Through no real reason other than happenstance, this became a weekend of “Part Three”s — Scary Movie 3, American Wedding (the third American Pie movie), and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban were all part of the weekend entertainment.
Scary Movie 3
Actually, I have to admit, while I’m no huge fan of the series, this was easily my favorite of the three. The humor was a little less scatological in nature and tended more towards the purely absurd, the reason for which became all too clear when the end credits came up and I realized that the director was David Zucker, one third of the Zucker/Zucker/Abrams team responsible for the Airplane! series and Top Secret!, among many other spoof films.
American Wedding
Not as amusing as either of the prior two American Pie films, unfortunately. Too much of the film revolved around Stiffler, who works well as a secondary character, but doesn’t have enough to carry as much of the film as he was expected to here. The look of the film bugged me, too — I’m not sure how best to describe it other than to say that it looked like a beer commercial (high contrast, lots of hand-held camera work, many shots with a very shallow depth of focus). It had its moments, but wasn’t that great, either.
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
Prairie and I caught this one Saturday afternoon at the 12:30 show, early enough in the day that we didn’t have to stand in line to get into the theater. Interestingly enough, while we generally have fairly similar tastes in films, I ended up liking this latest installment more than she did. It is very obvious throughout the film that there’s a different director this time around, and while I very much enjoyed the end result, Prairie wasn’t as impressed. After talking it over for a while after we got out, we think that it’s simply differences in the way we pictured the books as we read them — her mental images were more in line with how Chris Columbus directed the first two films, while I found Curanzo’s vision much more in line with how I’d “seen” things as I read the books.
This isn’t to say that she didn’t like it, of course, just that she didn’t like it quite as much as she did the first two. As for myself, I’ll quite happily join the many other people declaring HPatPoA to be the best of the three films so far.