Peter Jackson's THE HOBBIT duology... is officially gonna be a trilogy!

When there were first rumors about this I dismissed them almost without a thought. I mean, The Hobbit is a pretty small novel. I first read the whole thing during an afternoon and evening (it was the day of the Super Bowl in 1991). It's easy to see its film adaptation spread across two films... but not three.

But then director Peter Jackson announced thusly on his Facebook page a few hours ago:

It is only at the end of a shoot that you finally get the chance to sit down and have a look at the film you have made. Recently Fran, Phil and I did just this when we watched for the first time an early cut of the first movie - and a large chunk of the second. We were really pleased with the way the story was coming together, in particular, the strength of the characters and the cast who have brought them to life. All of which gave rise to a simple question: do we take this chance to tell more of the tale? And the answer from our perspective as the filmmakers, and as fans, was an unreserved ‘yes.'

We know how much of the story of Bilbo Baggins, the Wizard Gandalf, the Dwarves of Erebor, the rise of the Necromancer, and the Battle of Dol Guldur will remain untold if we do not take this chance. The richness of the story of The Hobbit, as well as some of the related material in the appendices of The Lord of the Rings, allows us to tell the full story of the adventures of Bilbo Baggins and the part he played in the sometimes dangerous, but at all times exciting, history of Middle-earth.

So, without further ado and on behalf of New Line Cinema, Warner Bros. Pictures, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Wingnut Films, and the entire cast and crew of “The Hobbit” films, I’d like to announce that two films will become three.

It has been an unexpected journey indeed, and in the words of Professor Tolkien himself, "a tale that grew in the telling."

Cheers,

Peter J

Okay, I'll trust Jackson on this. If nothing else this gives me an extra midnight premiere to take my girlfriend Kristen to! She's already agreed to go with me to the one for The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey in December.

And who knows. Maybe eventually Jackson will give us an adaptation of The Silmarillion. Then we'll have J.R.R. Tolkien's entire legendarium sitting on my Blu-Ray shelf!! :-)

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An observation about the Aurora movie theater shooting...

There are far more comedy movies than action movies

If movies are to blame for violence, how come we don't see comedy breaking out in the streets?

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THE WALKING DEAD Season 3 Comic-Con trailer

Look! The prison! Michonne! The Governor! Woodbury! Helicopters! And the return of a certain self-mutilated racist pig!

The Walking Dead begins its third season on AMC in three more months.

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So be nice y'all!

The family of God is much like any other: you don't get to choose your relatives.

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Special message to The Knight Shift readers

Dear readers of this blog,

As much as I would sincerely like to help some of you in this regard, I honestly do not have any privileged information about where anyone might be able to purchase a moonshine still. Neither do I happen to have in my possession any recipes for the manufacture of moonshine.

However if anyone reading this does have that information and wishes to volunteer it for publication, I would be more than happy to do so on this site.

Thanks.

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And now Ernest Borgnine has left us

From fighting in World War II on through seven decades of a legendary acting career, it can't be said that Ernest Borgnine wasn't blessed with ninety-five years of a packed life on this Earth...

The first time I saw Borgnine in anything, it was Escape from New York. He played Cabbie: the guy driving the taxi through the streets of the then-future maximum security prison that was Manhattan. Not long afterward he appeared for the first time as hotshot veteran pilot Dominic Santini on Airwolf. And over the years I managed to catch his earlier work too, like Marty (for which he won an Academy Award) and his sitcom McHale's Navy.

Borgnine had more than 200 acting credits, right up to the last few years where he was known to younger audiences as Mermaid Man on SpongeBob SquarePants (I will admit to having never seen anything pertaining to Spongebob: I only know what the kiddies tell me...)

Thoughts and prayers going out to Mr. Borgnine's family tonight.

And in tribute to his memory, here is the ultra-violent shootout scene he was involved in from the 1969 western The Wild Bunch!

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"We're gonna turn it on! We're gonna bring you the power!"

It's been six days since the derecho event last Friday night crippled electrical infrastructure across the East Coast. My girlfriend Kristen had been one of those afflicted: at one point there were more than 20,000 people without juice in Roanoke County, Virginia but thankfully earlier this evening her lights came back on (along with the air conditioning :-)

Okay well, this isn't really something designed as a tribute to those brave souls who have been laboring like mad to replace snapped-apart power poles and fixing transformers, but at least the song itself fits. From 1971 it's the original intro to PBS's hit series The Electric Company!

