That is, an anecdote that is brief, for the purposes of filling in a gap in the schedule. Not to be confused with a brief-filler anecdote.

Watched the second Hobbit movie with Wump over the past couple of nights, the extended special DVD edition. It was her first time watching the movies, having watched the extended DVD of the first Hobbit movie a while ago already.

Now she has to wait for the final instalment. Although I suppose I should start reading it to her soon. She’s beginning to get an attention-span for longer stories.

It was entertaining, watching it with her. And I did like some of the extra bits and pieces the special extended edition had. Hard to pick out some of it, of course, since the whole movie in a sense is a series of extended and deleted scenes. But anyway, there you go.

Wump seems to be enjoying it. I think she, like the rest of us, will ultimately rail against how little Smaug was in the movie. But then I always considered the minimalism of Smaug, the Balrog, Morgoth, basically anything big and bad and interesting, to be one of the more disappointing facets of the books too, so I suppose that’s just a faithful reproduction.

Funny, though, when the gold poured into the giant dwarf and then spurted out and re-melted, her response was “why is it molten again?”. Good question, Wump.

It was interesting to see how she reacted when Bilbo said “mine” in his spooky my-precious voice. It was a scene during the spider attack in Mirkwood[1], when Bilbo drops the ring and it lands near a big bug thing that looked like it has wandered off-set from Jackson’s King Kong movie. Weta Workshop being lazy, I think. Anyway, Bilbo dropped the ring, it landed next to this big bug, and Bilbo lost his shit for a moment, trying to get it back.

[1] Mirkwood as also severely underplayed in that book. My love of deep, endless forests has its roots in this story, as well as in The Magician’s Nephew.

When he grabbed it, and said “mine” to the battered carcass of the bug he’d just smashed, Wump remarked that he’d gone all Evil Voice. So I explained about the One Ring and the change it causes in mortal beings, and reminded her about Gollum in the first movie.

Ahh, it’s getting more and more fun to watch stuff with her.