Talkie Tuesday: The Desolation of Smaug

 

"In a hole in the ground there lived a Hobbit ..."

 

Hello everyone!

 

And welcome to the second part of our own incredible journey through Middle-Earth via the movies that have been released over the years.

 

Was I partly inspired to rewatch these because of how dismally I'm disappointed with Rings of Power?

 

Possibly.

 

In any event, I promised you all six of Peter Jackson's masterpieces, and so here we are with number two of the saga.

 

As you can probably tell, I'm really fond of doing things chronologically if I possibly can, so that's why we're starting with The Hobbit rather than with the trilogy that Jackson made first.

 

So without further ado, let's jump right back into it, and check out what our Dwarves have been up to, in The Desolation of Smaug.

 

Talkie Tuesday: An Unexpected Journey

 

"In a hole in the ground there lived a Hobbit ..."

 

Hello everyone!
 

And welcome to the first evening out of six during which we'll be going on an epic adventure worth more than just our time.

 

Like I mentioned somewhere at some point, Tolkien has been my all-time favourite author for ... well, at this point it's been decades I would think, and that's kind of a little scary, but also kind of not at the same time.

 

Recently, I've also been able to look back on the movies they released during epic fantasy heyday, and of course all my memories were roused, as well.

 

These movies defined my life in such a strong way that it'd be impossible for me to define exactly how much, so instead I'm going to let the blogs do my talking for me.

 

This means it's time to pack up our handkerchiefs and get our walking sticks out, because The Hobbit launches with An Unexpected Journey, right now!

 

Tome Thursday: Coward's Truth

 

Hello everyone!

 

Once more, I bring you a goodie from BookSirens.

 

Honestly, that's probably my favourite place to grab new books from nowadays, I'll admit as much. It's really a fantastic site, and the exchange of free ARC and review works really well if anyone asks me.

 

So tonight we take a look in something that's not too far out of my comfort zone.

 

It's got rulers, kingdoms, politics, gods, assassins, and space warriors for some reason.

 

This last one is probably the most confusing of them all!

 

The author, Christan Warren Freed, served in the military for over twenty years if I remember the biography information correctly, so each of his published stories features some aspect of that. This one's no exception either.

 

As it's the first book in what's going to be a series, naturally it's a set-up and the possibilities of explanation become larger the more you dig deeper, but you'll have to decide for yourself if this kind of story if for you!

Coward's Truth, a novel of the Heart Eternal, is up.

Saturday Snippet: The Greatest Adventure

xx

*video not mine

One (Booktober)

"In a hole in the ground there lived a Hobbit."

I ask you, who DOESN'T know this iconic first line? If you don't, you may as well have been living under a rock for decades. The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien is a fantastic way to start our Booktober, because it has it all: adventure, funky characters (here's looking at you, Gandalf), walkabouts in autumn, and a there-and-back again kind of story.

Also a dragon.

And the best thing? You don't have to move an inch from your favourite reading spot!

Bilbo Baggins enjoys a comfortable, unambitious life, rarely traveling further than the pantry of his hobbit-hole in Bag End. But his contentment is disturbed when the wizard, Gandalf, and a company of thirteen Dwarves arrive on his doorstep to whisk him away on a journey to raid the treasure hoard of Smaug the Magnificent, a large and very dangerous dragon ...

(from the book jacket)

xx

*image not mine

Game of Thrones: The Long Night

"We must fight together now ... or die."

Hello everyone!

We made it. Sort of. 

The Night King came and we mostly made it, so I suppose the day after is the time to count our losses, look and see just who it was that survived to fight another day, and figure out what in the seven hells went wrong.

Is anyone saying 'but nothing went wrong?'

HaHA. Sweet summer children.

A lot of things went wrong.

Still, at the end of the day, it was a cinematografic 80 minutes that HBO dished out for us, and for that I am truly thankful. With only three more episodes to go, it's coming to an end of an era, so I'm feeling bitter-sweet.

That being said, however, everyone is entitled to their own opinions. Or misopinions.

