Waited to see the newest Harry Potter until yesterday. Went to a matinee. Only 4 people in the theater. We got great seats, middle of the row, on the aisle with lots of leg room.
Great film. Have liked all the films, have never read the books but have a question.
Was wondering - do you think Rowling, now that she has seen her books being made into films, has been writing her books with films in mind?
Those who have read the books - are you noticing a change in writing style?
In other words, is she writing books that turn into screenplays, or is she writing screenplays as books?
No. If anything, since the first movie, I think that the directors are becoming more comfortable in adapting the books.
No. In my opinion, her style has remained constant.
No. The books can be dense. They can be riveting. But one thing they are: long. Long == Screenplay (generally speaking).
Honestly, in the first movie, the directors/producers included EVERYTHING. There was an active push not to exclude anything that would alienate fans of the books. As the books have gotten longer, I feel that the directors have had to actively exclude/pare down the story to fit the structure of a winning motion picture.
Yes, but the books are becoming progressively less filmable, not more. The later ones are more complex and layered, fuller of side plots and backstory, much of which has gotten the chop in the film version. A lot of the ethical complications from the later books don’t seem to translate well to film. My biggest complaint about the GoF film is that it really minimized the extent to which Barty Crouch, Senior was complicit in his own fate (in fact, it wasn’t really clear in the film why he was murdered at all).
I’m honestly not sure how they’re going to film OotP, since so much of the action takes place inside of Harry’s own head, and his real “outside” antagonist is the Ministry of Magic, which hasn’t been set up as a major presence in the films.
I didn’t get it the first time, but then, I hadn’t read the book. The 2nd time it was very clear to me that Crouch Sr. noticed that “Moody” had the same tongue flick “tic” as his son, and realized something very close to the truth about his son and Moody. They couldn’t leave him alive after that.
There’s no reason why I should have gotten that on my first viewing. There were a lot of things I didn’t understand, but I appreciated that the filmmakers didn’t treat me like a 5 year old and explain each and every thing. The intrigue of wanting to know what was happening “behind the scenes” made me read the books. Which I did.
Honestly, I do not understand why a book reader would let the possible confusion of a non-book reader bother them. The book reader KNOWS what’s happened, is happening and is going to happen behind the scenes and off-screen, so why should they need every little thing explained and shown? Non-book readers will be clueless, but the movies are now so well-done that they should be intrigued enough to want to know more, by reading the books. Non-book readers who just complain and complain that they didn’t understand a thing and condemn the movie for it (and I’ve heard from very few of those) don’t matter and shouldn’t be considered.
But they’ve obviously failed if it took two viewings for you to understand (though now your explanation fills in what felt like a major gap in the movie - I didn’t think there was any explanation for Crouch Sr.'s sudden death, and I had no idea what the bizarre and obnoxious tongue tic was inserted for.) I felt like that entire plotline was handled abominably by the movie, and it’s sad because in my opinion it added a good bit of pathos to the book, in a way that was less immediate but equally meaningful to Cedric’s death. I’m not generally slow when it comes to understanding movies, so I doubt our own difficulties picking up on it were isolated occurences. I know that Goblet of Fire had a good deal more material to cover than Prisoner of Azkaban, so it’s probably not a fair comparison, but I was quite impressed by the third movie and how gracefully the plotline was cut. My major complaint with the fourth movie is just how poorly I felt many of the cuts were done.
At any rate, my immediate impression in reading the first book was that it felt quite deliberately written to be a children’s movie, and I thought the same about the second. The books have indeed become far more complicated as the series has progressed, and I’d be hard-pressed to identify much capitulation if any to the needs of the filmmakers in the fifth book.
I don’t know how the fifth movie is going to be managed - even though the book has been out for some time, the films have done virtually nothing to set up the presence of the Ministry of Magic, while the books certainly had at this point. Granted, much of that was the sort of exposition that had to be trimmed to make a movie, but I don’t understand why the fourth movie - which I think entered production after the fifth book was out - so drastically cut the Crouch storyline, when it could have been easily used to hint at the importance of the Ministry of Magic as a foe for Harry. Failing that, they could have at least briefly mentioned Cornelius Fudge’s disagreement over Voldemort’s return, as the book did. I really cannot understand why it was done that way.
Of course, I probably would have made up for it by trimming the painfully long and ridiculously overblown fight with the dragon, which suggests that my tastes might not be precisely in sync with those of the rest of the viewing public . . .
I didn’t notice it. I also haven’t read it in a while. I enjoyed all the movies and the books, but I do notice that the plot details blur for me after a while. I don’t remember exactly what happened in which book except for the most major plot lines.
