It was a little stretched out and long for me.  I liked it, but I thought my wife was going to pass out from boredom. 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hobbit

"It was published on 21 September 1937"

!!

I really liked the 3d, it was very well used. That's the first movie I say that about. Although the old trick of "throwing something at the viewer" to get people to flinch gets old. Hope that doesn't become the new Wilhelm scream.

The movie had a lot of content that was basically filling in the blanks for lord of the rings, that weren't really there in the book. Their encounter with the elves was made a lot worse going from book to movie. That's my only complaint about the freedoms they took with the story, at least in part 1.I mean, in the book, elves are far more mysterious (how they track them in the forest the first times) and practically at war with the dwarves near the end. Now they are just this benevolent presence that really knows all and puts up with all the arrogance of the dwarves without a mutter.

Best scene was without a doubt watching the dwarves fighting the orcs at Moria. Second best Smaug's attack on the Lonely Mountain. They've done dwarves as a culture really well in my opinion. And thank you very much for avoiding the the dreaded funny "Jar Jar Binks" dwarves running around being silly, instead we get dwarves playing pranks on each other and just having a good time. That's how amusing characters should be, not fall over each other with flappy ears.

One complaint was that they threw a lot of names of places around all the time, it was a bit confusing to keep track of, especially for the younger minds in our retinue. That's Tolkien of course, three or four names for every blade of grass, but normally the moviemakers just stick to mentioning the important places where things will actually happen.

I didn't like the whole goblin bit, they were a bit too much like punching bags. What happened to most dwarves not being warriors? The scene with them running through the caves just lasted too long for a good action scene. Not to say it wasn't executed well, it just sort of became mindless violence after a bit.

I know

I have read all of Tolkien's Middle Earth books (including Similarion).  But sorry, this one was too long (and I understand we have 6 more hours coming).  The hobbit is an excellent book!  But it is a book, not a trilogy (they perhaps should have given more screen time to the LOTR instead).

I agree with your following assessments:

• The movie could be best described as giving unlimited budget and control to the ultimate Tolkien fan and letting him indulge in that.
• Radagast the Brown will become a meme, particularly with his “sleigh”.

I would give it a 7 out of 10 honestly.  I think Peter Jackson is falling victom to George Lucas like folly by doing too much with CGI...even compared to LOTR.  I also feel the use of corny comedy took away from the story...such as it was.  As much as I like Tolkien, too many liberties were taken with the story so they could, IMO, stretch the thing out and ultimately make it a trilogy.  I saw this in 2D and found that some scenes were oddly out of focus, particulary fast moving pans.  Not sure if that is due to the convert from 3D to 2D or not but it was definately there.  I plan on seeing it in 3D as well so I will see if that is any better. 

All in all, I would recommend it if you like high fantasy but it is not LOTR quality.

It is the same quality in my opinion, the emotional level is just slightly less mature and the plot structure is less sophisticated (keep in mind The Hobbit was always a children's book). It only falls short of being truly great because it lives in the shadow of LoTR.

Yes, very much agree with the ratings.Fellowship was a near perfect film.

I really liked the movie. I don't remember the book at all, or the animated movie very much. I liked how Gandalf had a pretty large amount of tricks that he used. It also helped that I read the wikipedia page for Gandalf before watching so I knew more about who/what he was.

I found the 3D to be distracting in a few scenes, mostly because of foreground objects that were purposely out of focus... it looked TERRIBLE. It totally broke the immersion for me. Most of the time it wasn't noticeable or didn't bother me.

The Imax projector at 48 FPS looked really really good. The colors were so vivid, even with the tinted glasses, that it looked almost real. If watching in 2D means you lose some of the color quality (i'm assuming they are cheaper projectors or at least several years older), then I would say its worth watching in 3D, unless 3D really bothers you.

Its hard to say how much 48 FPS matters but I think it added to the enjoyment though it did feel less "stylistic" than LOTR. I think this mostly has to do with better lighting, so you are seeing things as they are instead of smoke & mirrors to give a dark contemplative atmosphere. Maybe that was intentional since the hobbit is more of a grand adventure. 

Does it bring back the obsessive...

"Taaa dada daaaa dada daaaaaaa  ......  tadadaaaaa dadadaaa dadadaaaa.... taaaa daaaaaaaa"

?

The main problem is that when Tolkien wrote hobbit, it was just a plain fairy tale. In a fairy tale, there is no centuries-spanning background for the characters, no uberscheme of eternal good fighting eternal evil.

The trolls are not twisted servants of Darkness, attracted by the whispering of the One Ring, but just a bunch of stupid monsters that crave human flesh, and that turn into stone when touched by sunlight - and that's that, end of scene, cheap little thrill, and let's move on. Gandalf is not an incarnation of a demigod, but rather an old-fashioned wizard with a few spells under the hat, an aging fellow who enjoys a good laugh. And when he is done providing hints and help during the tutorial, he "suddenly remembers he has something important to do elsewhere", because the author has realized he is stealing all the EXP and robbing the story of the sense of danger ("Gendolf will save us, right?"). And the ring is just a magical trinket, like the purse of eternal gold, or a horse that can speak - they are found in every old fashioned fairy tale.

The whole X-files style epos of the struggle of good versus evil with complete mythology including gods, demons and history spanning thousands of years was written later, to seamlessly wrap around the simple tale the Hobbit originally was. 

The problem with Jackson's (and every Tolkien nerd) approach is that by constantly showing "look, this simple detail have far reaching context, and I am clever enough to know it", and inserting those references into the story, you are destroying what the Hobbit originally was - a simple tale for children, similar to those of Grimm brothers. 

Much better put than what I wrote, totally agree. It is not Lord of the Rings, so it annoyed me that they kept inserting all these tidbits (and sometimes a whole meet) just to connect the two together. This only makes sense if you make LoTR movies first then the Hobbit later. In the future, people will not have seen LoTR before the Hobbit. And then the Hobbit will appear much poorer than what we judge it for today.

To me, it felt like it was sort of missing the point in a lot of places. Of course there was little things the added action and the increased emphasis on the homeland compared to the gold, but the cut songs hurt it (although the songs they kept were great) and I felt that the changed scenes were pretty much all for the worse. The entrance into Rivendell in particular made no real sense to me.
Why have the dwarves showing such great animosity to the elves? Why did the elves show animosity to the dwarves, instead of singing as they did in the book? And why no meat, when elves are skilled hunters and bowmen? It's inane changes that break the setting and cause things to make less sense.
Why were the mountains literally big giants throwing rocks around? Taking figurative language overly literally robs the story of a lot of its charm.
The addition of Radagast was good, but the bird shit in his hair went too far and turned him into more of a caricature.

Overall, I felt like there was too much effort to make the story serious when in the book it's more of a lighthearted fairytale. There were some nods to the book's tone, but as Polistes notes they're so rare they seem to be a deviation from the movie's actual tone.

I did still enjoy it though.