An Unexpected Journey, or the morning after

[LordPhillock]

Great elephants... what is this wizardry? Some of you actually know of me? This is... unexpected!

That's just too humbling! Please allow me a sigh of utter relief to see that my sharing of that review didn't get snubbed to the side or encouraged a snarky frown - I initially made this review just for my personal friends to read since they wanted to know what I thought of it, and when I felt bold enough to share it on another Tolkien-centric web site, I was accused of being "worse than Christopher Tolkien". Though, in retrospect, that might be a good thing.

Yes, I agree with you about Armitage - as I've stated in my review about Freeman. Actor's craft and all that!

Are you intending to do one for The Hobbit? And if so, would your disappointment with the soundtrack for "An Unexpected Journey" be an impediment to that?

Well, I'll give that an indefinite maybe. The audiobook project I started working on (and thanks so much for calling it 'much-lauded', it made me do this: in real life) was something I did almost exactly why you started doing yours; and because I felt "left out" when the Hobbit movies began production. Therefore, now that I am feeling rather fatigued from the whole thing (those sound effects - those sound effects! Aaah!) I'm not planning on doing the Hobbit audiobook... at least not in the same way or by myself. Yes, the music cues are a little difficult to fit in since most of it is loud and quickly paced. I did start doing a personal project in just recording an audio-log (with sound effects and music - what's wrong with me?) on what I wanted the movie to feel like, and I do show those to some of my friends from time to time. At some point in the future, I wouldn't mind sharing it to some of you individually. "if they asks - if they asks nicely."

If they'd trimmed a lot of this the film might have been less conventionally exciting but it would to my mind have been significantly less generic as well, and wouldn't have been as needlessly long as it was. When I hear about material which was left on the cutting room floor, not always book-based but certainly more character-building, like Bilbo exploring Rivendell, Saruman discussing the Seven Rings and Glóin talking about his family I'm staggered by some of the content they left in.

Really? Well, to the "Extremeleylong Edition" DVD it goes!