Prairie and I went out to see the latest Potter movie last Sunday, and quite enjoyed it — in fact, this may be our current favorite (with number two battling for the prime spot in Prairie’s eyes). While many people have found it a bit rushed, I was impressed with how well they were able to compress such a long book into the span of just over a couple hours. To me, it felt fast, but not necessarily rushed. As Prairie and I have spent a couple days thinking back on it, we’re both pretty satisfied with this latest entry, and what few issues we have with the film fall pretty solidly into the realm of nitpicking, rather than actual issues.
Nitpicks (good things and bad, actually) under the cut (spoilers and all)…
- I wanted to see more of Tonks! Not only is she a fun character, but Natalia Tena? Yum! ;)
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The Dumbledore’s Army training sessions were wonderful — lots of fun to watch.
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The Patronus charm finally looked right (when the full bodied charm is produced, that is — the creature appearing, rather than the weird shield thing that was shown in The Prisoner of Azkaban).
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Mrs. Figg didn’t seem sweet and batty as much as she did meek and frightened.
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I didn’t like that they changed the effect used when Sirius is talking with Harry through the fireplace. While the effect in this film worked, I like the effect in The Goblet of Fire much better. Besides, it seems odd to have two entirely different looks used for the same spell.
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The Thestrals looked incredible — probably some of my favorite creatures in the series. However, I was disappointed that they didn’t even put a line or two in about how Harry and Luna were the only two who could see what they were flying on during the trip back to London, especially after establishing Hermione’s fear of flying during Buckbeak’s rescue in Azkaban.
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The centaurs looked better than they did in The Sorcerer’s Stone, which is promising, given that — unless the character is cut — there’s a centaur teacher in the next film.
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Grawp, however, didn’t really impress me all that much. Not bad…just…not impressive. I’m not entirely sure if it was the look, the movement, or something else (the uncanny valley, perhaps?), but it just didn’t quite work for me.
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Umbridge was perfect.
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While it doesn’t particularly bother me, Prairie’s not thrilled about Bellatrix’s obvious use of Avada Kedavra on Sirius. While I’d never really questioned whether or not Sirius was dead, apparently there’s enough wiggle room concerning the Veil and exactly which curse Bellatrix uses in the book that there’s been a fair number of people (including my girlfriend and one of the girls I work with) holding out hope that Sirius will come back in book seven. However, given Rowling’s involvement in vetting the scripts for the films, if she didn’t object to Bellatrix using Avada Kedavra…then it looks like Sirius most likely really is dead. Of course, we’ll know for sure in about four days, won’t we? ;)
As I said before, though, all of this, and any other issues we might have had, are pretty minor things, and we both really liked this latest film.
Now, just a few days to go before book seven appears…!
Hello:
I continued to be baffled why people are still interested in the Potter books and movies. Even in 21 st Century, people are still interested in fairy tales, magic and silly superstitions. Humanity has not grown up yet. It still has a long way to go.
Ikey Benney
Ikey, you obviously don’t have very much imagination, and you’re clearly not very well read. A very large part of a society is its mythology. A culture devoid of mythology wouldn’t be much of a culture. Mythology is something that is constantly evolving and expanding. Stories are a way to share cultural values and to interpret the world around us. I feel sorry for anyone who can’t see the importance of fairy tales.
One can look at this from a practical perspective, just by thinking of all of the technological advances that were inspired by H.G. Wells, Gene Roddenberry, etc.
Years ago a friend gave me a picture with a quote (from Poe, I think) that roughly said: “Those who dream by day are cognizant of things which escape those who dream only by night.”
The “grow up” attitude reminds me of Natalie Wood’s character on Miracle on 34th Street. Often those who are “grown up” are not fully human.
REPLY TO PRAIRIE, THE MORON
PRAIRIE, you are just a clown.
A nobody.
What is your real name?
You must be an idiot and that is why you post comments using a pseudo name.
