Happy darkies!

I'm just holding out for the animated sequel series, Korra: Legend of the Avatar, coming from the originators next year.

With any sort of luck that abominable travesty and waste of time and film will be eradicated from the collective memory.

Just got back from Harry Potter (seen with ChiKat and another friend--we went out to eat after the 7:30 show, which is why I'm not home until 1:30 am!!). Really liked it a lot; it was suitably dark, but had a lot of rather unexpected laugh lines, which the audience appreciated.

One of the trailers had a reaction that I think might be common, but one I'd never heard before. The trailer itself produced a lot of favorable buzz in the audience, but then ended with the title--Cowboys and Aliens--and the audience just cracked up. I think it just might be a big hit, from the buzz I was hearing.

Thought Harry Potter 7 was pretty good, all things considered. Too many scenes in really cold and/or damp places. It's foggy and freezing here, and we were sitting there in our coats wishing we'd waited for the DVD to play it in our living room where there is a fire. Most impressed with the kids' performances. Hard to believe they're the same actors who could have been replaced by lego figures and puppetry in the first movie and we wouldn't have noticed the difference.

Most impressed with the kids' performances.

Me, too! All three of them were really terrific. I had actually been a fan of Watson back in the first two films, and then grown distracted by her eyebrow acting between films 3 and 5. Grint has gotten much better from film 5 on. Radcliffe first impressed me with a single line delivery in PoA (when he said he was surprised he hadn't been arrested for blowing up his aunt) and then his overall performance in GoF and since then.

I don't even know what the movie's about, but Chris Pine + Tom Hardy + big guns = Must See For Me.

That is all.

eta An even better shot

Dirty Harry Potter t-shirt (click icon to embiggen)

Wow. I guess I'm glad that scene was deleted from A:TLA? Although the fact it was filmed is appalling.

I'm so glad M Night is on the coloured people's side. Finally, we have a voice.

One of the IO9ers, Garrison Dean, makes fake trailers for stuff (he did the two that popped up in the Firefly thread a few months ago), and he did one for The Rock's Faster that The Rock is redistributing because he liked it so much.

I was disappointed with the new Harry Potter movie. It was really a tough job for the screenwriter and director to shape a story out of half the book, and it's the portion of the book that's filled with much mopey teens in a smelly tent.

I thought the screenplay did a good job of compressing the narrative (in most cases), but I'm less confident in Yates as a director now. Thinking back on it, my favorite movies in the series were by Cuaron and Newell and it took me a while to warm up to Half Blood Prince.

There are always choices to make in adapting a book, and I understand you can't capture everything onscreen. However, there were several places where I'd disagree with the choice, simply because it wouldn't have cost the story anything and it would've added a lot.

First, it would have been very easy to include a shot of Luna's bedroom ceiling with its chain of friends. Wouldn't have cost anything in special effects or in the pacing of the scene and would've added a lot to the movie.

Another very small thing that would've added a comic touch in a dark movie was the interrogation scene of Mundungus. Would've and probably should've been so much funnier to have Kreecher beating on him with a frying pan. One minute for a funny joke there would have made a world of difference.

Another missed comic opportunity was at the wedding scene. Mean old Aunt Muriel is so impossibly bitchy and hilarious in the book, and she's wasted on a paragraph of exposition. That could've been better written to include the wicked relish she took in torturing Elphia Doge.

I particularly missed the comic moments because one of the things that redeems HBP on rewatch are the two comic set pieces of Ron on the love potion and Harry on the luck charm. There are no comparable narrative pegs in this movie.

A more defensible cut, was removing the scene where Pettigrew chokes himself. But it is both horrific and a moving callback to Harry's mercy earlier in the books. But they did need to move that scene along.

There were a couple of additions that weren't in the book that worked well.

When the trio were camping around there was a very sweet scene of Harry dancing with Hermione to cheer her up. Very loose and affectionate.

Also, in the escape from Malfoy Manor they changed the sequence of events a little bit and they do get a very funny moment with Dobby unleashing the chandelier on Bellatrix.

Generally speaking, I appreciated the narrative compression. We were spared many nights in the tent and almost no time at Grimmald Place.

That turned out to be a problem, though, in that so many of the key events in the book were much, much more suspenseful in the book than in the movie.

While I appreciate that they didn't want to spend a lot of time at Grimmauld Place, there's no sense at all of the weeks, and weeks of planning to break into the Ministry. I get that just the Ministry break-in and the Gringotts job (in part 2) each could've been done as 90 minute caper movies. Still, it really undercut the difficulty of going into the Ministry.

Similarly, the scene with Nagini at Godrick's Hollow, the escape from the Wedding, and the escape from Malfoy Manor were much more suspenseful and dramatic in the book.

Just thinking about this gives me new respect for Rowling's writing. While there were frequent complaints about the long stretches of Harry, Ron and Hermione bickering and traveling about, the corollary narrative effect is that the big events are more dramatic, much better set up, have more of a sense of consequence and danger.

I do think the script did a good job of compressing the wandlore, and stuff with the Hallows and the Horcruxes.

The part that most makes me doubt the director were all the long, lovely, travelogue shots of the British landscape. Pretty enough, and I see the choice (Hey, we're not stuck at Hogwarts in this movie! Let's open it up.) All very pretty but nothing I'd care to rewatch on DVD. And some of those sections were so fucking flat. No (continued...)