Scribbles in the Dark (or Third Time Pays for All)

So I've seen the Hobbit movie three times (twice on opening weekend, and once about a month later).  I don't think I'll watch it again. 

During the third viewing, I jotted down many notes of things I wished to remember and comment on.  Unfortunately, I was scribbling in the dark on the few scraps of paper I had available to me - a business card and a band-aid wrapper.  So at this point - after a few weeks' delay -- I cannot decipher most of the writing and have no idea what the scrawling was intended to signify.

So here are my after-impressions, aided or inspired by a few of the more legible scrawls.

Weirdness/Implausibility:

• Wargs can smell and track the dwarves in the rain.  A very impressive skill, not shared by their normal-earth counterparts as far as I know.
• Thorin & Co sneak off for a speedy, clever getaway from the elves, which completely discourages the elves from even trying to find the dwarves. But Gandalf easily catches up with the dwarves.  No problemo.  (Note to self: Is Gandalf part-warg?)

Riddles in the Dark Scene:

There's a wonderful homage to the fish riddle before the actual riddle game begins (while Gollum is happily talking to himself and killing the orc).

The riddles officially included in the movie are: 

• Mountain 
• Teeth
• Wind
• Time 

The Time riddle is my favorite in the Peter Jackson film, a lovely homage to the Rankin-Bass version. Specifically, Gollum is out of sight (hidden behind a rock) as he poses the riddle, so his voice seems to resonate throughout the space without a visible source.  This brings to mind the disembodied chanting of (I think) the Time riddle in the R-B film.

Candidate for Most Mysterious Change:

Gollum says, in an odd reversal of the book's formula (and, I believe, the common form), that his grandma taught him how to suck eggs.  This change must have been deliberate, but why?  An inside joke?   

Translation Into Film:

For film purposes, it would probably not have been very interesting for the dwarves to go back looking for Bilbo; and it would have been bad for them to seemingly abandon him; so they had a scene that gave the dwarves good reason to believe that Bilbo left.  This absolved them of the need to go looking for him during the riddle scene.  (As a general comment, the dwarves are much braver in the film than in the book, and generally less outrageous.  This is essentially a return to the earliest conception as seen in the Pryftan fragment; Tolkien made the dwarves over-the-top obnoxious and incompetent in the published version of the opening chapter, really caricatures rather than characters, presumably for humorous effect.  But this would not work well on film, I think -- toning them down to within the normal range is very important.  We see this in the Harry Potter films as well - the film-Dursleys are within the normal range of unpleasantness, both in their physical appearances and their level of cruelty, as compared with the near-caricatures we see in the book-Dursleys.  For example, the film-Petunia is merely thin, rather than "horse-faced and bony" with "nearly twice the usual amount of neck"; and the film-Vernon is merely plump, rather than "large and neckless" with "small, sharp eyes".)