A cheap date

At 3.45 pm this afternoon, Mountain Man and I were to be found in the Dominion Cinema in Morningside, Edinburgh. We had cheap (£4 each) tickets to see The Hobbit courtesy of Groupon.

The cinema is great. One of those with deep leather seats and a switch so that you can put your feet up. Plenty of space to spread out and the seating is arranged so well that there's no problem with tall people being in front of you. Finding the switch to flip the feet up thingy needed a bit of help from those in the seats next door, but once we were ensconced it was comfort all the way.

As to the film... what comes to mind for me is 'self-indulgent' and dare I say a bit boring in places. The story lost thrust by, in my view, starting in the wrong place. Instead of getting into the story straight away, Peter Jackson decided to start with Bilbo telling his nephew Frodo all about how his adventure started. That for me was a waste of time. I also thought the initial dwarf scenes, the fight scenes and the escape scenes were far too long. But I suppose if you're Peter Jackson you can do pretty much what you like and still people will flock to see it. I will still go see the next two parts of the trilogy to see how the rest is handled, even though part of me is already complaining about the fact that it's a trilogy in the first place. The other thing I wasn't so keen on was where the film tried to be humorous... completely unnecessary I thought. Oh yes, and the dwarves didn't look dwarvish. Just to set the record straight, I thought in The Lord of the Rings, the dwarf, Gimli, looked... well dwarvish, but in The Hobbit the dwarves just don't.

What MM and I have decided to do from this experience is go to the Dominion more often, especially in the afternoon, just cos we can, and even more especially if we get such a cheap deal.

What we did after that was go for a lovely Japanese meal at Bonsai, also courtesy of Groupon I may add, so a real cheap date in all senses of the word!