Bill Cosby, Morgan Freeman and Rita Moreno together on a children's educational TV show. Those were heady days, dear readers...

Seriously though: many, many thanks and thoughts of appreciation to the thousands of electrical workers who have been striving through some of the most brutal heat on record to restore power back to millions of people who got slammed by this thing.

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The officially licensed E.T. Finger Light

From the "What the hell were they thinking?!" file, GeekTyrant has found what must be the worst licensed merchandise ever: the E.T. Finger Light...

I'm looking at this and the only thing that I can honestly muster to mind to say is "Oh. My. God."

Fortunately more tactful minds prevailed and this light was pulled in favor of a full-hand version (I spotted it on sale at Toys R Us yesterday) but even so: where the hell was the due diligence on this thing? I mean, this was really manufactured and marketed.

But hey, at least the Atari 2600 game is no longer the worst-ever piece of E.T. merchandise...

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If you've never seen A FACE IN THE CROWD...

...then be aware that TCM (the Turner Classic Movies channel) will be running it at 1:45 a.m. this coming Friday, July 6th. That's Eastern Standard Time anyway (dunno how that'll translate in your own locality). Be sure to set your DVRs accordingly!

Why?

Because if you only knew Andy Griffith from the down-home Sheriff Andy Taylor he played on The Andy Griffith Show, then his performance in A Face in the Crowd will without a doubt shock the hell out of you.

This was Griffith's first film role. Directed by Elia Kazan from a screenplay by Budd Schulberg and released in 1957, A Face in the Crowd has Griffith as drunken Arkansas drifter "Lonesome" Rhodes: a no-good bum who becomes a media creation with fame, fortune and irredeemably rotten with power and corruption. Over time Rhodes comes to have influence over millions of people through the sway of television. And he is the most viciously mean bastard that you're ever likely to see in any motion picture in the history of anything. Also starring Patricia Neal, with appearances by Walter Matthau and Lee Remick, A Face in the Crowd has Andy so far removed from Mayberry that you'll be genuinely left wondering how in heck did he ever wind up with The Andy Griffith Show. Even so, in light of Griffith's passing early yesterday, it's a really nice tribute to his memory that TCM is doing by playing this movie. Highly recommended!

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Mourning in Mayberry: Andy Griffith has passed away

The very sad news breaking everywhere right now is that Andy Griffith has passed away at the age of 86 at his home in Manteo, on North Carolina's Outer Banks.

Awright well, what can be said that hasn't already been during the course of his long life: Griffith was an incredible performer, whether he was acting or singing or doing comedy... like what started it all for him, his 1953 monologue "What It Was, Was Football":

A few years later Griffith was in No Time for Sergeants, considered by many to be his single funniest work...

And 'course it wasn't long afterward that Griffith was keeping the sleepy little town of Mayberry safe and sound as Sheriff Andy Taylor. Griffith first put on the badge in a "backdoor pilot" episode of Danny Thomas's Make Room for Daddy (an episode which also featured future co-stars Ronnie Howard and Frances Bavier). More than fifty years later, and The Andy Griffith Show is still playing, somewhere, throughout the world in syndication.

But if you seriously want to see Griffith shine, you have to step away from his comedic repertoire and look at what he was capable of doing as a serious dramatic actor. The first time I saw Andy Griffith as anything apart from Sheriff Taylor, it was his portrayal of real-life murderer John Wallace in the 1983 television movie Murder in Coweta County...

Griffith starred opposite Johnny Cash, who played the Georgia sheriff who brought Wallace down for murder. The final scene, showing a shaven-headed Griffith strapped down in the electric chair, would be a particularly unsettling image for anyone who grew up with The Andy Griffith Show.

But that's downright mild compared to what was Andy Griffith's very first movie: from 1957, it's A Face in the Crowd.

I've no idea how else to put it: if you've never seen it before, A Face in the Crowd will scare the hell out of you...

I first saw it about a year and a half ago when TCM ran it. Directed by Elia Kazan, A Face in the Crowd has Andy a long, long way from Mayberry as drunken drifter "Lonesome" Rhodes. It's a brutal morality tale about celebrityhood and its power to corrupt. A movie that in many ways was far ahead of its time and even prophetic. And Griffith as Lonesome Rhodes is positively the meanest son of a bitch you're likely to see in any movie. If you haven't seen it already, I have to recommend it as being perhaps the finest work that Andy Griffith ever pulled off.

