The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey is part one of Peter Jackson's three-part prequel to his Lord of the Rings film trilogy from last decade. Unless you're a Tolkien diehard or a sword and sorcery nut I wouldn't recommend this film. I was hoping An Unexpected Journey might tap into some of the Lord of the Rings vibe, which for me was a Hollywood blockbuster cinematic discourse on Manichaeism. It does not.
Lord of the Rings was a manifestation of the Zeitgeist of the new millennium -- Bush v. Gore, 9/11, the invasion of Iraq. People wanted to make sense of what was happening to them. So they went to church, which for a lot of Americans, let's say most, is the movie theater. And what they found was Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings. Those three films -- The Fellowship of the Ring (2001), The Two Towers (2002) and The Return of the King (2003) -- made perfect sense of the times. I went to the theater and saw each one, and the theater was always full. Now, ten years and a global financial meltdown later, people don't go to the theaters like they used to; they have theaters in their own home in the form of large wall-mounted high-definition television screens or, in my case, a good rectangular computer monitor. Our shared spaces are shrinking, atomizing. The Shire, where Jackson's Tolkien films lovingly begin -- a bourgeois suburb at the end of the Western mind -- is disappearing. A buddy of mine (the same one whose opinion regarding North Korea seems closer to the mark than my own) said after seeing one of the Lord of the Rings movies, "Americans think they're good Hobbits living in the Shire when they're actually Orcs in the service of Saruman."
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