Hobbit-y Fun

I guess this Arts & Entertainment week here for me. I saw The Hobbit at the I-Max last night. All 186 minutes of it and I have to say: What a lot of slicing and dicing with hatchets and swords!The little Hobbit Bilbo Baggins misses his cozy cottage and I missed it too. The larder alone stuffed with cheeses and fruits, bread and barrels of mead, or whatever it was that people drink back in the days of Middle Earth.The whole thing reminded me of the many times I have read The Rainbow Goblins out loud to a child. (Those are the little imps from that book up top.)The trolls in the movie are funny. So dimwitted ha ha! (We all love to see dopey people in action. (Well, as long as they’re not like trying to operate on us or fix our cars, that is.))The elves are vegetarians and that's funny too; the scene when one of the dwarfs is offered a bit of lettuce by an elf made me laugh right out loud. "I don’t eat green food,” he says with a haughty look.Gandalf is like God, saving everyone at the last minute all the time.And Gollum?Gollum is just amazing. He looks like Steve Buscemi, with these liquid blue eyes that reveal his humanity. He's the one I really identity with, quarreling with himself and shuttling between kindly and cruel. He's how I'm going to look when I'm 100 I know it. Willard Scott I'm ready for my closeup!Here's the trailer. Well worth watching :-)[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?NR=1&v=9PSXjr1gbjc]

Scared Shirtless?

Thoughts on the new James Bond film Skyfall:Thought One: Daniel Craig takes off his shirt every ten minutes so we can all study his torso.  A half hour into the movie I felt like 1,000 mothers  examining their kids' chests for signs of measles.Thought Two:  Mighty small nipples!Thought Three: Bond gets shot with a high-powered gun, falls of a moving train and goes over a waterfall, seemingly downs and still doesn’t die? Reminiscent of Tom Hanks meeting Darryl Hannah-the-mermaid in Splash.Thought Four: Motorcycle chase along the tops of buildings in Istanbul: this isn’t E.T. and Elliot on the bike!Thought Five: Of course not! No full moon... !Thought Six, on Javier Bardem in the film: Here’s an argument for Polident, yikes. (No picture from the film here... Spoiler.)Thought Seven, on the movie in general. I didn’t fall asleep once during the whole 2 hour and 23 minute thing, for a workaholic like me , well that’s akin to a miracle.