As a non-reader, i have a question:
Why didn’t Harry tell people that Lucius Malfoy was a Death Eater? That seemed like a pretty big thing.
They could do one of two things – either having Hermione find out in the next movie and use blackmail (but Cuaron already left out all the stuff about animagi being registered). Or Rita might be bribed.
To each their own opinion, but I do find it surprising. The complain I’ve always heard is that Gambon’s too loose.
I didn’t think Harris had that fey quality. The look in Harris’s eye alwas seemed to say to me, “When the hell can I get out of this goddamn wizard costume?” It was like watching Alec Guiness play Obi Wan – it seemed to embarrass him.
Gambon seems to me like he’s having a lot of fun. He speaks like a stage actor doing Shakespeare.
[spoiler]Harry was still in shock at first in the book, so after he tells his story to Dumbledore, the headmaster does all the talking. Dumbledore, while prepared to talk about Voldemort, was reluctant to name names, because he had no proof besides Harry’s word – good enough for Dumbledore, not good enough for the wizarding world.
I can’t find my copy of Goblet of Fire. There’s a scene in it where he tells the graveyard story to Dumbledore, but I can’t remember if Lucius’s name comes up.[/spoiler]
In the next book (minimal spoilers):
[spoiler]Harry does talk about Lucius to anyone who’ll listen, but book 5 starts out with the problem that half the wizarding world believes Harry and Dumbledore, and the other half – including the Ministry of Magic – are trying to discredit them. Lucius is a close friend of Minister for Magic Cornelius Fudge, gives a lot of money to charitible causes, and has a good reputation. He claimed to have been under the Imperius charm last time around.
Meanwhile, Voldemort is biding his time, laying low and making preparations.[/spoiler]
Hamish - I think Alec Guiness would have been a good Dumbledore. I have no prior knowledge of either Harris or Gambon-so they are (were) just old British men to me. Actually, IMO, Peter Ustinov would have been great fun as Dumbledore as well.
I would have loved Guilgud (sp?) as Albus, too.
I think I may be having more difficulty with the script than the actors–some of the dialogue…it’s odd how some of the characters just jump off the screen–Neville, McGonagall, Madame Hooch (first movie), Rita–and some just don’t. For the life of me, I cannot decide if it is “bad” acting or bad screenplay or a combo of both.
I thought Hermione was outstanding in PoA, for example–Emma nailed her scenes so well. This movie–not so much.
I wonder if it is hard for the kids to adjust to new approachs every film from the director…
I really don’t think they can. I went, as did everyone else in this thread. And most of us have crossed that line into adulthood and can sit relatively still for 2.5 hours and watch a movie. But the 12-year-old who went with me was getting fidgety by the end. And Harry Potter is, to me, children’s literature and movies that adults can enjoy more than adult literature that is suitable for some children.
To make the movie longer and include everything would be one way to go (I was glad they cut the SPEW part. I hated that in the book. Nice insight into Hermione, of course, but the “happy slave” thing really, really pissed me off. A lot.) but it would be too long for what I think the target audience should be.
alanak
in the book
Harry does mention the names of those he heard. Fudge blows it off because they were people who had been tried and let off in the first round of trials, claiming they had been under Imerious. The trials were well publicised and their names available to the public so Fudge maintained that Harry had gotten them out of old Daily Prophets.
OK, have read 6 pages’ worth of comments before adding some of my own. To avoid saying what’s already been said in more detail than necessary:
- Yeah, mediocre Dumbledore
- Needs editing, is choppy, doesn’t flow
- Hedges in Triwizard was a wimpout
- Graveyard scene = good
- Bathtub scene w/Moaning Myrtle = cute, well-acted, naughty
- Weasley twins = well-acted, fun
- Neville — all right, go Neville go!
- Lousy female roles, check. See below also.
OK, here’s my more original, less redundant comments:
-
The dragon scene. Lots of time and effort into crafting a spectacular dragonfight. But it was all wrong for the plot they way they did it. We’ve got Harry Potter, extraordinary wizard for his age but presumably a bit out of his league in going up against the three “real” champions. The one place he really shines (outside of courage) is in what he can do on that broom of his. In the book, once he learns how to have the broom come to him on command (“accio”), this is one task he’s up to. But the way they did it in the movie, he was mostly just very lucky to not be Toasty Dragonsnacks, and it wasn’t exceptional flying that saved his butt, either. I really liked the CGI but not what they did with it.
