Lord of the Ringworm

Excuse my absence from this blog of late.  Where did the time go?  I spent most of it in a movie theater watching the two longest films in the history of cinema since The English Patient.  The latest magnum opi are Lincoln, starring Daniel Day-Lewis, and The Hobbit, starring some techno-nerdist locked away in an animation studio, eating a ham sandwich and producing CGI effects.

Nonetheless, one of these pictures kept me enthralled with its heavenly mix of drama, humor, adventure, and just plain edge-of-your-seat excitement.

The other one was The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey.

I'll say it was certainly unexpected that I'd find this much-anticipated film bloated, slow moving, shallow and tedious.

How could our expectations not be high?  It's Peter Jackson, fer chrissakes! I have never experienced such an elaborate (and surely expensive) marketing campaign as the one for The Hobbit.  On a recent trip to New York, I stood dumbfounded with amazement at the ads displayed in the subway passage under Columbus Circle:

Hobbit is so far removed from Peter Jackson's excellent The Lord of the Rings film trilogy that it should begin its own franchise, Bored of the Rings, and heaven help us if we must endure a trilogy of such muck.

The one redeeming scene was the one in which we spend twenty minutes in the company of the richest character to emerge from Tolkien's pen (and imagination).  I am speaking of Smeagol, a/k/a Gollum.

But this is a cat blog, so I am thinking, what if Smeagol was a Keetain?

I suppose he would look something like this:

And his pressssscioussss might look something like this:

He would say things like, "What has it got in its Pill-Poketses?!?" and "Master betrayed us.  Wicked, Tricksey, Friskies Buffet, False!" and "She's hungry.  She always needs to feed.   She must eat.  All she gets is nasty Orcses.  And Greenies." and "Pretty little fly.  Why does he cry?  Caught by Keaton.  Soon he'll be . . . eaten."

And he would think of clever riddles to stump poor Bilbo so he could put Hobbitses on the menu, like:

What greeny, flakesy, fluttery fleckses
Helps us to catch a good buzz
It cannot be smoked nor snorted nor eaten,
Yet turns our poor brainses to fuzz?

"Sorry, Bagginses.  It was deliciousssssss."