Forbes.com: My wife and I took most of our kids to the first showing of The Hobbit at our local theater Friday morning. All but one of us was already a fanatically patriotic citizen of the Shire long before this movie, and all of us enjoyed the film quite a bit. This will not be the case for every Tolkien fan: I suspect the purists will be upset by the ways in which the films deviate from the book.
I, however, am not a purist. The Hobbit is a nearly perfect book from a literary point of view. That is no surprise, given the fact that it comes from one of the greatest literary minds of the 20th Century. But, books and films are different types of story-telling vessels and Peter Jackson was right in adapting the story to the newer medium. And he did so as someone who truly loved the original, who respected his source material, and who as a general rule carved it with the grain and not against it in his attempt to shape it into the needs of a big budget film trilogy.