So make sure to grip that dragonglass, and have a torch ready. The Long Night is upon us.

Tome Thursday: After the Fire

Hello everyone!

I've been feeling a bit moody and completely unhappy with some of my reading choices, which is why my reading list SAYS I'm reading Queen of Shadows, but I'm actually waiting for my reading muse to kick in for that one.

Sadly, sometimes I get into a fantasy slump, but usually I can fix that pretty easily.

Usually, I say.

I haven't done it so far, even though I've gone back to re-read The Hobbit, and then deviated completely to Arthur Conan Doyle while I was at it, and then just ditched the whole mystery/fantasy genre altogether and went into the real world again.

There are three authors perfectly guaranteed to make me quite happy with the books they write, as I may have mentioned before: Noelle Adams, Serenity Woods, and Kathryn Shay, not necessarily in that order.

I started off with Woods and then moved along to Adams, but then just gave in to temptation and picked up Shay's 'Cop of the Year' (my first book by her) and then to the one I'm reviewing today, After the Fire.

Tome Thursday: The Hobbit

Hello everyone!

Alright, alright, I will admit, I can never seem to get over the whole Tolkien phase at all, even for a little bit. I'm always reading something or other from the master, and recently I've discovered that I need to be very careful about what I do before bed or else I might end up awake until the wee morning hours.

So to try and combat that, I decided to read every night before I went to sleep, which means that I was going to pick something I would enjoy, of course.

Naturally, I picked the Hobbit, because for one thing it was meant to be a bed time story, and for another I just love reading about Bilbo and the Dwarves, who are pretty much a comedic relief in comparison to what you see in the movies sometimes.

Then of course, I'm now debating what else to read before bed and I might tackle the Silmarillion next, but we will see!

For the time being, let's dip into the review of the Hobbit, book version.

Talkie Tuesday: The Battle of the Five Armies EXTENDED EDITION

Hello everyone!

Movie blog time again, after I pretty much had to wrestle my internet connection into submission. The thing suddenly decided to go all wonky on me even though it had a perfectly good signal to work on! 

Typical.

As I promised in my last Saturday blog post, today (or tonight, I should say, given that it's pitch black outside while I'm typing this) it's going to be ALL about the Hobbit.

Again.

I'm sorry about that.

But I'm definitely a hardcore Tolkien fan, and I've been pretty much itching to see the extended edition of the Battle of the Five Armies since the theatrical edition was released to cinemas! Why? Well, because the EEs usually have much better scene connections, and explanations.

Saturday Snippet: Lazy Day

Hello everyone!

Today was a sort of lazy day for me because I really, truly didn't do anything much. The most I can say I've done is read a little bit of Agatha Christie, spent time with my family, and this afternoon I watched the Battle of the Five Armies Extended Edition.

An actual blog post on this is coming Tuesday though, so keep your eyes peeled for that one!

To keep it simple and sweet though: some of my faith in Peter Jackson has been restored with this one.

Have a good weekend!

xx

*video not mine

Saturday Snippet: Snow!

Hello everyone!

So okay, okay, I was going to post something else today again - but it started snowing here and my plans got derailed!

I don't necessarily love snow in the sense that I'm crazy about it; in fact, I'm sure the second I have to drive somewhere in the snow, I'll be as unhappy as I can possibly be. But the first snowfall of the year is ALWAYS something magical, no matter what!

Aside 1: I've been translating so much this past week I think my brain is constantly hardwired to two languages, so sorry if I seem ... disjointed? Is that a good use for the word?

Aside 2: Our stores here may already have The Hobbit: Battle of the Five Armies Extended Edition. If this is actually true, I think Christmas just came early for me.

xx

*image not mine

Saturday Snippet: Bookshelf Tour, part 1

Hello everyone!

So, as promised, I will be doing a bookshelf tour in these blog posts (unless something else positively fascinating catches my attention), and today it's time to go to the top shelf. Now, to be perfectly honest, that's just ONE bookshelf as a whole that I'll be going through at the moment. But one wall of my room is entirely filled with them, so I might do a couple more, depending. Fact: all the pictures are taken with my phone camera, so if the quality might be a bit grainy sometimes ... that's why.

