The Hobbit, you guys

When the last Harry Potter movie ended in 2011, Mark and I said, "Well, there's never going to be another movie to interest us ever again, on Earth, at all."

Truly.

But then word came that The Hobbit was finally being made (which had been rumored for years but was bogged down by production delays, a change of directors, etc., etc., etc.) and all last year was mostly spent in breathless anticipation bordering on fanatical desperation for the release date of 12/14/12. You don't understand just how excited I was.

The Hobbit has been my favorite book since I was a teenager, when I also first started reading The Lord of the Rings. I didn't really fit in in high school. Other girls were swooning over Leonardo DiCaprio and The Backstreet Boys, while I was busy fangirling over The Beatles and getting issues of the Star Wars Insider magazine, leading up to the new Phantom Menace episode. I remember reading the LOTR and having to go to the library to get each book and being completely blown away, especially at how The Two Towers ends with Frodo being captured and Sam getting knocked out trying to follow the orcs into Mordor (I have a bone to pick with Peter Jackson about how that was all done in the movie....) and then it just LEAVES YOU HANGING! "Sam heard and saw no more." Gah!

Mark and I went and saw The Fellowship of the Ring on our honeymoon in California and probably saw it 7 or 8 times in the theater.When I got to SUU, I took an upper division literature class on the works of J.R.R. Tolkien and other fantasy writers (it was the BEST CLASS EVER), we went to see The Return of the King at the IMAX in Springdale when I was 8 months pregnant with Madelyn (I cried a lot during that movie) and I read The Two Towers while I was in the hospital giving birth to her. I remember driving Mark's manual car (which I was terrible at) in Albuquerque by myself because I was so desperate to see Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix on the big screen back in 2007.

Anyway, you get the point. I'm a nerd, I'm a geek. My Geekery board on Pinterest has 1,097 pins (not including my separate I ♥♥ Doctor Who board....which has 599....). It makes me happy.

 So anyway, somehow we made it all the way to December (having discovered Doctor Who in the meantime helped) when The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey opened. Mark and I got a babysitter--which we hardly ever do-- and went to go see it on December 18th because he'd had to work the previous weekend.

I wore my Hobbit t-shirt that I got at Target. I chopped off the neck and sleeves because it was a men's shirt. Men always get the best t-shirts.

The movie was so awesome. I had to get up to pee halfway through the movie, because it's almost 3 hours long.
 

 Our movie theater had a hobbit hole!!

Check out the hand drawn map!! I was dying.

 

The Hobbit is my favorite book because it's easier to read, funnier, shorter and more quirky/British than The Lord of the Rings. It was written in 1937 and was J.R.R. Tolkien's first book, geared more towards a younger audience. It takes place 60 years before The Lord of the Rings and involves Bilbo Baggins (Frodo's uncle) getting roped into an epic quest with 13 dwarves and Gandalf the wizard. The dwarves lost their homestead of Erebor to Smaug the Dragon 100 years previously and want to go back to try and reclaim it, along with all their gold.

It is a short(ish) book, but Tolkien wrote a ton of additional material that took place at that same time in the Appendices of The Return of the King, which Peter Jackson has utilized. So it is a little slower paced than The Lord of the Rings, which I've heard a lot of people complain about. What they don't realize is that in The Fellowship of the Ring, they cut out whole decades in order to speed up the story. I like that they have more time to explore backstory and characters this time.

 

 Mark and I thought that Martin Freeman was fantastic as Bilbo--he was so perfect for the role. He has serious geek cred already, having played Arthur Dent in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and Dr. John Watson in BBC's Sherlock. Apparently Peter Jackson saw him in Sherlock and he was the only actor he even considered to play Bilbo. He rearranged the entire movie shooting schedule around his availability. Martin was completely brilliant. Loved him.

Also completely brilliant:

Richard Armitage as Thorin Oakenshield.

Now, I never liked Thorin in the book--he comes across as a big jerk. He's still stubborn and haughty in the movie, but he's just so dang MAJESTIC. He's a prince and the leader of the company and kicks some major butt. There's a flashback in the movie that shows him battling with an orc named Azog in front of the gates of Moria, and it is the best sequence in the entire film. Balin (another dwarf) is telling the story, and he says, 

"We were leaderless, defeat and death were upon us. That is when I saw him; the young dwarf prince facing down the Pale Orc. He stood alone against this terrible foe, his armour rent, wielding nothing but an oaken branch as a shield... Azog the Defiler learned that day that the line of Durin would not be so easily broken. Our forces rallied and drove the Orcs back; our enemy had been defeated... but there was no feast or songs that night, for our dead were beyond the count of grief. We few had survived and I thought to myself then, 'There is one I could follow. There is one I could call King'

...and Megan and I were squirming in our seats, trying not to shout out, "I WILL FOLLOW YOU, THORIN!" Sorry, there's a lot of caps in this post.

Oh yeah, so my sister Megan.

Well, I've mentioned this before...she's possibly even more of a geek than I am. More prolific, anyway. So I invited her up a couple days after Christmas to come watch it with me (again). Notice the matching outfits!! Ah, we had so much fun.

And then of course, I had to have Mark take Madelyn to go see it:

 She was already a fan of LOTR and my nerdy little heart couldn't be more proud that she wanted to see it. 

I also bought the soundtrack from iTunes and it is awesome--I've listened to it so much that Mark has started to get annoyed. "The Misty Mountains" is a track that Thorin and Co. actually sing (one of two songs in the film) and it's superb. Richard Armitage has a very deep, manly voice.

So if you haven't gone to see The Hobbit yet, GO!! It's being made into a trilogy, and granted that's stretching it a bit, but like I said you get to find out what Gandalf was off doing when he kept disappearing and you see lots of familiar faces and places from Middle Earth (I nearly burst into tears when I saw Frodo). The music is grand and sweeping, the battles are fierce, the visuals and special effects are first class, New Zealand is beautiful and it is a great big adventure story. There's still lots to tell and now all we have to do is wait for December to roll around again for The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug!

Eleven months to go...............