Where is Thorin's beard?

It's Thorin: Thrain's son, Thror's son, king of the Lonely Mountain. You give him a beard and you give him a bloody big one, with braids, not some sparse and dinky close-trim.

And Thorin is florid and dignified in his speech, proud of bearing in his manners but not blinded thereby. He's not some pissy, arrogant, hard-hearted, somber man-model with the wet-look from the cover of some glamour magazine.

The dwarves are hearty and stout and have good appetites. They are not a bunch of ruffian frat boy rugby players, scraping the mud off their boots on Bilbo's furniture and burning the elven furniture for a fire on the elven porch in what is supposed to be the Last Homely House - the House of Elrond in the valley of Rivendell. Seriously, can you imagine? They actually burn furniture of the elves to make a food fire on the porch. And why do they do this? Well, that brings me to the next part.

You may be a vegan, Peter Jackson, and you may think it's all that, but elves, I assure you, are not vegans. Their food is most welcome to all the races of Middle-earth that are not evil. Nor are elves a bunch of absolutely remote, airy-fairy, asexual beings whose music is equally remote.

Gandalf knows his shit. He does not require the platonic caresses of Galadriel and her telling him in her annoying Cate Blanchett droning, affected voice not to be afraid, as Gandalf looks back at her all hopeful-eyed like he was about to cry. What bullshit.

And what up with the G-rated violence? Beren may have written the book in a style which he later abandoned, but even for that, the violence is, well, violence. Here though, when Bilbo pulls Sting out of an orc, it doesn't even have blood on it. The Great Goblin is supposed to get his head cut off and all his minions are supposed to go into a rage over it; not some stupid paper-cut across the belly and another across the throat together with a stupid one-liner that is supposed to be humourous. When Gandalf lights the cones on fire, it's his special fire that sort of explodes when it hits the wolves; not stupid regular fire where everyone else gets to join in in throwing regular-burning cones. Pathetic.

How does one so offend the soul of a work while being so milquetoast at the same time?

Let's see...what else. Oh yes, Cate Blanchett is so horrific a Galadriel it's not even funny. But we already knew that. I guess we just needed to be reminded.

Oh yeah, and Peter Jackson? You had to do the stupid butterfly thing with the eagles again, didn't you?

Yeah, I knew you would. It worked the first time back in 2001. You didn't need to wreck it.

Ho ho ho! Merry Christmas everyone! Happy holidays!