-
Rita Skeeter vs Hermione. I can’t believe they skimmed over this and then cut the climax, in which Hermione …traps Skeeter, who is in bug-mode, under a glass jar especially since, in snipping all that out, they reduced the already-thin set of meaningful screen-time for women in this movie
-
Single-sexxing the schools. I took a really strong dislike for this plot-change all out of proportion to what it had any real effect on, I guess. I’ll acknowledge that in the book Rowling focused almost exclusively on the male students from Durmstrang and the female students from Beauxbatons, although if you eliminate Victor Krum and Fleur Delacorte everyone else was just described as background window-dressing so it’s not as if she focused on 4-5 female Beauxbatons students and a half-dozen male Durmstrang students. Whatever. It just bugged me. That in combination with collapsing the Veelas (from the world cup tournament) with the Beaubatons students and the staff-whamming goose-stepping dark-n-scowly Durmstrangers turned the two wizarding schools into some kind of silly Jungian gender archetypes in a movie that (as others have said) already had too much of a tendency to give the boys all the vivid action while putting the girls on promgown pedestals. Where’s that pukey smiley, weren’t we supposed to get a pukey smiley??
-
It was Rowling’s worst book so it was a major challenge to make a good movie out of it. Unlike Order of the Phoenix or Half-blood Prince that were also huge and followed it, I thought GOF was overly large for mostly bad reasons: it needed an editor badly. And of all the books she’s written in the series, this is the one that sticks out as failing to have her characters feel consistent and real. In particular, the major plot twist of having Mad-eye Moody turn out to be an evil impostor just fell flat with me, and it didn’t work any better in the movie. Too much of what he did only fit right, only felt right, if he was truly Mad-eye Moody, the obsessively crazed auror. In the book, it felt all wrong for it to turn out that he was a sham, someone else playing him. In the movie, they made of him a less sympathetic character (more of a clown) but it still didn’t run well. In addition, it was just a very cluttered book.
-
The fallout between Ron and Harry was great. “Piss off” indeed! Neither the movie nor the book was all bad and this was one of the pieces I was glad to see they had done such a good job on.
I’m serious about Ralph Fiennes’ nose. Where is it?
Can I just say I saw it today and I really enjoyed the movie. I won’t suggest great acting or directing, just that I genuinely enjoyed it. My 8 year old daughter really liked it also. My wife & son fell asleep.
Jim
I liked the movie a lot, although I think the maze could have been much better. I also thought Voldemort looked like the Mummy
I generally liked the movie. I thought the maze was just fine: I don’t really get people’s problem with it. As with everything else, the bizarre loonybin they had playing Dumbledore definately hurt it a bit (people go a bit crazy in there: LIKE ME!!! I’M A PARANOID UNSTABLE NUTBAG WHO HAS NO RELATION TO THE WHIMSICAL AND KINDLY CHARACTER OF DUMBLEDORE), by oh well. Otherwise, I was pretty happy with things.
There were definately pacing issues and bits that felt like they had cut out scenes just to save time without thinking much about the problems they caused. For instance, unless you read the books, there is the little problem that… you’d have no fucking clue what the ship or carriage are all about. I mean, these things fly in… and you never see people getting out of them. Obviously there is some sort of special magic that transports 30+ people in a tiny horse drawn carriage, but we don’t get any of that. We just see it flying in… and then later on some various people show up. Are these events related? I know it seems stupid to most of us who have read the books (and the line about the horses sort of fills it in), but in terms of movie, it’s just sloppy. You don’t have a Mini cooper dramatically pull up to a club and then cut to another unrelated scene and then later on a football team enters the club. Us muggles, and especially our kids, need things spelled out a little more clearly than that.