And here we go! As you can see, at the very top I am graced by some games and toys. Ahem. The first one, The Lord of the Rings: The Search, is an oldie, back from my LOTR-craze days. Fun fact: my sister and I played this only once, and she beat me, regardless of the fact that she had never seen LOTR before in her life at that point. I was too humiliated to play again afterwards! The next are Manga cards, which I didn't want for playing purposes, but more for the fact that the ilustrations on the cards are cool. Go figure. Next, a figurine of Elizabeth Swann from At World's End, and at the end a box full of Star Wars figurines. I may or may not be a bit of a geek.

Moving on to actual books.

Talkie Tuesday: The Desolation of Smaug EXTENDED EDITION

Hello everyone!

So I'm back with another Hobbit review, and I realized I never actually put up the one I wrote right after seeing the second movie way back when, with a group of girl friends. We sort of made it an evening out and I have to say, just for the record, with as much hype as there was surrounding this particular event, and the trailers looking absolutely awesome, I was thoroughly and completely disappointed with the finished result. 

Not only did it have so many unbelievable scenes as to make it almost entirely a different story from the original book, but certain things made me wan to tear my hair out from the roots, and then burn it while dancing around singing Kumbaya.

I'm fairly sure that a lot of people enjoyed the movies, but I also know, for a fact, the book fans were as disappointed as I was, maybe even more. You know how people always say the Star Wars Prequel Trilogy was the biggest mistake George Lucas ever made? Well, the Hobbit movies are Peter Jackson's, if you ask me. Still, as I'm a bit of a Tolkien freak, I couldn't resist buying the extended edition for the additional material it has on the DVDs, and I just recently watched the movie through.

Talkie Tuesday: An Unexpected Journey EXTENDED EDITION

Hello everyone!

So I'm a Tolkien fan. As in, big time Tolkien fan. My cousin introduced me to the Lord of the Rings books about ... wow, it must already be fifteen years now! Gosh, time flies. Anyway, yes, she introduced me to it, and there have been a lot of interesting LOTR versus Harry Potter discussions in our family since then.

When the news spread that they were making movies from the book, I was beyond thrilled. By that point, my hardcore obsession was starting (like, covering my whole four walls in LOTR posters obsession), and since I was a teenager, there were crushes too (just not Orlando Bloom, sorry). 

And then the news hit that they would be making The Hobbit into a movie, too!

As anyone who has followed updates on this, you'll know that the development process went from one movie, to two, and then to three, making the thing a trilogy. Now, I disagree with the length of it - despite some fantastic sequences, I might add - but generally speaking it really could have been done in much less time. Still, I enjoyed the first one, and after a very kind friend of mine gifted me with the extended version, I couldn't wait to watch it.

Talkie Tuesday: The Battle of the Five Armies

Hello everyone!

So, to my intense and utter surprise, my little country got to see the last part of the Hobbit trilogy before the US! That NEVER happens, so I'm just a little bit excited, considering our premiere happened on the same day as the New Zealand one (and on top of that, my hometown showed it that same weekend, too!). So my girlfriends and yours truly decided to see it this past Saturday, and to be perfectly honest I was pleasantly surprised. Not that I anticipated a huge comeback from the blunders of the second movie (don't even get me started on that one), but I did go in with a whole lot less positive than I did then, wary of the great feelings the trailers evoked knowing how disappointed I was last year, and it turns out that, all in all, this wasn't half as bad as one would have expected. Was it still bad? Yeah, especially on topics that were introduced wrongly from the start, completely off-base, or lost somewhere in translation. It will probably never live up to the Lord of the Rings film trilogy, but at the very least, it WAS entertaining. One can't say anything against that!

So, spoiler alert ahead to anyone who has NOT yet seen The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies, you're reading at your own risk, though if you're a book fan it gets less, considering you know what happens.

The Hobbit: TBOTFA, New Line Cinema