest compliments you can give a film.

Go figure, whilst I have a few personal problems with IB, I'd consider it among Tarantino's best films (with True Romance, which he only wrote). I've always felt that Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs were a bit overrated.

I didn't much like Planet Terror, too ridiculous and inconsistent for me. Death Proof is a much better movie and I found myself much more engaged and entranced by the story, characters, and tension.

Yup, this was a great one. Quite a few great quotes that are bound to be replayed for the anniversay show.

If they bring back Samuel L Jackson, then I'm out. Hopefully Disney realises that he was a horribly miscast actor playing a horribly underdeveloped and boring character who spent most of the time holding the stupid ball.

I'd feel safe, but I've just seen the Clone Wars episodes where they incomprehensibly bring back Darth Maul.

Sorry fellas, must have been in a mood earlier. Here's something 'cool'.