Yes, agreed, and that's how I'd describe the line-up for 2013 too.

Was there a lost commentary for Peter Jackson's King Kong, or am I misremembering?

Firstly, Boromir kicks it in the first movie. Gandalf only makes it half way.

Secondly, the Dwarves in The Hobbit are entirely CG for many of the action set pieces. So they're being thrown around in a cartoonish way by Trolls, Orcs and Goblins a lot more. That wasn't the case for Fellowship were it was 99% live action shooting so the characters weren't doing as many unrealistic things from a physics point of view.

Some more comments... [Spoilers]:

Gandalf keeps disappearing and re-appearing to save the day. What's he doing? Scoring more pipeweed?

Gandalf has a bad case of dementia in respect to his powers. Sometimes he can clear out a cavern with his +10 Force Staff, and other times he's a feeble old man. Recharging the staff takes time.

The dwarves carry different weapons but I didn't get a sense of them specializing - perhaps that's still to come. One dwarf had a sling-shot, another had a bow, the rest had clubs and swords. There were no A-Team scenes i.e. this obstacle is a job for this character, and now we need this character's skills, etc.

Fortunately they resisted the temptation to have wall-to-wall belching & farting jokes.

Galadriel does a Batman - disappears when someone looks away. No log-out etiquette.

The 'Thorin disapproving of Bilbo' plot element was clumsily executed. As was the editing with Bilbo's decision to rejoin the dwarves after sparing Gollum's life.

The dwarves riding the wooden platform down the crevice was getting dangerously into Pixar/Disney territory. Whatever. Definitely a tone-shift compared with LOTR.

I saw it on Wednesday at 48fps - yes, very 'TV' kinda look. Also, prefer to see 3D on IMAX to counter the shrinking effect you get with 3D, but the IMAX here isn't showing it in 48fps.

As for the story itself, 13 invincible dwarves run from west to east and brush off everything that's thrown at them. Some first impressions (but yet to see it on IMAX at 24fps)...

Pros: It's good to enter Middle Earth again. The Riddles in the Dark scene was great. The VFX were superb. Some score cues were okay, especially Misty Mountains song from the trailer. Lots of eye candy - every sunrise/sunset was majestic. Every mountain vista a wallpaper. Photo-real CG. No obvious compositing.
Cons: Action scenes too long, too many, and with no tension. Too many 'set pieces' i.e. dwarves throwing each other weapons and donking enemies at the same time to follow what's happening properly. Not sure if Martin Freeman has the acting chops to pull of the contrived character arc. Some weird editing choices at times. The movie still only covers a fragment of a story. With extended editions, this is going to be stretched to 9 hours! Rivendell scene abruptly ends. A lot of use of CG and sets rather than location shooting and real actors. All the baddies speak Cockney.

Okay, so a rocket has moved from public domain to the private doman. But it's hardly an example of innovation, in the sense that it can carry more payload than Apollo or deliver a sample return mission to Mars or probes to Titan, Venus, Enceladus, Europa, etc.
Sure, now commercial satellites can be delivered privately into low-Earth orbit. That's good. It's about time NASA got out of the "space-truck'n" business. But it's hardly 'going forward' for humanity. Meanwhile Obama has cut NASA's planetary exploration budget by 20%

I remember Trey's advice from The Abyss commentary: if working with James Cameron, let him make a minor adjustment to whatever you're working on, so that he now 'owns' it and so can no longer chew you out over it. Cameron only hires you because he can't physically do everything himself, as much as he'd like to.

http://redlettermedia.com/mr-plinkett-review-titanic/

Looks like it, but where's the moderator to whip us into line? C'mon - give it to us.
But meanwhile thanks for the Bond meta-movie - I'll see if it's watchable.

Listen to Dorkman. Compare ourselves with 100 years ago and we look enlightened (at the risk of complacency), but compare ourselves with 100 years in the future (what could be) and we look like barbarians. And it's true, we can regress. Between 1920 and 1980, inequality fell, but then started rising again so that most of the 20th century's gains were wiped out, and now we're just about back to the levels of a century ago.

We all already know the story even before the trailer. It's a tentpole. Which means the story is... villain wants to fuck shit up, there are early scenes where he fucks shit up to show he's serious, heroes chase villain to the final show-down, there's a punch-up during a count-down, and with seconds to spare, the heroes win the day, roll credits. This accounts for the majority of tentpoles now.

It's the movie singularity. Given long enough, every franchise ends up converging to the same 'plosions, chas'n with guns, WWF punch-up, action schlockfests template.