As I sat watching The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey Extended Edition with some of my family the other night, it was brought home to me just how hard it is to make a book into a movie.

You wouldn't think it was that hard. I mean, the story's already there. And I'm not saying that I didn't like the Hobbit movie, but it did teach me some valuable lessons about how not to adapt a classic fantasy storybook into a movie. So, to, uh, celebrate the release of The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (I haven't watched it yet), here are three important things to keep in mind in case you plan on making movie-making (or movie-watching) a hobbit... I mean habit.

(Especially if you plan on adapting one of my 3 all time favorite books into a blockbuster cinema event.)

1- Tell, don't show. I mean, they tell you the opposite in writing class, so I understand this might be hard to get. And I know that movies are visual and require a more visual kind of story. But there are limits. And when we go past those limits, we end up making a movie 3 times as long as it needs to be, and dragging out hours of needless and frankly boring material. Like another chase scene. And another pointless scene with elves talking to each other. And another awkwardly-worded flashback-cutscene.

2- Source material is important. Don't ignore it, and don't do things that wouldn't fit at all with the original. Like, for instance, don't have the dwarves make innuendos at elf-females. Or have dwarves swim in the elf fountain. Or have dwarves make fart jokes. At least have people speak like they do in the book. I only noticed a handful of times the lines the characters said corresponded to what they said in the book. And the replacement lines, too often, were inferior. It made the movie a lot less believable.

3- Listen to Aristotle. In his Poetics he examines the elements of poetry (to the Greeks, all stories came in poetry). Of these, the element of "Spectacle" is the least, and too much of it ruins the potential of a moving story. The Hobbit is a moving book, but at least the first movie lost most of that adventurous, heroic quality under waves and waves of needless special effects. As such the Goblin Caves, the Forest Fire, and other of the intense moment in the book are buried beneath six feet of whiz-bang. Observe the picture at the top of this post... case en point.

Just some thoughts, really. But together these three things really unmade the Hobbit movie for me. As in, they made it nothing. It as completely separated from the genius that is the Hobbit book. These days, I've been re-reading a lot of the old good books, and realizing what made them great. They tell stories that matter, that are both deep literature and good art. I just wish I could say I was rediscovering movies the same way, but I'm not. Not even the Lord of the Rings movies do for me what they used to. But perhaps there's just something about a book that no movie can capture. What do you think?

~GJD