The Hobbit - An unexpected journey

I read this years ago, as I did the Lord of the Rings, and my (possibly flawed) memory tells me it was a children's book, unlike the latter. Not so with the film.

Yes, the plot is more-or-less the same. Yes, the characters are all there (plus some). Yes, appropriate links are made with LOTR (some of which did not, however, exist in the book, as the later novels had not yet been written). And yet...

The Hobbit was a children's book (admittedly, one you read in the last year of Primary School), but this is not a children's film. If you want to take your under tens, forget it; they'll have nightmares. It's a 12A and worth every digit. I don't remember the book being quite so blood-thirsty.

As with LOTR, the visual effects are brilliantly done, with everything on a vaster, more dramatic scale than anything in the book: cliff-hangers, vertiginous drops and scary monsters abound; the dragon Smaug is huge and "the last homely house" elevated to the grand scale of the Rivendale that superceded it in Tolkein's imagination - but which preceeds it in the experience of the filmgoer. And therein lies the problem - how could something we've already seen be allocated it's original status as conceived by the author, if that means shrinking it? And the events themselves are stretched out to breaking point - the book is less than an inch thick, wheras LOTR was three volumes. It's hard to see how three films can be eked out from this children's fairytale.

So, no, I did not enjoy this as much as LOTR. It felt as if the intention was to recreate the success of LOTR while conveniently ignoring the fact that the books were very different. If there is one good thing to come out of this, however, it is to motivate me to read The Hobbit again, just in case my memory serves me wrong.

To Rome With Love by Woody Allen

Some say this isn't as good as Midnight in Paris. I have to disagree. It's just as funny, with just as much pretty scenery, pretty young people and romantic vistas of the historical European cities envied so much by the Americans.

The plots are several: various love triangles, mistaken identity, farce: there are at least 3 unconnected story-lines here. I made the mistake of trying to connect them all up from the beginning, but they don't even follow the same time frame. It gets a bit surreal at times - just as it did in Midnight - but go with it.

The main difference to the last one is the appearance of the man (Allen)himself, typically self-deprecatingly, as Grumpy Old Man who, together with his sensible, long-suffering wife, provides much of the humour. Lots of other famous faces too - can't remember the names, but you'll have seen them elsewhere.

Another nice touch is the prevalence of Italian spoken (with subtitles!), which you don't always get in American films set elsewhere.