The Hobbit (1977)

Ashia R:

It’s #FamilyMovieNight, and tonight we’re watching The Hobbit, straight from 1977! Let’s discuss as the movie unfurls…

As you can tell by the fact that this movie was created before 1985, and everyone’s white with beards and shit, this week it’s Nathan’s turn to pick the movie.

…The rest of us are nervous.

After Flight of Dragons and and Never-Ending Story, and Rats of Nimh and that other bland fantasy one I can’t even remember, we’re…weary of movies where people just yammer at each other for hourssssss.

I am having a little bit of a hard time following what’s going on. Everyone is bald and rocking a beard.

On no actually, everyone has a hair quota, whether the hair grows from your head, your face, or your toes.

A great blessing to toast to, via this movie: “May the hair on your toes never fall out”

R2: “There’s no hair on your toes.”

Ashia: “I have hair on my toes.”

Nathan: “Hobbits have hair on their toes.”

Ashia:

I guess I’m insecure but right now I feel like I’m being insulted (this is not the first time he has called me a Hobbit)I am a general ‘hobbit’-shaped creature.

Oh my god white men just love listening to themselves talk

something something moon something something feet, something something curses, something something smaug

This  movie is so boring, R2 is dying. We all tried to agree none of us would groan during Nathan’s movie pick but I’m…I’m having a hard time.

and R2 over here has Not Shut Up about how boring this is

OMG they are negotiating a will.

This is a children’s movie where we watch old men drink beer and toast each other’s toes and then EXECUTE A WILL

Now a dude is shaky-singing

“A grEeAeTeSt Adventure..bLaH bLah bLah”

I don’t know what hte words are for singing devices – but he’s doing htathatt shaky thing that opera singers do at the end of words except it’s for every vowel from start to finish and it feels painful. 

Like he’s trying to talk through a vocal chord condition. 

This is the Diane Rehm of bards. Except Diane is a badass who continued her career through spasmodic dysphonia and for this dude it’s a CHOICE.

OH MY GOD NO IT’S ONLY BEEN SEVEN MINUTES.

I feel like we’ve been watching this movie for AT LEAST half an hour. How has it only been seven minutes?

!!!?

“Not even a pocket hankerchief. how can one survive?!” Says our Primary Hobbit – and I guess this is a joke to lighten the scene where everyone is hiking in the rain for hourssss.

I forgot how many movies from this era required like a 48-hour hike in dank weather and this was what writers called ‘adventure.’

Oh thank goodness. Trolls. Maybe they’ll eat the hobbits and end this movie and then we can be done

Ahh of course, one of the Evil Trolls has an Evil Eyepatch.

Nine minutes in and we’re already down one check for Evil Crip Bingo

Ashia: “How many movies have we seen where an eye patch means you’re evil?”

Q: “Two….million.”

Ashia:

And sure like the ‘Hobbits’ are clearly ripped off from the existence of Little people, and they’re not ‘evil’ but they definitely follow that ‘Quaint/Noble’ race characteristic that is just the other side of the disability trope coin.

And they’re not just short humans, they’re a completely different SPECIES.

Like the wizard guy is a human, and Hobbits are a cross between Little people and rodents.

Which…yikes.

I’m gonna take a WILD guess and assume no women or nonbinary folks (of course) show up in this movie. But where are they? What are they up to?

Oh good, an elf. So lithe. So pointy.

So pale and *superior*

Oh good. Goblins. :::waits for the antisemitism:::

…So far they’re just chaining folks up and…singing?

Good? I guess?

Okay so no overt clear antisemitic stereotypes.

Here we are, in the most (only?) memorable scene in this movie from my childhood, here we have Gollum, and a looong, heavy-breathing conversation in a cave.

This scene is exactly as confusing and creepy as I remember.

Q: “What. What is going on.” 

Ashia:

We are all pausing the movie and making Nathan explain this scene to us because we all have no idea what’s going on.

“It’s rated for ages 7+” argued Nathan, during dinner.

I mean like, yeah, just because a 7yo won’t be traumatized with this movie doesn’t mean it’s engaging or easy to follow.

Oh interesting. Q reads Gollum as a ‘she’

So I guess we DO have women in this movie!

I am pretty sure that everyone who made kids movies in the 70’s was purely focused around the challenge of: “What fresh nightmares can we give kids?”

