I swear to god, I have three draft posts sitting in my Posts folder, none of which were good enough to publish, even by my admittedly lax standards. Please don't hurt me for my accidental five month hiatus. I'm very sorry and it won't happen again (maybe). (To cut a long story short, life happened in the form of me starting an MFA and even when your MFA is in professionally playing Let's Pretend - or as it is officially known, Theatre Directing - it is still an MFA and demands much more of your time than watching X-Men cartoons and smoking out of your bedroom window. Who knew?)
But I'm here! I am back this New Year because there has just been so much pop culture of late and I cannot possibly let it go by without whipping up a few rounds of my signature cocktail of capital letters and inappropriate drooling. Where to begin? There's last autumn's telly-land, which saw The Hour pick up steam after a shaky start dicking about with an organised crime storyline that was somehow less believable than having a Soviet spy in the midst of a fairly inoffensive BBC news programme (um, spoilers?); however, after hanging in there only to see what the offspring of Anna Chancellor and Peter Capaldi might be like and how soon it would be taking over the world, the last two episodes were absolute barn-stormers. Merlin ended for good with both a bang and a whimper and this truly is a tragedy for those who stuck with it from the beginning. Although I don't think Arthur took his top off once last season, so maybe it is time to move on. There's a whole new Twilight film to mock, coming hand in hand with the blessed knowledge that there are to be no more, hallelulah praise the Mormon Jesus that spawned this dust-bunny of menopausal fantasies and unfulfilled life prospects in the first place. Christmas Doctor Who was tentatively promising for the coming season, starring not only a new companion but Lesbian Silurian and Lesbian Cockney, who are much more likely candidates for a spinoff than John Barrowman ever was.
But before any of that, there is a film that must be talked about. A film that I have looked forward to, not with the pants-wetting fist-biting glee of The Avengers, but with something far more likely to warm the cockles of my Middle-Earth-loving heart. And boy, were my cockles warmed. I'm talking, of course, about The Hobbit.
Un petit confession, as the French say. I love Lord of the Rings. That's not the confession. The confession is that I love the films. Burdened with an English student's guilt over enjoying an adaptation before reading the source material, I turned to the books at the tender age of thirteen and commenced a three-month project of staring in horror at the bricks of text in front of me listing rhyming dwarf-dad name after rhyming dwarf-dad name. Why was there another song in Elvish? Was I supposed to read it? Sing it? Perform an interpretative dance to it? Had it really been going on forty pages and these people were still talking about events that not only had we never encountered, but never would and would have no bearing on the plot? Even I have a saturation point when it comes to fantasy. I OD'ed hard on A Song of Ice and Fire, making a headlong dash through the three-and-a-half-thousand odd pages of the first four books only to have some kind of breakdown around the beginning of the fifth and hurl it across the room crying, "I simply can't bear learning any more awkwardly partnered Latinate and Anglo-Saxon names! Bear me to the fainting couch, I believe I have the vapours! AND WHO THE FUCK IS ARTHUR DAYNE?" At some point, I will pick up the fifth one again. When the screams of beloved murdered characters have stopped echoing in the wind.
As always, I digress. I was saddened that I did not love reading Tolkien because I had very fond memories of The Hobbit being read to me as a child. The Hobbit is a very simple children's story, certainly not one that seems a natural fit for a series of of epic films. But Peter Jackson cottoned on to something very clever with the LOTR films, which is that Tolkien is simply not a natural storyteller. The universe he creates is rich in character and landscape, the morality of the books cleaves to something undeniably decent and stirring. But by Frodo's quivery bottom lip, he cannot string a story together in a compelling way. Peter Jackson, however, can. Peter Jackson can sustain a story as complicated and rich as this one over nine hours and not lose anything from it that was worth keeping. (Except the Houses of Healing in Return of the King. That could have been kept in favour of a bit of Liv Tyler looking wry, surely.) So if Peter Jackson turns to me and says, "Y'know, there's a lot of stuff I wanted to put in those films but couldn't", I am actually more than happy to hand him my copy of The Hobbit and say, "Okay, Pete. Go to town on this."
The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey is still Tolkien's Hobbit. It is not, as some have suggested, Lord of the Rings 4. Which would be silly anyway, as The Hobbit is set 60 years before. Tch. At its centre is the comfort of home, the bigness of the world, the notion that it is small acts and small people that stand against the dark. The Hobbit is a (relatively) small story set in an epic fantasy universe and that is exactly what Jackson delivers. When Tolkien wrote The Hobbit, he could not have known what it was the beginning of, what Middle Earth would grow to be. Most of us reading The Hobbit for the first time did not know either - it is rare to find someone who read Lord of The Rings before its predecessor. But we do know Lord of the Rings now. Either we have read it or seen it or simply become unavoidably aware of it through pop cultural osmosis. It would almost be impossible, I think, to create a version of the Hobbit in which we weren't watching it looking for the links with the story and universe we already know, and in which I wasn't asking the question, "Does Benedict Cumberbatch look sexy as a dragon?"* Jackson has embraced this and turned The Hobbit into a kind of three hour bubble-bath for Lord of the Rings fans with a butler on hand to drop a chocolate into your mouth every now and then. It is audacious, visually stunning, funny and, above all, surprisingly charming. Sorry, just gagged on my own gushing there. Let's fix that.