But today, Griffith is mostly going to be remembered as "America's Sheriff": the chief constable of a town that never really was but we all wanted to visit.

Thoughts and prayers going out to his family.

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United States Supreme Court upholds Obamacare

What. The. HELL?!?!?

HOW in the blue f--k is ANYTHING about Obamacare constitutional?!? What the #$%* are they smoking at the Supreme Court?!? Are they high on bath salts or something?!

Well, it's not like this would be the first time that the Supreme Court screwed it up, is it?

The individual mandate just became the biggest tax imposition in the history of mankind. We are now living in a socialist state that would have made the Kremlin hardliners envious.

This country is soooooooo screwed.

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BOHEMIAN RHAPSODY lip sync!

A little over a week ago I was in a rented SUV thingy riding up to Mount Hood in Oregon along with m'lady Kristen, her brother and his wife. And it just so happened that "Bohemian Rhapsody" by Queen came on the radio.

Well as many people know I can't help but perform along whenever that song gets played. So much so that I've developed a little "act" over the years. But Melissa had a bit of a headache so Kristen quickly asked me to "tone it down" a tad.

As you can tell, I did indeed maintain some decorum... though I couldn't help but cut loose a bit :-)

You may have to turn up your speakers to hear the radio.

Thanks to Kristen for posting this (and I'd totally forgotten that she recorded it :-)

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DALLAS came back last night

I didn't know it either until yesterday morning (yes, I can be woefully behind on pop culture at times). Not a "reboot" as it turns out but a new series on cable network TNT that's a continuation of the primetime drama that ran on CBS from 1978 to 1991 (not counting the '85-'86 "Bobby Ewing/Only a dream" season).

So I tuned into Dallas, which I rarely do for a new television series. And lo and behold I enjoyed it quite a lot! It was like the Ewings had been going about their lives all this time and we caught up with them two decades later. Larry Hagman is back as the scheming J.R. Ewing, Patrick Duffy returns to the saddle as brother Bobby and Linda Gray - lovely as ever - has come back to the role of J.R.'s on-again/off-again wife Sue Ellen. But the real action is found among the next generation: J.R.'s son John Ross and Bobby's adopted heir Christopher. John Ross is old-school Texas oilman like his daddy and Christopher is into developing alternative energy industries. There's already a great dynamic set up between the two, set once again amidst Southfork (which the late Miss Ellie had willed would never be drilled for petro).

Maybe it's not the legendary feud between the Ewing and Barnes clans that began with Jock and Digger eighty years earlier, but it's nonetheless a smart update that stays faithful to the spirit of the original. Ken Kercheval is set to return later this season as Cliff Barnes (maybe we should begin wagering on how many times Cliff gets drunk this time) and apparently Victoria Principal might be reprising Pam.

So in honor of the triumphant return of Dallas, here is one of the most classic bits of dialogue in television history. From the original CBS series, it's J.R. and Sue Ellen having it out in their own inimitable fashion...

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Back from the Pacific Northwest!

That was the most fun trip that I've had in a long, long time.

Will be posting pics in the next few days, after getting caught back up on things. I'm wondering if the excursion to Mount St. Helens might merit a post all its own.

So... did I miss anything? :-)

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THE SHINING, PART II

Struggling writer Christopher Knight becomes the latest caretaker to fall victim to the madness of the Overlook Hotel...

Except it's not winter: it's early June. This isn't Colorado either: it's Oregon. And this is not the Overlook, but the Timberline Lodge on Mount Hood (open for skiing year-round) which is what was use for the exterior and establishing shots of Stanley Kubrick's 1980 horror classic The Shining.

And while we were there I just had to channel my inner Jack Nicholson for a pic (especially since there was so much snow around us!).

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Ray Bradbury has passed away

This world is suddenly much less interesting this morning...




Ray Bradbury, author of Fahrenheit 451, The Illustrated Man, The Martian Chronicles and so much other classic fiction, has passed away at the age of 91.

Thoughts and prayers going out to his family today.

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Greetings from Oregon!

Looking at Mount Hood from our chateau this morning...



And later today we are headed across the Columbia River into Washington State to visit Mount Saint Helens.

Will try to post some pics when I get back home :-)

Oh yeah, we saw a marijuana store in Portland yesterday! This place out-weirds even Asheville... but Oregon has still gotta be one of the most beautiful places that I've ever visited :-)

And oh yeah, here is Kristen and I at Multnomah Falls!

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