The local fleapit have started advertising it. Unfortunately the only showings listed are 3D only.
If I could just get Bilbo’s dressing gown I’d be happy.
Martin Freeman apparently got to keep it! (At 1:00 here.
64% Fresh at Rotten Tomatoes…(same as original film albeit in a sample size of 11)
Yeah, it was 83% this morning, so who knows?
The latest Time magazine has an essay about visiting the set. Fun fact: everyone you see onscreen is wearing a wig, and the dwarves’ hair and beards are mostly made from yak hair.
That sounds hopeful.
Uh-oh:
“Among the additions created by Jackson and his team is a budding romance between the elf Tauriel and the dwarf Kili, a subplot that plays less hokey than you might fear.”
Well of course. It couldn’t possibly play more hokey than I fear.
You are capable of great fear, my friend.
I suspect its for cinematic reasons, to make her stand out from all the other wood-elves who are wearing similar clothes, hair-styles and make-up.
But there are red-haired elves in the Simarillion, so its not really against cannon either.
Huh. No buzz for this movie here at all. 
I’ll be seeing it on Tues. night. Looking forward to it, but not all aflutter, I have to say.
Holy crap, I stand corrected. I did not realize there was an example of a red-headed elf.
I plan to see the Hobbit tomorrow weather permitting.
we have tickets for a showing tonite - we watched the extended edition of part 1 last nite.
We are appropiately atithered.
I saw Hobbit 1 and 2 in a marathon showing from 8:40 to 2:40 last night. I enjoyed it enough but let’s just say they bent the story from the original considerably more than the first installment; there were hints of that in the trailer with the appearance of a red-headed she-elf. If you’re curious how far it gets, the movie ends with Smaug flying off to destroy Lake Town.
Clown shoes are readily available.
I saw it on wednesday in 2D, because I wasn’t impressed with the 3d HFR version of the first movie.
Opinions:
I liked it a lot, and it was a definite improvement over the first installment. Even though it’s a middle movie, it seems to flow better. The first movie may have suffered the most from splitting the story into three parts, and it seemed more like an amusement park ride at times. This one felt like a movie.
Story spoilers:
[spoiler]
They take a lot of liberties with the story, so some Hobbit purists may be annoyed. The basic story structure is still the same. It’s been ages since I last read Hobbit, so I might remember some things wrong. There’s a lot of minor changes, and quite a few completely new scenes, and not just the Gandalf in Dol Guldur stuff we already knew about.
They split the party before going into Erebor. Fili, Kili, Bofur and Oin stay behind in Laketown for various reasons, primarily because Kili was shot with a Morgul arrow. There’s an orc invasion of laketown, and an elaborate fight/chase scene between Smaug and the dwarves. Presumably we’ll see Smaug’s attack on Laketown from the eyes of Bard, the dwarves, and Tauriel/Legolas in the 3rd installment.
There’s a barrel ride chase scene involving orcs, dwarves, and elves. Legolas uses dwarf heads as stepping stones while killing orcs, and it’s just as corny as you might imagine. Reminded me of the shield surfing scene. The so called “romance” subplot between Kili and Tauriel wasn’t nearly as bad as I imagined.
Smaug looks magnificient, and is probably the best looking CGI creature of recent times. He’s also satisfyingly enormous, though some scenes don’t have an appropriate scale comparison. I went to this movie hoping to see a really awesome dragon, and I got what I wanted. [/spoiler]
I saw it last night at the midnight showing in HFR 3D Imax. The picture was gorgeous!
I liked it much more than the first film, it felt like it had more emotion and story to it than the first one. I think this does suffer from being the middle film much more than The Two Towers did, however. With that film, at least you had Helm’s Deep to end with. Here, there really isn’t an ending, it just basically stops.
I was not a fan of the romance aspect, which seemed shoehorned in and added nothing except runtime to an already long movie, nor did I like them making Legolas such a large role. I thought he’d only be at Mirkwood (which does make canonical sense.)
Smaug was awesome and looked incredibly real in the HFR 3D.
I did notice one thing that stood out as very odd to me:
(Not really a spoiler of any kind, but)
What was up with having several close ups of Black, Asian & Hispanic random people in the crowds at Laketown? It weirdly stuck out to me as trying to appease some PC thing of people claiming the LOTR rings films were just about white people and I don’t remember any other towns as being so racially diverse. Was there an in-story reason for it? Because it didn’t feel inclusive to me at all, rather it was like Peter Jackson was saying "Here! Look here’s a Black person! CU on them! Now CU on the Hispanic woman! Now the Black woman again! We’re not just white people here, see? See!?
I saw it today at an 11:30 am matinee.
Without spoilers, I can say this–
The 3d works a lot better in this one–except for Beorn’s bees.
If you want to enjoy this, go to see it thinking of it as a ‘reboot’.
Like the batman movies, where every third movie or so they start all over with the only connection being ‘a whacked out vigilante who goes by “batman”, in or around Gotham City, and he has a butler’
This is like that.
It is almost, but not quite, a completely different story that includes some nods back to the source material.
If you can see it like that, it is a pretty sound movie.
If you go into it wanting to see the book on screen, you are going to hate hate hate it.
Run time is 2:40 (!) and I was surprised when it was over–it felt pretty short.
Smaug was really good.
The wistful romance thing worked pretty well (except for one annoying line)–don’t worry about it. It is played more like ships passing in the night that have a momentary connection.
I liked it a lot, but I was willing to view it as a reboot.
YMMV
–jack