I wrote this as a blog about the movies I saw over the holidays so I decided to re-post it here. The movies we saw were The Hobbit and Les Miserables.
I am a huge fan of Lord of the Rings so I was super excited to see The Hobbit. I enjoyed the book well enough (although admittedly it’s not as good as LOTR) and Peter Jackson did a fantastic job with LOTR so I had high hopes. When I heard that it was going to be made into a trilogy I was skeptical. Apparently though, the Hobbit is supposedly actually just going to be the first two movies and the third one will be based on some of the appendix sections from Return of the King. That’s kind of odd but hey, it’s better than trying to stretch The Hobbit over three movies I guess. We saw The Hobbit on New Year’s Eve, the day after we arrived back home from Maine (a 14-16 hour drive!). It was a late showing so we weren’t sure if we were going to make it back in time, but we got back at 11:45! Lol. When the movie started, we were pleasantly surprised when we recognized Martin Freeman as Bilbo. We absolutely LOVED Sherlock and he was Watson in that.
So about the movie itself. I liked it personally; I thought it was very good. I don’t think my parents or our friends that we went with liked it as much though. My mom in particular was grossed out by the goblin king guy. I honestly didn’t find the special effects in this movie as good as they were in Lord of the Rings. In LOTR I thought they did a really good job of making the creatures and things look more like they were actually there but I didn’t think the effects were as good in The Hobbit. There were some changes, mainly the scene where Gandalf spoke with Saruman and Galadriel, because that was not in the book. It was a harmless enough addition though. Also, there were some kind of ridiculous moments like the trees knocking each other down like dominoes and the platform breaking off and sliding down the cliff and three awfully similar scenarios where the dwarfs were captured and Gandalf comes out of nowhere to save them, but then again those were all in the book as well so that I think just comes down to the fact that The Hobbit was just not quite as good of a story as Lord of the Rings. Overall, I still really enjoyed the movie.
The other film we saw was Les Miserables. We were going to see it with our whole family and our friend’s family but the guys were NOT interested so we went the next day and made it a girl’s day out. I had neither read the book nor seen the stage production prior to seeing the movie (which is unusual for me, as I usually insist upon reading the book first). When trailers first started coming out for Les Mis, some people criticized Anne Hathaway’s performance of I Dreamed a Dream. I didn’t really understand that. Ok, I’m sure by now we have all heard Susan Boyle’s version, which is very good. The difference between these two versions though was that Susan Boyle was just performing the song just to perform it, while Anne Hathaway was performing it in character. They are two very different kinds of performances and I don’t think either one was better than the other one, they were just different, and both very good. The other thing was that apparently the only main member of the cast that had not had any prior Broadway experience was Russell Crowe, so people were wondering if as a result his performance wouldn’t be as good. I found him to be just fine. His singing voice was just a little nasel-y but still strong and I thought he sounded pretty much just as good as the others. I did find it interesting that the musical aspect of the movie was more opera style, where just about everything is sung with very little spoken dialogue. The movie was great; very sad though but more bittersweet than depressing I guess. Although my brother was dead set against seeing it because it was a musical, we think he would have liked it because it is largely about war and the French Revolution.