Against The Hobbit 2: I Prefer My Orcs Be Named Mork and That My Smaug Come From LA

I’ve
got a new column up at Time.com. It’s about parental
responsibility and my lack of interest in seeing The Hobbit:
The Desolation of Smaug. Some snippets:

I will be chaperoning somewhere between one and 100 friends of
my 12-year-old son. As dispiriting a prospect
as Smaug is on its own, it’s coming at the tail
end of a year that has already birthed The Lone
Ranger, The Croods, The Smurfs
2, One Direction: This is Us, Free
Birds, Thor 2, and a dozen other kid-friendly, parent-annoying
movies that adults have blissfully repressed from memory.

I understand that billions— if not trillions—of people
love The Lord of the
Rings and The
Hobbit both as novels and as movies, and I’m happy
to admit that I am the problem here. Yet surely I’m not the only
adult American who is sick and tired of living under the reign of
terror foisted on us by Tolkein’s imagination lo
these 40
years after his death. For too much of the 21st
century, it seems that the year-end holidays exist only to provide
space for yet another family reunion with the Bagginses of The
Shire (why won’t they ever come to our house?). Director Peter
Jackson ruined the holidays in 2001, 2002, and 2003 with his
three Lord of the Rings movies and
then just last year darkened the season anew
with The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey,
the first in a three-part sequence.

It’s worrisome that Jackson seems bent on making bigger
and longer movie franchises out of Tolkein works. Think about it:
With Lord of the Rings, Jackson did three movies out of three
books. With The Hobbit, he’s doing three
movies out of one book. May Sauron have mercy on us all if Jackson
ever sets his sights on creating a franchise
out The Silmarillion, which even most
Tolkein enthusiasts grant is unreadable. It seems plausible
that The Silmarillion might well
comprise two dozen or more installments, thereby ruining Christmas
for the rest of most of our lives.

Read the whole thing.