Nathan’s theory “I think they were just high as kites.”

Ashia:

After 45 seconds of panning across grotesque cave rock formations that resemble distorted noses and spooooooky singing…

Huh… Gollum was the creative pronoun OG.

Sorry, Gollum [we/us]

Which is.. Disturbing.

Makes you wonder if all those Boomers are freaked out at the thought of creative gender pronouns because this was a signifier of stigmatized mental conditions and creepy hobbit-eating.

Poor Gollum

We just wants our birthday present back!

Q is feeling so bad for Gollum. We is the true protagonist of the story.

Meanwhile our ‘hero’ Bilbo is coming off as a real asshole.

Bilbo is watching Gollum Lose. Our. Shit. over our lost precious ring. And Baggins is like “Oh! Delightful! Ta-ta!”

Literally: “Ta-ta!”

Like that extra fuck-you, after someone comes into your home, plays a game of riddles, steals your shit, and then when they see how hurt you are, they’re like “Ta-taa!” 

The AUDACITY. And not in a fun cool way. Just in a, ‘Ugh, this guy.’ kind of way.

Oh the goblins are singing again and…lighting stuff on fire. And singing about …birds.

For Reasons Unknown.

So the birds rescue all the hobbitses and wizard from…the pyromaniac goblins. 

Q: “Why did they have to walk ALL THIS TIME if the birds could have just carried them?”

Ashia:

Fair question. Why did we have to watch ALL OF THIS HIKING if the birds could have saved us this torture?

Ohhh. Good. More hiking. 

(This is sarcasm.)

Alison L. This one made me laugh out loud LOUDLY and now I can’t stop laughing, thank you.

Ashia: 

I’m sure hiking is more fun than it sounds.

Like WHO wants to watch OTHER PEOPLE HIKE.

R2 is CRYING now because this is so boring.

Q: “How long til he stops singing that?”

Ashia:

FFS. Now everyone is screaming.

And sobbing. R2 is sobbing

R2: “They said they’re going on a journey and they aren’t showing any of the journey!”

Ashia:

And now we’re explaining how a 70’s journey is just a long hike.

At this point we’re bribing him. Promising him we’ll let him watch a pixar short of his choice if he can just hold it together for the whole hike. This movie is all of the torture of dragging a child on a real hike, without the health benefits.

HA! Baggins is like “Imma write a memoir called ‘There and Back Again’” which sounds exactly as exciting as this movie.

“My contract is vague on several points” who writes dialogue like this and is like “This movie is for kids”

Awww! a cute spider!

You know Baggins is gonna kill it. Baggins is such an asshole.

yep. killed it

Baggins just named his sword 

Q: “Sting? This guy comes up with the WORST names”

Ashia:

Okay here is a… sequence of scenes. ALL OF US except for Nathan are baffled.

A spider is like “hahaha evil sounds gonna eat these hobbits.”

(Godspeed spider. Please do.)

Baggins pulls out his sword. The spider…spins…and then disappears?

Baggins is like “Im gonna name this sword sting!”

(Nathan says this suggests baggins killed the spider, but it’s VERY NOT CLEAR)

The spider re-appears(?) and tries to eat more hobbits.

Baggins is like “I will help them”

…More spinning spiders. Which I guess is better than hiking. But no less confusing.

The hobbits running away, baggins is like “I will do the stinging! you run away!”

NO ONE is like “WTF do you mean by stinging you pervert!?”

More spiders show up. They are like “we are no match for stinging!”

Is there no word for ‘stab’ in this language? Can’t we just…not be so precious about this arachnicide?

One day, I’m gonna retreat from battle shouting “I am no match for [weird word my enemy has called their weapons]” 

because that makes total sense (/sarcasm… or is it?)

And now the hobbits are in elf jail. But not the kind of elf who gave him a magic sword. A different kind of elf called wood elves who look like your aunt Pam the chain-smoker.

This is so unnecessarily confusing.

Every adventure in this movie is them stumbling across an unnecessarily violent race of humanoids, then just kind of…easily walking away. More or less.

Now they’re in the human village.

All the humans look the same. They are all clones of white men with brown hair and chunky mustaches.

There are no women. No children. No elders.

Just middle-aged Daves. Picture a whole village of men named Dave. It’s that.

