The Sunday Salon: The Hobbit 2 Trailer #1

While I found The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey to be a mixed bag, I, nonetheless, dropped everything and ran to my laptop a little before 1 PM this past Tuesday. There’s always something about your first fandom, isn’t there? (Sit down, Digimon, you don’t count.) Plus, it’s the summer for television, I’m almost done with the Bondathon in real time, and I’m lying in painful wait for a copy of Star Trek: The Voyage Home to come in at the library, so I’m a little starved for content at the moment. And so, like everyone else on the Internet, I offer up my traditional frame-by-frame analysis. Hit it.

• 0:09: Dramatic Thranduil monologue… Pace’s English accent feels a little thin to me.
• 0:18: The underground palace of Mirkwood. Love the use of stone columns to mimic what we see done with the trees in Lothlorien.
• 0:20: That reminds me, I need to get cracking on my Thranduil costume.
• 0:24: Barrels out of Bonds!
• 0:26: Butterflies! Aw, what a fun, delightful kid’s movie—
• 0:29: OH GOD THE CGI ELVES ARE ATTACKING
• 0:33: Mirkwood looked so psydelic in the production videos. I’m glad it looks properly dark and spooky here.
• 0:36: I can’t tell if Legolas is CGI in this brief transition.
• 0:39: “Do not think that I age.” Hey, Orlando Bloom.
• 0:40: Beorn’s house! That is presumably Beorn, right? They’ve been keeping terribly mum about him.
• 0:42: We have all been worried about Tauriel. But I like her, and I like that she is the only elf who seems to question the fact why everything is AWFUL IN MIRKWOOD ALL THE TIME.
• 0:45: Dale!
• 0:46: Hey, Legolas, did your mom braid that padawan braid or what?
• 0:47: This shot, more than anything else in the trailer, reminds me of the original films; all tactile and good design. Also, Tauriel points out that it is kind of their responsibility to clean Mirkwood. I love you, Tauriel.
• 0:53: Can I appoint Sylvester McCoy and Ian McKellen my grandfathers? Please?
• 0:58: Oh, Ian McKellen, you are perfect. PERFECT.
• 1:02: More Mirkwood. Love the use of roots here, as the elves are still connected to the trees. Nice light quality, too.
• 1:04: “COME, ADORE LEE PACE’S MIGHTY BROWS, AUDIENCE.”
• 1:05: Legolas—with his trademark double daggers and fishtail braid—stomps off to go investigate, direcrted by another member of the guard, I suppose.
• 1:10: Oh man, I totally repressed the white orc. BOO. BOOO.
• 1:18: Bard!
• 1:26: Getting attacked by Thorin’s dad… wait, is this a flashback? Are we flashing back to it in THIS film? When the information was pertinent last… oh, Hobbit trilogy. Shh. Shh. It’s going to be okay.
• 1:27: Man, Tauriel, I bet your kids with Lindir are going to be just as awesome as you are.
• 1:38: Ken Stott is perfection. It’s stuff like this that makes these films have heart.
• 1:50: And a shot of Smaug in dim lighting. I know they had Cumberbatch do some motion capture for Smaug’s face, but I think I may be imagining the likeness…

This week… well, I’ve been using my mornings to work on book blogging and my afternoons to work on my homework for my publishing program, so I’ve been feeling very productive. I might even be done with the homework next week, allowing me to get to the true purpose of my vacation: watching Star Trek in my fuzzy houserobe and weeping “They’re friends” into my bowl of strawberries. (Moshe Kacher has a joke about discovering he hit menopause while crying over Star Trek: The Next Generation. I’m living that joke.) Bookwise, I’m making some progress—I read The Time Traveler’s Guide to Elizabethan England this week, as well as Gotham Central: In the Line of Duty. And, as I mentioned, I’m almost done with the Bondathon in real time. On the blog, we’ll end around December. God bless scheduled posts.

This week’s links:

• tumblr proposes an actor for the next Doctor: Matthew LeBlanc. “I’m the Doctor. I know, right?!“
• zenhabits proposes thinking of new habits as things you are allowed to do instead of things you have to do to motivate yourself.
• Comedian Aamer Rahman tackles the problematic nature of Daenerys’ story in the Game of Thrones Season 3 finale at io9.
• The good news: there’s going to be a Gods of Egypt movie! Yay! The bad news: the casting director thinks Nikolaj Coster-Waldau can play Horus! Boo! Here’s the petition to stop this nonsense.
• tumblr user thylaa recaps Star Trek (2009) hilariously, and doesn’t let Abrams get away with any nonsense. I’m t’cry’la, Kira, t’cry’la with laughter. (Incidentally, I think this is where “oh no, he’s hot” comes from.)
• Remember that Cheerios ad featuring an interracial couple and their adorable child? Here’s an awesome queer parody of it (the reaction to the commercial, not the commercial itself).
• Today marks fifty years of women in space, as it’s the “the 50th anniversary of cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova’s 1963 trip to low Earth Orbit“. Celebrate!
• N. K. Jemisin’s speech at Continuum asks the sf community for reconciliation, which she imagines as a push for diversity in the field and a push against bigotry.
• Author Gini Koch reacts to the latest issue of SFWA’s Bulletin, pointing out that she does not need to justify her status as a successful female speculative fiction writer to anyone, least of all racist and sexist dinosaurs. It reminds me of something Robert Downey Jr. once said: nod politely when you hear advice and go do whatever you were going to do in the first place. Rocking it is the best revenge. (That last sentence is me.)
• Mindy Farabee examines diversity in speculative fiction at The LA Times.
  

What do you make of the new trailer?