Xander ,'Selfless'
A place to talk about movies--old and new, good and bad, high art and high cheese. It's the place to place your kittens on the award winners, gossip about upcoming fims and discuss DVD releases and extras. Spoiler policy: White font all plot-related discussion until a movie's been in wide release two weeks, and keep the major HSQ in white font until two weeks after the video/DVD release.
I'm doing a Criterion trial because of you good people. Turn two, the rest are food...
Question: can you search by actor name? I tried but it wasn't giving me love. That said it was also late and I was high. Like, do they have a permanent library or just the themed groups of films monthly?
Question: can you search by actor name? I tried but it wasn't giving me love. That said it was also late and I was high. Like, do they have a permanent library or just the themed groups of films monthly?
They do have a permanent library. And the themed groups stick around for as long as some of the films in that collection are there. It's just that often the themes revolve around something that needs to be contracted out (I assume) and so they all expire at the same time when the contract runs out.
On the web (where I tend to organize most of my streaming queues since apps/Roku tend to be shit for that), there is an "All Films" section where you can filter by country, decade, director, and genre. While this can be useful if you are looking in a general way for, say, westerns or films of the 1910s (where there aren't that many), I mostly just use the Search feature. Their permanent collection runs very art house so I think if you are looking for a particular Hollywood actor, they might not have anything right now, but it doesn't mean they won't ever.
They cycle things in and out rather often. I've already seen multiple films "expire" and then be back again for some other reason.
The way I've pretty much been using Criterion is I have a permanent queue of films I want to get around to eventually and then I add new collections/films/double features that look interesting at the front when I happen to notice them, and then every month I put the expiring ones at the front of that. So on the Roku we see the expiring ones first and if nothing seems appealing at that moment we go to the collections. The only ones we seem to get to in my more permanent queue are the female filmmakers since I prioritize those on Fridays.
Rose and I just watched the third HP movie, and I was so surprised that nobody explains to Harry (or the audience) who Moony, Wormtail, Padfoot and Prongs are! That seems really important both plot-wise and thematically.
My major problem with that movie! I took my mom, who had not read the books, and kinda lost patience when I tried to explain, so she just didn't understand a lot of that movie.
Not as egregious as The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy neglecting to explain towels, but still.
Right?? I'm baffled as to why that was left out. I remembered that being my favorite of the HP movies (though I think I've only seen up through the fourth) but somehow had forgotten that major omission, and it really irked me this time around.
I'm rewatching the entire Potter series and I just saw the film yesterday and thought the same thing!
Yeah. The lack of explanation of the Marauders makes for quite a few confusing bits, like Lupin's familiarity with the map and why it insults Snape when he tries to look at it.
The third movie is the best movie basically because they started being willing to cut things for the sake of the movie actually being good, but that is of course a double edged sword. They could get away with it because by the time that movie came out the books were pretty universal.
As someone who only read the books after I had seen the films (and stopped at, I think, the fourth; the books just got so darn long), I can confirm that not knowing who the Marauders were makes absolutely no difference to one's understanding of the film. I think of it more as an Easter Egg for readers than anything essential. B. told me about it afterwards (he too was horrified that it had been left out) and it amused me greatly, but yeah, from then on they needed to edit the books down pretty radically for the movies and a lot of details had to be omitted.
Azkaban is generally considered to be the best of the Potter films, I think. It's not a controversial opinion at any rate.
Azkaban has the virtue of the best director of the entire series.
All the kid actors also noted that he was the one began to teach them how to act. Chris Columbus would literally say, "Do the line exactly like this" and give them the line reading he wanted.
Cuarón also changed the production design considerably, making Hogwarts look much more worn and aged.