Akwat Kbrana said:
To kick off the discussion, since I've provided a positive review of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey elsewhere, I thought I'd mention a few things here that I didn't like about the film. (Spoilers ahead.)
1. The portrayal of the dwarves. This is one of the things that consistently annoyed me in Jackson's LOTR trilogy. Tolkien's dwarves are not particularly crude, vulgar or gluttonous, and there is no reason to portray them as such. Jackson's dwarves come across, much of the time, as a bunch of dumb jocks that like to drink a lot, scratch themselves inappropriately, burp and fart, and generally behave in a riotous frat-boy manner. Tolkien's dwarves were much more elegant, refined, and cultured. In my own fanedits of the LOTR trilogy, I cut down significantly on Gimli's dumbness. Eventually, I plan to apply the same treatment to The Hobbit trilogy.
I found this reaction interesting. Textually, of course, you're correct: Dwarves are not depicted as being as jocular in either The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings as they are in Jackson's adaptations. Personally, however, it never occurred to me that they'd act otherwise. I must have had the same preconceptions about this race as Jackson, because I always found their gruff, uncivilized antics to be totally in keeping with my personal expectations of what a dwarf would be like.
Two things worth thinking about, however, are:
1) why object to Jackson's depiction of Dwarves but not Elves? In both TH and LOTR novels, Elves are depicted as being a very whimsical, light-hearted people, but in the films they're portrayed as serious and somber. If one is to find fault with one race's portrayal, why not the other?
2) as an in-universe explanation, one could argue that, unlike Elves and Men who were created by Illúvatar (i.e., "God"), Dwarves were made by Aulë, one of the Valar (i.e., a "lesser power"). Aulë was concerned with rock and metals (essentially the substances of Middle-earth). As such, Dwarves might be expected to be a little more a "salt of the earth"-type race than their Elven counterparts.