watch tHe skies

Saw Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire last week. Actually it should have been the week before but for a slight misunderstanding on tickets (we wanted 9pm tickets and got 9am tickets, damn the British resistance to the consistent application of the 24 hour clock!).
For me, it is definitely the best Harry Potter movie, but even so, for non-readers of the books (yes I know that I’m probably the only person in the northern hemisphere who hasn’t read them, but I figure that I will read them to the baby anyway so why start now?), they aren’t that great films in their own right, because they rely on you having additional knowledge about the stories.

For example, they don’t explain the thing with the wands at the end. If Potter is a kid who can barely compete with the older kids in the competition, how come he can match Voldermort at the end? I appreciate that the movies are aimed at the big franchise consumers, but they should make sense to everyone. I mean the Star Wars movies do stand on their own despite thousands of novels and cartoons, comics etc.

However, the film was enjoyably dark, nowhere near as scary as the press had led me to believe, but it was funny in places, and some of the action was very exciting. I must, however complain about the editing. It was obvious that they had cut scenes short to keep the running time down (which came in at a hefty 2hr 40mins), but this came at the expense of some continuity: At the dinner dance the trio all fall out with each other, and the next time they are together they are but mildly vexed and quite apologetic. What happened in between? I also think that the films suffer from being too literal in their interpretation of the books. It is not easy to put in a scene in a movie that has no bearing on the plot, yet in a book it is simple. Here, however, half of the movie had little effect on the plot; the tri-wizard events never revealed anything new about the story, and so effectively you had 20mins at the start, a few moments in between where plot issues were discussed, lots more filler and then the plot concluded. The books could have done with the same attention to screenwriting that Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh gave to the Rings screen adaptations - where a scene was bound to be real eye candy, they looked to include plot items around to suit the screen. Perhaps timescales prevent this on the Potter movies, but they are worse for it.

I am looking forward to the Chronicles Of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe. I’m not sure if I’ve ever read the books; they are surprisingly small, but the film looks great and may just fill the void left by no films set in Middle Earth (come on Peter, you know that we want Silmarillion: The Motion Picture??) The trailer is superb and advance comments on the movie are very positive, so I may well have to get tickets for opening night, next friday. No news on a sequel - I would suggest that the other books, and the series as a whole, are not as well known as the Rings books, so perhaps Disney are waiting to see how it performs, plus I don’t think that the same characters persist in subsequent stories, so unless people are enchanted by the land of Narnia, this may be a one-off.

I read with interest that Ram Bahadur Bamjan, a 15 year old Nepalese boy is being hailed as the latest incarnation of Buddha. The boy has been meditating under a tree (where the original Buddha found enlightenment, not the same tree as far as I know, but a tree nonetheless) without food or water for six months. Religious nutters really kicked up a fuss when he was bitten by a snake, but seemed able to resist the poison. There is one thing that doesn’t quite ring true for me - a screen is put around him every night, so no-one can actually tell if he’s not gorging himself on crisps and mars bars during darkness hours. I mean it should be obvious - surely he must be very skinny even if he has slowed his metabolism down to nearly nothing in the six months, or perhaps he doesn’t get any thinner like Hurley in Lost (incidentally that bit at the end of last week’s episode where his CD player stopped working = genius).

Anyway, I hope he is Buddha, I genuinely do, in these times of terrorism, global greed and paranoia, we could do with an enlightened being to show us the path. Unfortunately I’m not sure that he will get people attention away from reality TV and war long enough to make an impact.

And on that note I wish everyone a jolly good weekend.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 2nd, 2005 at 7:30 pm and is filed under general, movies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.