Funny Things  Thursday, December 20, 2012  Concerning Hobbits:
An Unexpected Review  First things first: The Hobbit: An
Unexpected Journey is, essentially, fanfiction. You adapt a book
to a film, some things are going to change - it's par for the
course with moving between a medium where everything has to be
described in turn to one where things can just exist side-by-
side and be seen, between a medium where there's a narrative
voice and one where that's usually kind of weird and intrusive.
That's going to happen. It's still possible, though, to produce
a pretty faithful adaptation of source material (just look at
Watchmen).  Peter Jackson, Guillermo del Toro, Fran Walsh and
Philippa Boyens have not done that. Their Hobbit has, well, made
a few changes. It's developed a few characters and incidents,
and added a few more; it's reshuffled quite a few plot elements;
it's explicitly setting out as a prequel to The Lord of the
Rings rather than 'that children's book that Rings was the
sequel to'; it's recognisably