And, you may be right at that. IMHO, Gandalf was pretty well prohibited from using overt magic, but he could use the fire magic from Narya. Most of his other stuff was parlor tricks.
He also used the “spell” of pipeweed to calm Radagast down when he was getting all hyper.
And for you credit-geeks out there (like me) - how about that disclaimer at the end of the credits about how the film is not to be taken to be inferring any benefits of tobacco products? Ha!! Cracked me up. Best credit nugget since “Phantasm.”
Spell, magic, incantation… My semantics are not the best in that area. But in general, what the hedgehog and the other animals had was magical/otherwordly, and as soon as Radagast realized that, he counteracted by using his own powers. The spiders again probably sensed that he was stronger than they thought, and let him be.
Count me in as someone who was also surprised some of the dwarves were… good looking. I’ve never gotten the sense from the books that any of them would be good looking (for humans, I’m sure for female dwarves Gimli may have been the hottest prince ever).
Also, I hope the movies at the end stay true to the book in the sense that:
At the end, most of the dwarves die, including Thorin, Fili, and Kili
Most? Thorin, Fili and Kill are the only dwarves of the party of 13 who die in the book. Everyone else survives the Battle of Five Armies.
Oh, sure…all the hot ones die! 
Yes. Balin, Ori and Oin later go to Moria and are killed there long before the Fellowship arrives. Oin was killed by the Watcher in the Water, Balin shot from ambush as he went to look in Mirrormere, and IIRC the evidence suggests that Ori made the final entry in the Book of Records before being killed in the dwarves’ last stand.
I think my ears caught Radagast invoking the name of Elbereth, top female Vala and Queen of the Stars, as part of his spell to drive the curse out of his hedgehog. Creatures of darkness don’t like to hear that name bandied about (and of course it is a glass phial with trapped starlight in it that repels Shelob in LotR).
Yeah, that would make a whole lot more sense, and follow other instances of invoking Elbereth in the books, than the spiders being spooked because Radagast healed a rodent.
[spoiler]Interestingly, the Rankin/Bass 1977 animation was far more brutal; it killed off more than half the dwarves in the Battle of Five Armies. I don’t think it ever said exactly who, except Bombur and of course Thorin.
Of our original thirteen, how many are left? Seven. – And, Thorin? Soon will be only six…
That’s my favorite scene from the Rankin/Bass version. No matter how many years it’s been, no matter how many times I’ve seen it, I still cry like a little bitch every single time at Thorin’s farewell.
[/spoiler]
Anyway, I just hope that when Jackson gets to the part of Mirkwood with the spiders, he includes this song. 
Saw it this afternoon. I thought it was moving just fine up until the end of the troll sequence and took a big cinematic dump starting from the made-up warg attack until the start of Riddles in the Dark. After going back to the dwarves, the movie went straight to hell until the credits, including apparently just landing the company on Carrock. I’m okay with Radagast in theory but don’t care for how the character was handled or the scenes he was in. I don’t really see why it couldn’t have been Gandalf in a flashback telling of how he went into Dol Guldur and got the items from Thrain to the dwarves and then bring it up again later in Rivendell. And I don’t mind Jackson trying to bring in everything to do with Dol Guldur, but so far he’s done so ham-handedly and wasted screen time that could have been used in either moving the plot along (or elaborating scenes) or further getting into the Dol Guldur material.
I quite liked it, but then I too am a gentle soul, who prefers the company of animals. (Though I do draw the line at letting them nest in my hair and shit down my face. Seriously?)
Saw it, loved it.
Now the nitpickery, but not really about the movie;
1> People who compare Radigast to Jar Jar Binks. I want to smack the crap out of you. I wonder what you’d have made of Tom Bombadill.
2> “Too long”. Nope, just right. The thing I love most about the LotR and Harry Potter and other ‘well loved universes’ movies is the IMMERSION. Please, dawdle over the scenery as much as you like, Mr. Director. Give me extraneous scenes of life that have nothing to do with the plot. Let me spend as much time in this Eye and Mind Candy Universe as I can, and let me see lots more of it than the typical American “every moment must be action packed or it’s boring” movie mindset allows for.
3> Changes from the book. Don’t fucking care. I accept that movies and books are often two versions of the same story. As long as it’s fairly close, I’m ok with it. I only get bent out of shape when they use the name and a rough approximation of the setting to produce total crap that is nothing like the source material (I’m looking at YOU, Starship Troopers!)
And that Dragon eye at the very end was very very very cool.
A stoned Jar Jar Binks?
Thank you for the laugh.
Meesa merry fellow!
I wonder how Jar-Jar would say, “Oh God, the rush!”
Saw it twice. Alone on Christmas Eve and with relatives on Christmas Day, both times in IMAX 3D 24 fps.
I loved it. Not as much as LOTR but that’s a very high standard. There were things that bugged me in my first viewing that I was okay with the second time around, mostly having to do with the tonal shifts between frivolous and serious. The one I couldn’t get past was the guano - really, Mister Jackson.
My biggest fear going into this movie was the Dwarves. I have the LOTR Extended DVDs and I fast-forward through all the added scenes with John Rhys-Davies because I can’t bear the buffoonery, and The Hobbit threatened to be Gimli times twelve. It’s why I never posted in the movie anticipation thread. So I emerged from the theater feeling relieved, thanks in large part to the casting. Thorin’s company provided some sorely needed dignity between the belches.
And speaking of the cast, Martin Freeman was absolutely wonderful. I read The Hobbit when I was young and couldn’t really relate to Bilbo, not like I did with Frodo later on. But Freeman’s Bilbo Baggins is engaging and believable, and I was completely caught up with him as the story unfolded. The scene where he’s deciding Gollum’s fate gives me chills just thinking about it.
Hopefully I’ll get to see this in 48 fps, maybe even today. In the meantime I have the soundtrack and a car with a cd player, whee!
Fang and I saw it this weekend. We enjoyed it. A few thoughts:
1 - PJ needs an editor who can say, “No.” It could have lost a half hour easily, and been a better movie for it.
2 - I liked the dwarves. They were all individuals. The Rakin-Bass cartoon, and even book give the feeling of there only being Bilbo, Gandalf, Thorin, and twelve generic Dwarves. Each dwarf in this had a distinctive personality, which is a feat considering their number.
3 - Radagast was not quite how I would have pictured him personality-wise, I had a quieter idea in my head, rather than the semi-manic portrayal. McCoy’s interpretation worked though. He was not a Jar-jar. He was also mercifully brief.
4 - The 48 fps will take some getting used to, but it looks good. At one point I was getting irritated at this fool standing in the theater, when I realized I was glaring at the back of Thorin’s head.
One thing made me laugh. Towards the end, when they were trapped in the tree, just as the last tree started to tip over the cliff, Fang let out with an exasperated, “Ah c’mon! Really!?” He turned to me, and whispered, “These guys just can’t get a break.”
…so… what the hell was going on with the stone giant mountain battle? That was just…bizarre.
They just liked to come out on a stormy night and have a good punch-up - they weren’t even paying attention to the squishy organic life-forms crawling about the mountains, and even if they were aware of them they wouldn’t have cared two hoots who they were, where they were from or what they were doing.
They’re more or less transposed as-is from the book, although the book doesn’t say that they’re made of stone and, from context, at least some of them must be approachable: Gandalf later says, of the goblin-trap got the dwarves caught, that he must see if he can find a more or less decent giant to block it up again, or there will be no getting over the mountains for honest travellers.