It's not perfect by a long chalk. I've seen it twice and it doesn't stand up to second viewing in the way that the LOTR films yield endless delight, especially if you are a bit drunk and making once of your friends drink every time Gollum switches personalities. After the initial thrill of being introduced to a whole new raft of characters to shout "take your shirt off" at during inappropriate moments, the second viewing had me checking my watch during the long (long, long) first hour and a half. Then it starts getting really good (like, really good) and it's all slightly obscene looking Goblin Kings and Andy Serkis and fire and eagles and eagles on fire (except the last one) and then it ends. Gah. So the second one better be really good is all I'm saying because I remember the plot of The Hobbit as being there's some short dudes who go and get a slightly shorter dude and there's a dragon and some trolls and some goblins and a ring and then the dragon dies and everyone drinks lemonade. Most of those plot points have already been covered in great detail. Peter Jackson better have something fucking spectacular up his sleeve (actually we already know he does, it's called LEGOLAS). So if you weren't a fan before then you definitely won't be converted by this but if you were, then see it once in the cinema and then wait for the DVD so you can identify hilarious moments of homoeroticism with your friends (they really need some more women in this universe). Also, see it in 2D and normal frame rate. It seems much more like a film and less like a game of 'That was CGI, that was pyrotechnic, that was CGI'.
But. Enough beating about the bush. No, that wasn't a euphemism. Because I know what you really want, you filthy little blog-readers you. I know what you have been waiting for all these months, and frankly, it disgusts me. If you think I am going to make a fool of myself disclosing the most intimate struggles of my shattered psyche in the consideration of whether it is a crime against all that is right and good to look at Richard Armitage dressed up as a dwarf and wonder whether a new and disturbing fetish has been awoken in me, well you can look elsewhere for that kind of smut because you won't find it here. Nor will you find musings on whether Peter Jackson watched North and South before filming started and was so hopelessly smitten with Mr Armitage that he decided to put in a frankly alarming quantity of shots in which Thorin Hardwood or whatever his name is stands atop a rocky outcrop brooding so furiously on his lack of kingliness that Viggo Mortensen is considering suing. Nor will I comment on how the background music seemed to so taken with him that the Latinate (Elvish?) chanting during that bit at the end where stands up on the tree to take down the Orc-Video-Game-End-of-Level-Boss might as well have been shrieking, "RICHARD ARMITAGE! STANDS ON TREES! RUNS THROUGH FIRE! HE IS MANLY WITH MAN PAIN IN HIS MAN EYES!" I'm sure at some point they were considering having him saving some baby orphans from the flames on his way to the fight but it was cut for time (it was the only thing cut for time).
Nor will you be hearing anything from me about the startling coincidence that sees the three most eligible dwarves - Thorin, Suspiciously Attractive Dwarf (Kili, played by Being Human's Aidan Turner) and his brother/boyfriend** Less Attractive but Still Doable Dwarf (Fili, played by Dean O'Gorman) - sporting a noticeably smaller quantity of prothetic nose and beard accessory than the rest. James Nesbitt as Bofur, whilst hiding his everyman charm beneath a hat that I thought was going to take flight and a moustache that looked sad independently of Nebitt's own facial expression, could still legitimately have replaced all of his lines with "I'm James Nesbitt. And now you want to have a pint with me." Elijah Woods puts in a brief appearance as Frodo and I had to stop myself from standing up and congratulating Ian Holmes on having such a fine-looking nephew and asking if the cheekbones ran on the other side of the family and, if so, were there cousins? (I, by the way, was convinced that Elijah Woods has a painting in an attic somewhere looking like shit because as far as I could tell, he hasn't aged a day, but everyone disagreed with me on this point and said he looked haunted by the loss of times past.) All this and the elves won't even make a proper appearance until Part 2. (Although special points for Flight of the Conchord's Brett Mckenzie reprising his internet-stealing silent cameo from Fellowship of the Ring complete with a new elvish name that means 'singer' and even more special points for Lee Pace who you probably know as the guy who made pies and resurrected the dead in Pushing Daisies as LEGOLAS' DAD ON A FUCKING ELK LOOKING FABULOUS.)
So put that in your elongated Gandalf pipe and choke on it, good reader. The various aesthetic qualities of the cast will emphatically not be reflected on in any way, not even how good Saint Cate Blanchett is at turning slowly in a shimmery dress (twice). This is a new, more mature Jane Shakespeare and you can take your filthy gutter-dwelling minds elsewhere for that kind of thing. Also Martin Freeman just deserves, like, ALL THE HUGS and those pointy little hobbit ears are really working for me. He is everything you could want and more (less? There's a height joke in there somewhere) as Bilbo, and I very much admired his choice to play his scenes with Thorin as a particularly egregious rom-com. ("I'm just a hobbit. Standing in front of a dwarf. Asking him to love him.")
*In the event, we will have to wait until the next film to find out, and yes, I am aware that Smaug will be CGI and not Cumberbatch in a dragon suit but it should be.
**Seriously, what's the deal here? I'm pretty sure they're related in the book but they seemed to spend an awful lot of time going off to bond and then coming back looking flustered and out of breath. Why were they the only two dwarfs up in the middle of the night tending the campfire? Why were they sharing an eagle when there were clearly enough for everyone to have their own? If they weren't looking out for the horses, then what were they doing? It's a conspiracy.
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