kiz:
Hagrid reveals himself as half-giant in movie # 4 (Goblet), and explains all about the half-brother in # 5 (Order). Centaurs previously appear, as residents of the forest, in movie # 1 (Stone).
He’s inexplicable in the books, too. I don’t see what the point was of ever introducing him into the series.
I absolutely loved it. My favorite of the ones so far. I didn’t read the books ahead of time but I didn’t find it confusing at all. I found the third one confusing a bit. It’s a very long book so I understand that they had to cut a lot but I do wish they had left it longer, that was my only complaint. It was my favorite because of the possession scene. I am a sentimental fool and I love watching it over and over again on youtube. Brings me near tears everytime. I disliked Harry’s hair, thought it looked better when it was a bit more shaggy.
Likewise.
Now that it’s all over, I was waiting for Rowling to do something cool with the giants, but she dropped that thread like a hot potato, along with many others.
Each book got fatter and fatter. The films simply could not keep up, otherwise OotP would be 4 hours long and the next two even longer. Stuff simply has to be omitted. Well, unless they release the next two in several parts.
What bothered me was that too many of the really good scenes in the book were cut and replaced with lackluster scenes in the movie. The “careers counseling” interview was one of my favorite in the book, because it had the confrontation between McGonagall and Umbridge, and it also set up the most important fact for the next installment.
(Becoming an auror requires advanced potions which requires E, which means Harry doesn’t buy an advanced potions book and has to borrow one)
The confrontation they had was a little perfunctory.
Also, the rage scene in Dumbledore’s office could have been cut down and rewritten for the screen into something really touching, and it was turned into a sort of afterthought. I wanted to see Mrs Black lose her shit just once. The showdown between Dumbledore and Voldemort looked like it something out of Star Wars.
But somehow, they made Order of the Phoenix actually shorter than Prisoner of Azkaban (which went around 2h 30m, IIRC). Order of the Phoenix clocks in at around 2h 15m, and they can easily have made it something like 2h 40m, which would still be watchable (if long) for the young crowd. This is the generation that’s growing up with the Lord of the Rings movies, after all!
With those extra 25 minutes, so many things could have been made clearer and many scenes could have been made far more interesting, instead of feeling like a mad dash to the next scene. The conversation with Dumbledore at the end, especially, could have used a few more minutes, as this really fills out what’s been going on, as well as acting as a nice emotional denouement to the action. A few minutes here and there would also have the benefit of making a lot of the secondary characters feel more like a part of the story. As it stands now, almost everyone feels like a cameo, the dialogue is horribly simplified (“I just care for you too much, Harry”), and it all feels quite rushed.
They really need to make Half-Blood Prince 2h 40m or more, or it’ll likely end up feeling like another slap-dash, mediocre movie. I really hope they can get Cuaron back in the project somehow, as Prisoner of Azaban is the only one in the series to pass really well as a stand-alone movie.
I think that one thing that the first and third movies proved to us was that you cannot “film” the books. They are even more unfilmable than the Lord of the Rings books were, because she simply stocks them chock full of stuff that you enjoy. So you end up either trying to stuff everything into the movie (Philosopher’s Stone), or you end up trying to tell the basic story and ignore the rest (Prisoner of Azkaban). Prisoner worked so well in my opinion, and that of many others (including most movie critics) because it was a movie, not a film of vignettes from the book, each too short to do the situation justice, the entirety to long to be manageable.
This movie failed to find the balance at all. The climax ends up being quite “eh?” And I agree that it never managed to explain why the hell Voldemort would want this “prophecy” so badly that all this mucking about was going on. And while people who are truly into the series will have recognized Mr. Malfoy, they sure didn’t use his name at all, did they? :eek:
It had the look of being edited heavily, and badly. Percy’s presence in Dumbledore’s office indicates to me that the movie established what he wqas doing at some point, but the scene was cut for the final edit.
I think the best we can hope for (and it’s unlikely) is someone deciding to release EEs like Jackson did for LOTR. Heck, I settle for “deleted scenes” on the DVDs.
This movie did have one thing going for it… No f-ing Quiddich. I hate every single Quiddich scene in every movie.
My girlfriend who loves Harry Potter, loved the movie.
Nitpick, but OotP is the longest book in the series, and is 100 or so pages longer than the last book.
I also thought things were a bit rushed, and that the ending with Dumbledore was lame. Also, they should have included a bit more of the Snape backstory, and I wish they hadn’t omitted the Weasly cleaning thing.
That said, it’s nonetheless probably my favorite of the series so far, or maybe in a tie with “Azkaban.”
True, You make a good point. While I think we both agree that 4-6 hour films won;t happen here, certainly another half-hour was doable.
I think that, for the most part, the Potter films are really well cast (especially the adults) and I enjoy the way the characters are represented, which makes me wish that the scripting and arcing of the films wasn’t so terrible. From the omissions about the creators of the Maurader’s Map and the identity of the Maurauders in Azkaban to the omission of the complete text of the prophecy in OOtP (I still can’t believe they reduced the frackin’ Order itself to a cameo), the films make an absolute mess of the books. While the films are still passable and manage to tell a story that is coherent enough, only those who have read the books are able to fill in blanks that provide real meaning to a lot of the payoff scenes.
Take Harry and Ginny for example. It’s kind of important; one imagines it will figure into the ending scenes of DH. A lot of the groundwork here is laid in CoS. That entire subplot in the film was completely bungled (and there was no reason–CoS is a simple book played out as a two hour and forty minute film). Did Ginny’s meaningful looks even register on the audience? Also take Neville and the prophecy. If this is not somehow brought up before the Nagini scene in DH, that scene will be robbed of so much meaning. It will still look cool, and people will think “that’s nice,” and it will be passable, but it will be much less than what it could have been.
I guess that’s what is so irritating–these films feel like they were scripted independently of each other. Each script begins to make an attempt to highlight a moral theme or character arc or hint at a point of development, and all the but the largest of these gets dropped or altered or not brought to an appropriate conclusion. There is very little coherence. The root of the problem is in the disasters that were the film versions of SS and CoS, because the reaction against those films were PoA and GoF, done in more of a vignette style (and I still vastly prefer those two because they were at least funny and quirky and true to the spirit of Rowling’s text in a way that the first two films were not–plus, I’ve read the books, so I can fill in the blanks). Why OotP was so short, I’ll never know, and how they could screw up Sirius’s death, which was one of the few parts of that miserable book that I felt was well done, is beyond me. Having Sirius randomly killed by Bellatrix without the taunting and the laughter makes no sense–it saved no time, the change was not used to establish anything we didn’t already know, and it was just DUMB.
I have little hope for HBP or DH as coherent films; I only hope that they manage to provide a visual representation of my favorite moments that I can watch as a DVD chapter. I hate to say this, because I really do enjoy the actors and actresses for the most part, but…