Sunday!

Jaybird 14 Comments

Went to see The Hobbit with a bunch of friends yesterday which I didn’t think was *THAT* bad, but probably should have instead been named “Peter Jackson’s Middle Earth Movie Product (based on J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit, The Silmarillion, and other works)”. There were a bunch of little things that I really liked, such as Saruman being a Middle Manager (“We’re looking at your dwarf Numbers and we wish to express concern…”), Radagast’s bunny sled, and the Goblin King’s “beard”. Now, all of these things appear to be license on the part of the story re-teller and, well, you’re going to have to put up with quite a lot of his license. Tolkien, remember, was more a fan of the “telling what happened by having the people around the fire explain what had happened” form of storytelling (with a couple of paragraphs devoted to talk of the herbs used to season the meat and potatoes being eaten by the people sitting around the fire). Jackson, for good or ill, seems to have decided that he’d rather just give us the sequence instead of giving us the sequence as being retold.

Which means that there are are a couple orders of magnitude more of butts being kicked right and proper.

So… what are you reading and/or watching?

Jaybird

Jaybird is Birdmojo on Xbox Live and Jaybirdmojo on Playstation's network. He's been playing consoles since the Atari 2600 and it was Zork that taught him how to touch-type. If you've got a song for Wednesday, a commercial for Saturday, a recommendation for Tuesday, an essay for Monday, or, heck, just a handful a questions, fire off an email to AskJaybird-at-gmail.com

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14 Comments

  1. Having read some negative reviews, I went in with low expectations. And you know what? The movie was pretty good. Sure, he took massive liberties, but I told myself that all the “fleshing out” Jackson was doing was pulled from The Silmarillion or some other source material (fiction or not) and that made it ok. What also helped is that I enjoyed the story he was telling. And frankly, it may have helped that I haven’t read The Hobbit since mumblemumble grade.

    • Nah, I’ve read The Hobbit eleventymumble times and I was fine with it. I see the Peter Jackson exuberances that don’t match my vision of the story as a natural corollary to the Peter Jackson exuberances that *do* (most especially the exuberance to get the damn thing made in the first place) – and I think that’s a more-than-fair trade.

    • Aargh, the bunny sled was the worst. You’re off my Christmas card list.

      • Dude, the bunny sled totally was something that the 8th Century Hun would come up with. Der Krampusse would totally use one.

    • Speaking of crazy mashups, I am midway thru S1 of a Canadian show called “Todd and the Book of Pure Evil” that is a third “BtVS”, a third “Mallrats”, and a third “Strangers With Candy” (very, very non-PC and kind of foul, but pretty damn funny).

      If Xander had been the star, and a stoner, it’s sort of like that. Kind of genius, actually. It’s on Netflix streaming.

  3. I’ve been rereading. More Sandman (all the way through the wake), audios of Brighty of the Grand Canyon and I, Robot. And as mentioned above, watching the Hobbit. I’m also still rewatching Freaks and Geeks. *deep in comfort mode*

  4. I’ve picked up Angelmaker by Nick Harkaway, which is… well, to be honest I’m not certain yet. “Existential pulp” is how one of the reviewers on the jacket described it. The writing, however, is densely humorous and fun. I think that no matter what the plot develops into, I’m going to love this book.

    I really need to follow through on my plan to post on every book I read in 2013.

  5. I’ve been reading Alfred Bester’s [1] mainstream novel “Who He”, which is about a TV producer who lives in Manhattan, as many (most?) did in 1953. So far it’s an interesting specimen rather than a great novel, but I’ll persevere with it.

    1. You might know that name because of the Babylon 5 character. who is named after the writer, whose The Demolished Man [2], The Stars By Destination, and roughly dozen best short stories are absolute gems of the Golden Age of Science Fiction. Here’s one of them.

    2. About a murder in an age where murder is impossible to get away with because of telepathic cops.

      • When I was young, I used to go the the library and prowl through old, musty short story collections hoping for a Bester story I’d never read. Now you can just point your browser at isfdb.org to get the complete list. It’s progress, but…

  6. Going through the jury instructions from the Ninth for section 1983 claims.
    Finished qualified immunity this morning, and I need to go through the footnotes to highlight stuff. State created danger and unlawful seizure for the rest of the day.

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