Of course, the humans aren’t bloodthirsty, because they’re a city of Civilized Daves. So they just…leave.

There really was no reason to show all these Daves. Just there to fill up animation time. Get our decade’s allotment of Daves.

Now Baggins and the 9-or-so dwarves are climbing up a mountain to look for a door. And he’s like “Use the key!”

Q: “Wait. There is no epic scene where they lose the key?”

R2 “They said keep it safe. They kept it safe.”

Ashia:

But yeah I agree that’s just a Chekov’s gun left unfired. It’s lazy writing.

Q still can’t get over Baggins stealing the ring from Gollum.

Nathan keeps using “he” for Gollum and we’re all like “WE!”

“It WAS ours!”

This creative pronoun conversation is the best part of this movie.

Mostly because the movie is paused and that background singer isn’t doing his shaky-singing.

All of us: “WHY doesn’t this guy just STOP SINGING”

So we’re trying to explain that this civilization where the LOTR stories come from – is the same exact civilization where colonization comes from. 

So this is what it looks like to be a ‘hero’ through the eyes of an invader/ mercenary / colonizer.

“So polite for a thief and a liar” says the dragon of Baggins. (Dragon calls it like it is.)

You know baggins is gonna kill this Dragon just minding their own business, being chill with some dude invading their cave.

Oh the dragon is Smaug. That’s who this smaug is.

(They’ve been mumbling about Smaug this whole time.)

Smaug seems like a cool guy.

I’d go bowling with him.

He’s got a ‘Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee’ narrative. I’m feeling it.

“My wings are HURRICANES!” Brags Smaug.

Oh no, Smaug! Baggins is tricking you! He’s using your healthy self-confidence against you!

(ALL of us are cheering for Smaug)

Baggins is such an arrogant shit.

Dammit. Baggins survived, after stealing shit from Smaug. Escaped with nothing but a singed bottom.

Which is like a soggy bottom, but on fire.

::: snort. baking joke:::

So this whole movie they’ve been talking about ‘burgling’ like it’s a good thing.

“What did you burgle?” they ask, first thing when Baggins gets back.

Is this the currency of bad hikers? Like their whole thing is hiking and burgling? Are Hobbits just 12-year olds looking to rebel?

Meanwhile…back at Davesville…

OMG I thought I was not paying enough attention and didn’t see it right but every Dave is wearing a uber-short mini dress.

Like so short that if htey weren’t wearing bikini undies to scoop stuff up, there would be …dangling.

I kept trying to google a movie photo to show it to you, but I realized I had to remove the word ‘Dave’ from the search.

Search: “Village of Daves in the Hobbit”

Search: “Daves in the Hobbit outfits”

Search: “Archers in Dave village The Hobbit 1977”

Nothing.

But then I remember, ‘Oh right other people might not see this as SO DEFINITELY a village of guys named Dave.”

But still. Once you see it you cannot unsee it.

King of the Daves is Burt Reynolds in full body armor except for his legs, which are properly clad in a metal miniskirt with the rest of those gams bare reaching All. The. Way to the ground. 

Damn, Bave.

A single arrow killed a dragon and Every Reasonable Person in this room thinks that is some complete bullshit.

So now me and the kids are trying to take an inventory of creatures.

There’s Chain-Smoking Wood Elves, Singing Goblins, Evil Crip Trolls, Lithe White Elves, Basic Daves in Miniskirts, Thieving Hobbits, Dwarves, Eagles, Random Other Birds, Gollum.

Burt ‘Bave’ Reynolds with his layers and layers of armor and those cheeky bare knees feels very Super Hero Lady with Bare Cleavage.

SOMEONE in the animation department was very keen on keeping those knees bare

:::fetish:::

So there’s a ‘war’ (really just a battle) between four of the species/races, and I guess only Baggins the Hobbit and Wizard the.. (maybe a human or maybe Wizards are a separate thing) survive it by…not fighting.

Della M: I love ALL OF THIS SO MUCH

Ashia:

I mean I love Nathan, and he loves this whole LOTR fantasy universe, so even thoug I find it all DREADFULLLLLY boring, I’m glad it exists.

But only because of that.

and also this comedy sketch.

[Video of sir ian mckellen explaining how he Did Acting’ in the LOTR movies]