Hobbits

I don't know about you, but, I for one, am not looking forward to the new Hobbit movie.  I don't understand why they changed it so much.  Furthermore, I don't understand why people were raving about the first flick.  It was too long and egregiously dragged out.  Many scenes in the movie weren't in the book.  I'm sorry, was J.R.R. Tolkien on the writing team?  It was my understanding that he died whilst writing The Silmarillion, then his son tragically tried to finish it.

I remember when it wasn't cool to like Tolkien, comic-books, or reading of any kind.

What happened?

Has main-stream-media and Hollywood-hokum really canted our views of "hip" that much just by adapting things that weren't previously considered socially-acceptable into three-hour-special-effects-filled-marvels?

The reason The Lord of the Rings trilogy worked so well on film is because the material was taken damn-near word-for-word, sentence-by-sentence, paragraph-by-paragraph from the books.  Go back and read the series.  Some people do it every year.  The texts aren't that impressively written.  Yet, why do we keep reading them?  Why do we watch the continuously syndicated endless-loops on TV?  It's because the story is f****** awesome.  I defy you to write a better trilogy.  Now-a-days (no names mentioned here), series are dragged out into a septuplet of volumes, which is only cool if the story engaging and the author actually has something to say.  Summarize people.  Tighten.  Polish.  Don't use five words when three will do.  Eliminate repetitive words, had been, it was -- sorry, skewing off tangent.

The Lord of the Rings series worked as a trilogy because it was a trilogy.  The Hobbit was only 287 pages, well within the margin of unifying it into one feature film.  John Grisham's The Runaway Jury (adapted on screen simply as, Runaway Jury), climaxed at an epic 550 pages.  I'm sorry, please remind me, 'cause I have the attention-span of a gold-fish, but was that developed into a multi-million-dollar trilogy?  No really.  I can't remember.

The point is, Hollywood didn't need to chop The Hobbit into three mediocre slices when one hearty serving would have slaked our appetites.

To be honest, I don't even care to see the next two installments.

I'd rather re-read the book.
Which I've done, and trust me, the book is better than the movies.