The Glade 4.0

I like the automotionplus Its awesome.

But whoever invented shakeycam and extremeactioncloseupsmashcutactioncam needs to be purged with fire.

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Holy shitsnacks!

There were many people rejected talkies too. The eventual holodecks won't be in 24 fps.

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Les Zombis et les Loups-Garous!

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
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Song of the Lonely Mountains. End-credits version.

Reviews are coming in. Gist:

Good but not great
Lighter in tone than LotR
Less emotional connection
Bloated, bloated, bloated; absolutely no need for this to be a 9-hour story

As for the 48fps (HFR) film, very very few seem to like it, saying that some shots exhibit incredible clarity, but the trade-off of making everything look like a Benny Hill sketch (or, to quote one reviewer, the 48fps makes the film look like "the greatest BBC production ever") isn't impressing anyone.

People have also been leaving the film with headaches, dizziness, and motion sickness due to the 48fps.

I should note that 2D showing of The Hobbit are all in 24fps (after audience reaction prompted Warner Bros. to scrap their plans for a mostly-HFR rollout. Here is the list of theaters showing it in HFR.

We've got midnight tickets for 3D IMAX, but our theater isn't listed for HFR. I kinda want to see it in 48fps once, just to see it for myself.

I'm reading the Hobbit for the first time... I am so glad this isn't the first movie in this verse.

LOTR was *so* much better.

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Holy shitsnacks!

I was hardly interested enough to watch this when I thought it'd be a three hour single movie. Now that the idiots have stretched a single book into a trilogy I have zero desire to watch.

I'm fighting the ambivalence, myself. My kids want to see it, which I kind of hope is the target audience. But, given that it's essentially a children's story being adapted by a very adult director, I dunno. I fear muddle.

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This cold and dark tormented hell
Is all I`ll ever know
So when you get to heaven
May the devil be the judge

Hrm. Called it?

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

All told, I don't think I liked the book very much, it was not at all what I expected. It read like a shitty DND campaign with a bunch of NPCs (the Dwarves) and the GM's girlfriend's character (Bilbo).

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Holy shitsnacks!

Huh. When I think "read like a shitty DND campaign with a bunch of NPCs and the GM's girlfriend's character" my brain immediately thinks: Dragonlance. Specifically, "The Dragons of Winter Spring Summer Dawning Whatever" series. Turns out, that's exactly what they were.

I remember thinking "Oh the GM's girlfriend's character dies? Yeah. That's going to be permanent." Sure enough...

But The Hobbit? It was a kid's book. Specifically, Tolkien made his 8 year-old son do a book report on it to give him his approval or not. At face value, it's a very entertaining book of lighthearted fare. It also has 100% more dragons than LOTR, which automatically puts it in the realm of "good."

But it's a book definitely not made to fill 3 movies.

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Les Zombis et les Loups-Garous!

Ah, well that explains things. I had expected it to be more LOTRy.

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Holy shitsnacks!

The other big thing to keep in mind (other than The Hobbit was Tolkien's first book) was that Tolkien didn't have some grandmaster plan in the back of his brain while writing the book. The ring Bilbo finds was nothing more than a cool magic ring that had no inherent evil qualities whatsoever... other than allowing Bilbo to be a dick and bending the rules of their riddle game.

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Les Zombis et les Loups-Garous!

Yeah, that's the GF's character part. The dwarves were *utterly* useless and the PC finds a superpowerful item that just happens to enable the entire adventure to happen ok.

I dunno, just felt kinda cheesy to me. But then, I'm not the target audience I suppose.

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Holy shitsnacks!

It actually has an infinitely greater percentage of dragons (from 0 to 1) than Lord of the Rings. If the flying steeds of the Ringwraiths were draconic in any way, that drops to 11% as many dragons, but 1 Smaug is still greater than 9 flying Nazgul steeds.

(Tolkien's only words on the steeds anywhere else were: "Pterodactyl? Yes and No. I did not intend the steed of the Witch-King to be what is now called a `pterodactyl', and often is drawn (with rather less shadowy evidence than lies behind many monsters of the new and facinating semi-scientific mythology of the `Prehistoric'). But obviously it is pterodactylic and owes much to the new mythology, and its description even provides a sort of way in which it could be a last survivor of older geological eras.")

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

Pff. Smaug was a chump.

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Holy shitsnacks!

And yet you must pay many and much praise and tribute to his name, for without him dragons as we geeks know them would ne'er have existed. He is the Original Gangsta.

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Les Zombis et les Loups-Garous!

You mother **** talk like you forgot about Fafnir.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

Who's fafnir?

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Holy shitsnacks!

Fafnir is more of a serpent, isn't he?

The Hobbit reminded me a lot of Two Towers in that until the end it was a hard read.

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Raell Kromwell

Depends on the telling. The words serpent and dragon are often used interchangeably in mythology, and art commonly depicts the same character with and without wings depending on who's producing it.

Fafnir was the covetous son of Hreidmar, who killed his father and stole his gold. His greed eventually turned him into a dragon who breathed poison and sowed terror into the hearts of mortals. Basically, the quintessential dragon we all know today, and that Smaug was based on.

Fafnir was not the only mythological dragon to be portrayed as greedy and covetous, guarding a hoard of treasure. So the notion that Smaug was the granddaddy of our favorite dragon stereotype is absolutely laughable. Papa Tolkien did nothing so much as copy the story of King Arthur and change some names around. The One Ring is just the Holy Grail.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

Actually, Tolkien combined a hell of a lot of mythological and literary elements from Norse, Germanic, and Gaelic cultures, in addition to the legends of King Arthur, Beowulf, and your already mentioned Icelandic saga, Sigurd the Volsung (the slayer of Fafnir)... an older (and still not original) dragonslaying tale.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

3D or 2D on this? Recommendations?

I'm going full 3D Imax on this one.