They also didn’t seem too clear on what they were doing with the Crouches. Obviously, they had to change a lot in regards to simplifying Jr’s story/Winky, etc. and that’s okay. But was Barty Sr. under the Imperious Curse or not? Plotwise, it wouldn’t make much sense: there was never any need to Imperious him since Crouch apparently was never under his care. And yet, Barty Sr. post the World Cup acts very strangely: in the Goblet announcement scene he litterally looks like a puppet with all sorts of odd twitching and fingers splaying randomly. And then again later he doesn’t do that, AND we have the odd scene where he sees Barty Jr/Moody’s facial tic and has a moment of recognition… and is prompty killed for it. None of that makes much sense if he was under the curse. So which is it?
Likewise, Crouch’s escape from Azkaban, let alone his being alive (if he died in this version) goes completely unspoken of as others have noted. A real loose end. They also telegraphed Moody-as-crouch far too obviously, especially given that most people would already know and be looking for it. From the facial tic to Crouch dying almost immediately after seeing it to the several gratiotous references to polyjouce potion, the movie telegraphed the surprise far far more than the book.
Still, I liked the interplay of characters just fine, and that’s what counts.
Oh: the fact that they didn’t include CONSTANT VIGILANCE! in the classroom scene with Moody was a tragedy. There was room, there was time, and it was the perfect context.
And more on Dumbledore: yes the guy is supposed to be wacky. But whimsical wacky, not nasty wacky. The Dubmledore of the books would NEVER, NEVER shove Harry up against a bookcase and scream at him. The Dumbledore of the books may be stern at times, but the worst he gets is closemouthed and disappointed. And this is balanced with warmth and charm that is just utterly lacking from Gambon. The reason Dumbledore is so formidible when he gets angry is in part because at other times he is wise and faces even the darkest hour with good humor. Gambon’s Dumbledore has very little of this powerful loving humor. Instead he seems a stressed out buerrecrat about to crack from the pressure. That’s just the exact opposite of Dumbledore. And a real weak point.
I have another question which is really bugging me.
Why would two schools spend their entire year at hogwarts for a little tournament that only involves one of the students from each school? Especially when you can fit the entire tournament in one weekend? Does this tournament happen every year? If so, shouldn’t basically each of the three schools be spending only one out of every three years in their home school?
Is this a bad plot device because of Rowling, or just some details skipped over in the movie?
It wasn’t the entire student bodies of the other schools, just the that students the headmasters thought would be best as their school’s champion. Still, your point stands.
Can’t remember where I read it, but they basically photoshopped it out of the movie.
GT
Apos --excellent post, you expressed my reservations about Gambon’s Dumbledore quite well. I share your disappointment–the shaking of Harry is waaay over the top as is Dumbledore’s despair at figuring things out later in his office (“I keep searching for something I may have missed”)–AB would not say that-flat out.
But for this, I fault the script writer. Add Gambon’s wooden facial expression–and his stare and none of it adds up to Dumbledore.
While this thread is here, I have a question. I was just thinking, in the first task, would it be possible to just do an “Accio egg!” and be done with it? Is there any reason why that wouldn’t have worked? (other than making that scene really boring)
I wouldn’t say that his open dispair is necessarily unDumbledore like, but the real Dumbledore would, at least, in a moment like that, also let on that his despair and frustration were because he so deeply cared about the safety of his students, that it pained him to know that he was failing in his charge to keep them safe. That’s what’s missing from this Dumbledore: any hint of his underlying love for Harry and his students. This Dumbledore could indeed feel all that, but none of his lines or acting really drive that point home. As far as anyone who hasn’t read the books might know, Dumbledore is stressed out because if students are harmed he might not get promoted or something.
I actually thought the movie covered this okay, albiet not exactly clearly enough. The whole point of the Triwizard tournament is to bring people from different schools, nationalities, and cultures together. Hence things like the Yule Ball. The competition adds the element of friendly competition and rivalry, but ultimately, as Dumbledore says at the end, the point of it is friendship and unity. Which it actually DOES achieve in many ways (Fleur, Krum, and Maxime especially)
Well, they did word the challenge such that you had to “get by” the dragon and get to the egg. That’s a stretch, but I suppose that they could have set up some kind of spell to prevent you from casting anything on the egg. Still, you’d think that they’d be more explicit about that.
To add to previous answers, the Triwizard Tournament is being started up again after many years of not being held; because (IIRC) there was such a high death count in champions (and sometimes spectators). Plus, I believe it was held every 5 years or so - something along those lines.