REVIEW #1: The Hobbit

So, I plan to see The Hobbit a few more times (including in fancy-shmancy 48fps 3D), but I saw it last night in standard 2D and wanted to get some thoughts down on the first viewing before I saw it again (sorry, non-Phish people). I'll do this in bullet-pointy fashion, so as to encourage myself to get back to lesson planning for my spring courses ASAP:

• My overall response is "I loved it, it was great, and I want to see it millions of times."
• I also feel, though (and have always felt), that LotR is a much more interesting and better story (based on my preferences) and while the Hobbit book will always have a warm, fuzzy spot in my heart, I know that I'll never quite like the film adaptation as much as I liked the LotR film adaptations, simply because the base story isn't as interesting to me. It's like being asked to choose between adaptations of Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet; you might make the best R+J adaptation ever, but on some level it's never going to match the quality of an average-great adaptation of Hamlet, because there's just not as much to work with.
• The casting, especially Martin Freeman as Bilbo, was pretty much flawless. Do they give Academy Awards for casting? I hope so.
• Richard Armitage as Thorin was  just as good as the internet said he was going to be.
• The Hobbit book presents a slightly (but importantly) different Gandalf than the LotR books do. I was glad to see Ian McKellan (and, I'm sure, everyone else on the film crew who contributed to his performance) showing an awareness of this in the movie. It's the same old Gandalf, but also different enough in the ways that matter that it doesn't seem like McKellan is just taking a victory lap with the character (not that I ever imagined he would).
• I felt like many of the dwarves were each distinct entities in the film (which is something that Tolkien didn't even achieve in the book), and I have a feeling that the ones who weren't fleshed-out in this film will be in the following films.
• There were a lot more diversions from the book than I expected. Mostly, this was actually great. The framing at the beginning of the whole story as being told to Frodo by Bilbo right before Bilbo's birthday party was a great touch (including the amazing introduction of pre-invasion Erebor!), and a lot of the smaller gestures to the larger story of the coming War of the Ring (White Council, Necromancer) were great. Radagast was a nice inclusion, even if he was a bit overly goofy (I saw his added rabbit-chase scene referred to in one review as "a Benny Hill chase scene" and I can't disagree).
• Much of the added material did come from Tolkein's appendices or was just a logical extension of the shorter, less visual Hobbit book, but when Jackson and crew went beyond that, it resulted in the only parts of the movie I actively didn't like. The added warg/goblin battle (before finding the cave) seemed oddly out of place and strangely paced (and I thought this before realizing that it was, in fact, an added scene not taken from Tolkien's material). The subplot with Azog also rubbed me the wrong way since it essentially rewrote an important character directly against how he is described in the original appendices. I appreciate the need for a primary antagonist to make the film a bit more accessible to non-nerds, but couldn't it at least have been Bolg, Azog's son (who actually shows up later in the book) that followed Thorin, maybe holding a grudge for the fact that Thorin's sort-of relative Dain killed his dad in the past? It just seemed silly to include Azog when he was supposed to be dead, and made it hard to not see him as a bland, Big Boss character. Thorin's story already has enough pathos as it is, we didn't really need a Megatron-orc for him to fight against.
• Less of a bummer, but still a slight annoyance: the preponderance of scenes in which dwarves, hobbits, and other characters swung around on platforms above precipitous drops and/or fell hundreds of feet while bouncing off of sharp rocks, all without being hurt. I understand that the action scenes needed to be a bit expanded based on how Tolkein described them (or didn't, really) in the book, but did they all have to be turned in levels from Super Mario Bros.? The stone giant battle, for example, was visually awesome, but I was really jerked out of the immersion of the scene by the ridiculous-ass bullshit the dwarves and Bilbo had to go through (again, not in the book!) to survive.
• Overall, though, I felt like all the added material (except for action bits that were just added to make everything more action-y and, by extension, cheesier) was meant to tie these films more firmly to the LotR trilogy, and that was actually really effective. If things continue as they are, I could see all six eventual films working much more cohesively as a whole than the original books do, which would be a Neat Thing. The movies seem less to be about adapting a faithful version of The Hobbit and more about serving as the first half of a six-part story about the War of the Ring. And I don't really think that that's a bad thing.
• On the other hand, a lot of the big scenes were done almost completely as-is from the book, which was great. There seemed to be a sense that there were some things that couldn't be altered, such as the long, slow introduction to the beginning of Bilbo's quest (which was not too long, despite what trigger-happy movies critics seem to think...have they even ever read the book?), the trolls, Riddles in the Dark, etc.
• The music was great. Listening to the soundtrack again tonight. That's all.

I think that's everything for now...more thoughts after the 48fps 3D experience...