In the movie, I don’t recall that they explained what was going on in the scene where he locked wands with Voldemort, which seems to me to be a major flaw. Where the hell did all the dead people come from? Why did Harry have a few moments to escape, but Voldemort couldn’t see that coming? I recalled that they did explain it all in the book, and I was waiting for the standard post facto Dumbledore exposition that would clarify Harry’s (and the audience’s) confusion (“What the @#$% was that all about?” Harry recalls with confusion, seated/reclining in his dorm room/Dumbledore’s study/a hospital bed/whatever. “Well, Harry,” replies Dumbeldore with a wise expression, “you have to understand…”).
It was the climax of the film, for Pete’s sake, and it seemed a bit of a muddy deus ex machina. I did like the film, though. Would have been easy to address this, I think.
This worked OK in terms of movie plotting, but it’s quite different from the reason in the books. Crouch, Sr. had actually sprung his son from prison in the books, at the request of his dying wife, and kept him in his own home controlled under Imperius for some years. Crouch, Jr. learned how to fight off the curse, got hold of a wand in one of his lucid moments, and put his father under Imperius in turn. In part, he did kill his father because he wanted to silence him, but mostly, it was about revenge, and there are some very deliberate parallels set up between Crouch, Jr. and Voldemort, both of whom were named after fathers they hated and later murdered.
The other important thing about the Crouch family saga – which is lightly implied in the trial scene in the film, but very central to the book – is that Crouch, Sr. was the Ministry’s chief prosecutor during the years that the Death Eaters were at large, and he was a hard-liner who authorized Ministry agents to use the Unforgivable Curses, threw people into Azkaban without trials, and generally took a “kill 'em all and let God sort 'em out” approach. Arguably, the Ministry’s policies were a major factor in turning people toward Voldemort in the first place.
They did address in this in the film. Harry says to Dumbledore near the end of the film (they are in his “dorm” room) that the wands did something funny. AD mumbles “Priori Incantatum” and goes on to tell Harry sharply that the dead cannot return.
It’s not much, but it was addressed (or alluded to).
As a book reader, I went into the movie “knowing” what was going to happen. And unfortunately I’m in the block of fans who aren’t completely happy with the movie because of what they did cut out.
Don’t get me wrong, as a movie - I loved it. As an adapation of a book, I sighed at the end for all they had cut out. To me, the books and the movies have to be treated differently. The movies waver from the books. It’s like they’re tracing the path of the books and every so often the tracing strays from the line and at the end it manages to return to following the book.
I don’t see any change in her writing in favor of movies. She keeps right on plugging and as was noted above, the writing becomes more filled with storylines. I’ve also noticed that she has begun to compress her writing so that her books don’t end up as tomes which break shelves in weight.
I think Rowling just naturally writes in a very visual, quick-paced style, which adapts easily. I can’t imagine she was thinking ‘movie’ when she was writing that first, unsold book, but it’s in that same style.
Even the complex later books, which will be harder to adapt (I think they should just admit they’re complicated and release one book as two movies a month apart), are still told in a very visual fashion.
I could have written this post, but if I had, it wouldn’t have been nearly as clear and cogent. I don’t remember wondering about why Crouch, Sr., was killed–his son’s a bad guy; that’s what they do. (Especially in movies, where most violence and villainy seems poorly thought out.) But I did think the explanation of the eidolons appearing from Voldy’s wand during the duel was quite lacking.
Not only that, but for those who hadn’t read the books, was the fact that his parents were the ones who came out of his wand even apparent? Harry’s parents, for better or worse, are what heightens Harry’s (and the reader’s) sensitivity to what is happening, and those cloud-like images from the movie, well, just didn’t really work, in my opinion.
The lucidity of how I pictured things in what I consider the climax of the book made that part of the film seem like epitomy of why the movies simply don’t work… and that they actually can’t be properly adapted to the screen.
That said, I thought the rest of the Voldemort scenes were pretty well done.
The reason for the tongue tic was foreshadowing who Prof. Moody really was. It was just after Crouch Sr. saw Moody’s tongue tic that he was killed, i.e., he recognized his son and would’ve blown the whistle.
I generally feel that the last two movies weren’t up to par with the first two. They rather seemed like just a bunch of scenes taped together.
I just saw TGOF, and was disappointed in the removal of the following: Mrs. Weasley and the elder Weasley boys, Mr. Bagman, house elves, the plot line about Fred & George’s business aspirations, the actual Ireland vs. Bulgaria Quidditch game. While I missed the house elves, I liked that they actually had Neville help Harry with the second task.
Also, Rita Skeeter’s secret wasn’t revealed (or even used) in this movie, so it’ll be hard to use her in the 5th movie, when she’s blackmailed into helping Harry tell the truth to the wizarding world.