What are you hiding?
Oh, so you don’t want the world to know you’re a cockroach?
Or
Are you a smelly rat?
Let me tell you what you are: a putrescent mass, a walking vomit.
You are a spineless little worm deserving nothing but the profoundest contempt.
You are a jerk, a cad, a weasel.
Your life is a monument to stupidity.
You are a stench, a revulsion, a big suck on a sour lemon.
You are a bleating foal, a curdled staggering mutant dwarf smeared richly with the effluvia and offal accompanying your alleged birth into this world.
An insensate, blinking calf, meaningful to nobody, abandoned by the puke-drooling, giggling beasts that sired you and then killed themselves in recognition of what they had done: BRING A MONSTER INTO OUR BEAUTIFUL WORLD
Yes, Prairie the maggot, you are a monster, an ogre, a deformity.
I barf at the very thought of you.
Lepers avoid you because you are vile and worthless.
You are a fungus, the dregs of this earth. A bag of filth, vomit, and a dog doo-doo. In addition, did I mention you smell LIKE A ROTTEN EGG?
You snail-skulled little rabbit. Would that a hawk pick you up, drive its beak into your brain, and upon finding it rancid set you loose to fly briefly before spattering the ocean rocks with the frothy pink shame of your ignoble blood.
May you choke on the queasy, convulsing nausea of your own trite, foolish crappy comment.
You are grimy, squalid, foul-smelling stench and disgusting. An ignoramus.
Monkeys look down on you. Even sheep won’t have sex with you.
You are unreservedly pathetic, starved for attention, and lost in a land that reality forgot.
You are a disease, you puerile one-handed slack-jawed drooling meats-lapper.
PRAIRIE: You smarmy lager-lout git.
You bloody woofter sod.
Bugger off, pillock.
You grotty wanking oik artless base-court doo-doo face.
You clouted boggish HOGGISH foot-licking twit.
You dankish clack-dish plonker.
You gormless crook-pated tosser.
You churlish boil-brained clotpole ponce.
You cockered bum-bailey poofter.
You craven dewberry pisshead cockup pratting naff.
You gob-kissing gleeking flap-mouthed coxcomb.
You dread-bolted fobbing beef-witted clapper-clawed flirt-gill.
PRAIRIE: You are a fiend and a coward, and you have bad breath.
You are degenerate, noxious and depraved.
I feel debased just for knowing you exist.
Go away.
I cannot believe how incredibly stupid you are. I mean rock-hard stupid. Dehydrated-rock-hard stupid.
Stupid so stupid that it goes way beyond the stupid we know into a whole different dimension of stupid.
You are trans-stupid stupid. Meta-stupid. Stupid collapsed on itself so far that even the neutrons have collapsed.
Stupid gotten so dense that no intellect can escape. Singularity stupid.
Blazing hot mid-day sun on Mercury stupid.
You emit more stupid in one second than our entire galaxy emits in a year. Quasar stupid.
Your writing has to be a troll. Nothing in our universe can really be this stupid.
Perhaps this is some primordial fragment from the original big bang of stupid.
Some pure essence of a stupid so uncontaminated by anything else as to be beyond the laws of physics that we know. I’m sorry. I can’t go on. This is an epiphany of stupid for me.
PRAIRIE: You are hypocritical, greedy, violent, malevolent, vengeful, cowardly, deadly, mendacious, meretricious, loathsome, despicable, belligerent, opportunistic, barratrous, contemptible, criminal, fascistic, bigoted, racist, sexist, avaricious, tasteless, idiotic, brain-damaged, imbecilic, insane, arrogant, deceitful, demented, lame, satanic, fraudulent, libelous, bilious, splenetic, spastic, ignorant, clueless, illegitimate, harmful, destructive, dumb, evasive, double-talking, devious, revisionist, narrow, manipulative, paternalistic, fundamentalist, dogmatic, idolatrous, unethical, cultic, diseased, suppressive, controlling, restrictive, malignant, deceptive, dim, crazy, weird, dystopic, stifling, uncaring, plantigrade, grim, unsympathetic, jargon-spouting, censorious, secretive, aggressive, mind-numbing, arassive, poisonous, flagrant, self-destructive, abusive, socially-retarded, puerile, clueless, and generally Not Good.
