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It suddenly occurred to me to wonder what Smaug would be like if he were played by James Spader.

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Billy Connolly has just joined the cast of The Hobbit.


You may commence shrieking now.

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Behold!

( THE NAMING OF STING!! )

That pic was posted today over at TORn. Is it not MAGNIFICENT?? *squees in anticipation*

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Just popped in over at TORn, and I see all the same dim-witted arguments about what PJ is doing "wrong" are being dredged up again. Kili is too cute! Nori's hair is too weird! THORIN'S BEARD ISN'T LONG ENOUGH!!! (I shit you not, the ninnies over there really are arguing about that.) Like all of this hadn't been hashed over ad nauseam the last time.

It's just too fucking FUN.

From The New York Times:


I paused at what looked like an image of a double-bitted medieval hatchet. “That’s Smaug,” del Toro said. It was an overhead view: “See, he’s like a flying axe.” Del Toro thinks that monsters should appear transformed when viewed from a fresh angle, lest the audience lose a sense of awe. Defining silhouettes is the first step in good monster design, he said. “Then you start playing with movement. The next element of design is color. And then finally—finally—comes detail. A lot of people go the other way, and just pile up a lot of detail.”

I turned to a lateral image of the dragon. Smaug’s body, as del Toro had imagined it, was unusually long and thin. The bones of its wings were articulated on the dorsal side, giving the creature a slithery softness across its belly. “It’s a little bit more like a snake,” he said. I thought of his big Russian painting. Del Toro had written that the beast would alight “like a water bird.”

Smaug’s front legs looked disproportionately small, like those of a T. rex. This would allow the dragon to assume a different aspect in closeup: the camera could capture “hand” gestures and facial expressions in one tight frame, avoiding the quivery distractions of wings and tail. (Smaug is a voluble, manipulative dragon; Tolkien describes him as having “an overwhelming personality.”) Smaug’s eyes, del Toro added, were “going to be sculpturally very hidden.” This would create a sense of drama when the thieving Bilbo stirs the beast from slumber.

Del Toro wanted to be creative with the wing placement. “Dragon design can be broken into essentially two species,” he explained at one point. Most had wings attached to the forelimbs. “The only other variation is the anatomically incorrect variation of the six-appendage creature”—four legs, like a horse, with two additional winged arms. “But there’s no large creature on earth that has six appendages!” He had become frustrated while sketching dragons that followed these schemes. The journal had a discarded prototype. “Now, that’s a dragon you’ve seen before,” he said. “I just added these samurai legs. That doesn’t work for me.”

Del Toro’s production design for “The Hobbit” seemed similarly intent on avoiding things that viewers had seen before. Whereas Jackson’s compositions had been framed by the azure New Zealand sky, del Toro planned to employ digital “sky replacement,” for a more “painterly effect.” Sometimes, instead of shooting in an actual forest, he wanted to shoot amid artificial trees that mimicked the “drawings in Tolkien’s book.” In his journal, I spied many creatures with no precedent in Tolkien, such as an armor-plated troll that curls into a ball of metal plates. Del Toro said that it would be boring to make a slavish adaptation. “Hellboy,” he noted, was based on a popular comic-book series, but he had liberally changed the story line, and the demon had become an emotionally clumsy nerd. “I am Hellboy,” he said.

Even the major characters of “The Hobbit” bore del Toro’s watermark. In one sketch, the dwarf Thorin, depicted in battle, wore a surreal helmet that appeared to be sprouting antlers. “They’re thorns—his name is Thorin, after all,” he said. The flourish reminded me of a similar arboreal creature in “Hellboy II,” which was slightly worrying. That film is so overpopulated with monsters that it begins to feel like a Halloween party overrun by crashers. Midway through the film, del Toro stages a delightful but extraneous action sequence in a creature-clogged “troll market” hidden beneath the Brooklyn Bridge. The scene comes across as del Toro’s bid to supplant the famous Cantina scene in “Star Wars.”


I am SO FUCKING GLAD this guy ISN'T going to be directing The Hobbit. Those descriptions are DISGUSTING. All we need is some anti-Tolkien asshole redesigning everything just because he thinks the books are BORING.

I really hated Pan's Labyrinth - yeah, I know everyone goes on about it being "genius" but I find it narcissistic and depressing - and it really upset me when I heard he was going to be involved with the new film. I rejoiced when he quit. I'm apprehensive because PJ talks about hanging onto this guy's ideas...I mean, painted skies? Pillbug trolls? WHAT THE FUCK.

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Here's something wonderful:


Pages from a Russian edition of The Hobbit.


The illustrations are great! Certainly far better than that illustrator they've got doing the next LOTR calendar. (Never liked his pictures at all.) These have a very old-world feel to them; they remind me of Pauline Bayles's pics that Tolkien liked so much.

At the bottom of the page is another treat: three scenes from a low-budget Russian TV production of The Hobbit. Now before you screw up your face like you're sucking a lemon, I'll tell you that they're actually pretty good, keeping in mind that they are low-budget. But Bilbo is quite good, given that he's a Russian Bilbo. There's also Gandalf, Thorin and Gollum. Think of it along the lines of what you might see in a traveling wagon version put on for schoolchildren, and you'll get the picture. (I'd love to see what they did with Smaug!)