[Lalwendë]

Originally Posted by Legate of Amon Lanc

The drowsy-voice spoken quote sounds a bit like when she was in the Two Towers or RotK for no apparent purpose having mind-conversations with Elrond which didn't really make any sense (as in, anybody else could have been saying that there). "Mithrandir, why the halfling?" is already stuck in my head and will probably be a quote repeated on some fitting silly occassions even if I decide to go and see the whole movie. Which I am somehow beginning to doubt after this one.

The drowsy (dozy?) Elf speech always irritates me. At least we don't see them enough to make it a big issue.

And I already hate Merry and Pippin. Sorry, I meant Fili and Kili. Because of their accents. I don't know how native English-speakers see this, but that accent just annoys me when it's used on purpose... and here it certainly is. Agan of course already likes them, not only because of how they look, but because they sound like Jon Snow on top of that.

They are Northern, so they have Northern accents! It's perfectly correct! I've noticed other Dwarves who sound Irish/Scots and that's acceptable too. Posh accents have no place in Middle-earth. Note that even Gandalf still sounds a bit Northern and Bilbo isn't posh either. Crikey, a film cast with actors who sounded like Tolkien would need to have subtitles because everyone would be sat there going "Eh? What?" And posh Dwarves would be more wrong than all the wrong things put together from all the Tolkien adaptations

Really, the whole thing, whether it's faithful or divergent, whether it gets picked apart because they use the wrong colour of beard, hangs on the acting. It's this that takes you on the journey and I cannot see anyone who is miscast (apart from Hugo Weaving with his disco eyebrows as Elrond), in fact the cast could not be more perfect. I know I was right all those years in agitating for Martin Freeman as Bilbo, my favourite character in the whole legendarium. We know Ian McKellen is right, and there are other obvious winners. The one who I think is going to sneak up and steal all the scenes is James Nesbitt.

Originally Posted by Inziladun

True, but the problem is that PJ's idea of "humor" seems incompatible with the subject book. He ought to be aiming for this, but I'm getting more a feeling of this.

The problem with comedy is everyone has different tastes. Some will want Python-esque, but let's be honest, nobody has ever pulled off Python-esque except the Pythons themselves, and even then not in any way consistently. Python was funny because it traded on contemporary morals and politics and got laughs out of being shocking/smutty and The Hobbit is not the place for that in any way. What it can do is have silly and bizarre moments, which are something Tolkien specialised in. And with rabbit sleds in the mix, it sounds like that is going to happen.

Strikes me though that we have criticism that the films are going to be too dark and epic, but on the other hand, any hints of humour or light-heartedness get criticised. So from this I deduce that nothing will satisfy some as you cannot have it both ways