A Birthday in Middle Earth

The Fellowship inviting me on An Unexpected Journey

Thank you all for the lovely birthday wishes last week and over the weekend.  The day couldn't have been any more perfect and the world didn't come to an end!  What more can a girl ask for?

We did go see The Hobbit in IMAX 3-D HFR ASAP JSYK.  For all of you who want to see it but haven't, I definitely think it's a must-see in the movie theater and in IMAX if you can manage it.  The New Zealand landscapes are just as fantastic in this film as they were in Lord of the Rings ("LOTR") and you should see them on the biggest screen possible.  My personal opinion, which pretty much counts for nil, is that PJ should have filmed this movie first and then moved on to the LOTR trilogy.  I understood in LOTR why they had to cut out sections from the books to make the movies more manageable in length but in The Hobbit, they added on pieces to the plot that were not part of the original canon and don't exactly tie in well.  And since I'm such an uber-nerd, I could tell exactly which scenes were added on and made sure to point those out to Siri while we were watching, which was distracting and didn't make her too happy with me.  However, the parts in The Hobbit that were awesome?  The battle scenes and the riddle scene with Gollum.  I won't ruin it for those of you who haven't seen it but Gollum / Smeagol pretty much steals the show.

Overall, the film is really entertaining and as my sister aptly puts it - better than LOTR if only for the fact that you don't have to suffer through the awkward scenes between Frodo and Sam.

Tomorrow I'll be cooking up a storm for the Christmas Eve feast and will be sure to share some of the successes and, inevitably, some of the misses of our meal!