Note: This is cross-posted from my newspaper blog at The Marshall Independent.
Our local movie theater website says “The Hobbit” will premier in a midnight showing on Thursday, Dec. 13.
Oh boy, for Tolkien junkies this has been a long wait indeed.
It’s hard to believe it’s been about 11 years since the first installment of “The Lord of the Rings.” I know it is because my son, now 11, was a baby when it came out.
My apartment in Warsaw is eight floors above the entrance to the Kino Bajka movie theater where we saw “The Fellowship of the Ring.”
“Kino” means cinema in Polish, and “Bajka” very appropriately means fairy tale.
We had arranged to put the baby down, and have my sister-in-law stay over while we attended the midnight show. We had bought advance tickets – and then discovered we’d made the idiot mistake of going to the midnight of the next day. Midnight marks a new day you know. So we had to see it in shifts.
Same thing for the second part. We saw it in London while staying at my sister’s apartment, taking turns while the other stayed up with a now very active toddler. Saw “The Return of the King” in Warsaw, and wondered, “What do we do now?”
Well now we have another decade or so of Tolkien movies. Of course I’ll review it, and I’ll have some controversial things to say about them (from a safe place in hiding of course) but given Peter Jackson’s track record I really don’t think we have anything to worry about.
And believe me, given the disappointing Ralph Bakshi attempt, and the disastrous but mercifully forgotten Rankin/Bass abomination*, some of us had reason to be worried before we saw Fellowship.
But here’s the cool part, my children will get to experience the series more-or-less in story order.
I’ll take them to see “The Hobbit” and they’ll be able to catch “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy on DVD, or maybe special showings in the theater once “The Hobbit” is out.
I don’t know when that’s going to be though. When we got the video and played Fellowship we had to turn it off at the battle on Weathertop amid the ruins of Amon Sul. My son freaked when Frodo was wounded by the Nazgul and started crying “Frodo, Frodo!” He still hasn’t seen the trilogy all the way through.
Yeah, it was that scary.
My son is old enough, and a monster movie junkie, so no worries. My daughter is only six though… we’ll see.
* To be fair, Rankin/Bass did a not terrible animated Hobbit.