I spit in your moronic face, PRAIRIE
With the backing of the UNIVERSE, I hereby pronounce a curse on you to take effect in 3 months.
In 3 months time, starting today, you will be diagnosed with a fatal untreatable BRAIN CANCER, which will lead you to doom and hellfire.
Carl Lionhead
PS:
Oh, by the way, I have hired somebody to post this comment here every week, so go ahead and delete it. The more you delete it, the more my man will re-post it.
Furthermore, we will be sending a copy to you by snail mail every week. You will soon realize what a mistake it is to step on the tail of a lion.
Heh. Wow.
For the record: a similar (though shorter, and mildly less vehement) comment was left by the same character yesterday. I deleted it, because I’m not terribly excited about letting my weblog be a venue for personal attacks.
However, I’m letting this one stand — and I don’t doubt at all that Prairie will respond (and, knowing her, quite a bit more coherently) — simply because it’s so bizarrely over the top that it is (probably unintentionally) flying into self-parody.
For the record, though: while I don’t have any problems with well-mannered disagreements, personal attacks (such as is so aptly demonstrated above) are, as a rule, not acceptable here, and will be deleted. Please keep that in mind as we continue….
Wow! You do know how to use a thesaurus. I humbly bow to your greatness. (Snicker! Eye-roll!)
You just spent the past hour (or more) of your life composing a rant about a person whom you’ve never even met, about whom you know absolutely nothing. I simply commented that you seem to have very little imagination. I hold to that. Instead of proving me wrong by academically debating the topic at hand, whether there is a place in the world for mythology, you chose to attack me on a personal level, which makes very little sense considering that you don’t know me. How do you know I’ll even check the page again to see if you’re responding? And beyond that, how do you know that I’ll care about your comments about me? (By the way, I don’t care about them in the least. To me they signal that you’re a very unhappy person, and I feel even sorrier for you than I did before. Abusive behavior is something for which you can seek therapy, and I’d certainly suggest that you consider it.) I don’t feel the need to prove myself to you, nor to justify myself in any way.
If you want to debate or argue, you should take a class and learn how to do it properly. Attacking someone personally doesn’t lead to true progress or understanding, which is the purpose of academic debate. Personal attacks just make you seem juvenile. A true debate, especially about a literary topic, does not include childish name-calling that would better be left on elementary school playgrounds.
An educated person would understand that calling someone names does not signal superiority but rather a deep-seated inferiority complex. People call other people names when they feel inferior in some way and they can’t think of anything adequate to add to an argument. It’s a puerile way of announcing to the world that a person is insecure with his/her own intelligence when he/she stoops to common name-calling.
Will I stoop to your level and attack you like you did me? Of course not. I’m not that petty, nor is my self esteem so low that I feel the need to engage in a moronic fight with an abusive person whose opinion means nothing to me. The only reason I bothered to respond to your first comment was that your poor literary criticism annoyed me. If you can come back and argue like a grown up, please feel free to talk about literature. I’d be happy to give you an education in mythology. If you can’t debate properly, kindly stop visiting this site. You’re not welcome if you can’t behave like an adult.
If you need to abuse someone to make yourself feel better about who you are, find another target who will be cowed by your abuse. I’m not fazed, nor am I impressed, nor am I hurt, nor am I damaged. I’m giving you the attention you crave at the moment, but I’m not going to waste any more of my time on this nonsense. I have a real life. As soon as I finish writing this, I will forget all about you. My advice to you would be to stop wasting your time and to find something constructive to do.