Salon.com > irony http://www.salon.com Wed, 19 Jun 2013 02:24:51 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 “The Hobbit” is not a hipster! http://www.salon.com/2012/12/02/the_hobbit_was_not_nor_should_it_ever_be_imbued_with_irony/ http://www.salon.com/2012/12/02/the_hobbit_was_not_nor_should_it_ever_be_imbued_with_irony/#comments Sun, 02 Dec 2012 21:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=13107120 There’s a sequence in the most recent trailer for Peter Jackson’s “The Hobbit” that worries me. It’s at the very end: The dwarves are tentatively emerging from the debris of some colossal battle or other, and one of them says, “Well, that could’ve been worse” — and then a Volkswagen-size goblin carcass crashes down on them.

This is more Chuck Jones than J.R.R. Tolkien, and if there’s more of the same in the coming feature film — whose scope, as we already know, has expanded far beyond that of the original novel — it may not be just Tolkien’s lovely little picaresque adventure that gets swallowed whole, but its plucky, whimsical tone as well, consumed by modern irony.

Continue Reading...

]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/12/02/the_hobbit_was_not_nor_should_it_ever_be_imbued_with_irony/feed/ 48