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Harry Potter movie
This one felt more like filler than any of the others so far. (Chamber of Secrets is the other candidate.) It looks like the major goal of this episode was to teach Harry to work with others and groom him as a leader. That can be a compelling plot; this particular rendition didn't compel me, but the movie was still ok overall.
We are starting to see the government corruption that affects the school, but motives are still pretty murky. (Yes, I am somewhat familiar with the politics of academia, so I know the real world doesn't always make sense here either, but I hope for more from fiction.) And, once again, aside from "boy-hero stories require it", I find myself wondering why those with power who do know about the grave threat aren't doing more to help instead of leaving Harry to figure it out on his own. Trying to teach him self-defense is all well and good, but I'm left feeling that wizards of Dumbledore's calibre could do more.
I'm left wondering some other things, but probably not the things the author had in mind:
- It appears that magic is limited only by caster knowledge and concentration, and not by something like energy or daily manna. What stops the baddies from going around casting the instant-kill spell all day to their hearts' content?
- What is the mechanism by which unauthorized student casting is detected and acted on within the hour, and why isn't it used to monitor the baddies (or extra-judicial magical torture for that matter)?
- It appears that the wand is a wizard's single point of failure. Why don't wizards carry wands the way assassins carry daggers -- two at the belt, one in each boot, one up the sleeve, a six-pack in the backpack, etc? It appears that broken ones can be replaced (from an earlier movie), but maybe there's some sort of attunement ritual that lets you have only one (at a time) and that is too time-consuming to use in combat?
- What's the effect of the shattered prophecy? Just "no more answers for you", or something more metaphysical?
Trailers:
- Bee Movie: Looks cutesy, so it comes down to the quality of the writing. I'm unlikely to bother absent good reviews from people whose assessments are good predictors of mine.
- Golden Compass: We'll see this. (This reminded me to try their web site again. It still fails for me, differently in Firefox and IE. Oh well; I guess I wasn't meant to have a daemon.)
- The Enchanted: This looks funny; I laughed out loud multiple times during the trailer. Definitely worth learning more about and hoping the trailer didn't contain all the funny parts.
- I don't remember the name of the Loch Ness movie. At the beginning of the trailer it evoked memories of E.T., but the trailer suggests that a good chunk of the movie is about the search for and secrets of Nessie, more than it is about a boy and his pet alien, and that doesn't grab me.
- Fred Claus: No thanks. Actually, a pretty good heuristic seems to be to write off anything billed as a holiday story. The snowflake logo at the beginning of the trailer told me everything I needed to know.
- Get Smart: I was never a fan of the TV show, and the trailer hasn't led me to reconsider.
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Golden Compass: We'll see this. (This reminded me to try their web site again. It still fails for me, differently in Firefox and IE. Oh well; I guess I wasn't meant to have a daemon.)
I don't think it's a browser issue -- it works fine for me in Firefox. Maybe something to do with your security settings?
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A very powerful bit of Neville's backstory (one that should change how you view a DADA lesson from a prior movie, for example) got turned into a few seconds of spoken exposition, which was disappointing. On the other hand, they captured Umbridge pretty much perfectly, and brought out more of Snape's complexity than the last couple movies, so points for that. And they did keep one of my all-time favorite Dumbledore moments ever.
RE: Harry Potter
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In Firefox (and also Mozilla), with scripts enabled, I get through the 20 questions for the daemon quiz and then it displays the name of my daemon, blurs it, and sits there and spins forever. (That is, the browser thinks it's waiting, but nothing more comes, at least within an hour.) I was expecting to get a picture or at least species, not just a name, and -- based on what I saw on LJ when this first came out -- a blob of HTML to post.
In IE, after installing Flash using the link they provided, the site doesn't even load the flash -- I get the title and black background and a very slow progress bar from the browser, and nothing more. I killed it after half an hour or so. (I had thought the problem as at the site, but I tried the Mozilla experiment immediately after.)
So, no idea what's wrong. I haven't pulled out the Mac to try it on that. No non-standard firewall settings here.
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Hmm. I guess that one sailed right on past me.
I appreciated seeing the extra complexity from Snape.
Which Dumbledore moment?
Re: Harry Potter
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I love the utterly matter-of-fact grace and understatement. I love how (in the movie, but even slightly more so the book) Umbridge and the rest think they still have the upper hand while any observant reader knows they should now be trying to find defensive positions.
There was a similar (if more sharply edged) moment between Dumbledore and Fudge following the sequence in the Ministry of Magic in the book that got trimmed, alas.
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Re: Harry Potter
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There's pretty much nothing stopping the baddies from doing just that. (It'd make a bad RPG setting. Curses can apparently miss, but one hit will take someone out of the fight.)
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Note that this is a contentious point. Some people really disliked it, but it was one of my favorites. I thought it was fascinating -- although nearly everything I liked about it was dropped from the movie, which retained only two major plots intact and excised most or all of the other half-dozen or so.
As for why Dumbledore doesn't help more -- this is actually one of the main plots of book seven, but I personally don't feel it ever gets properly explained.
What stops the baddies from going around casting the instant-kill spell all day to their hearts' content?
What stops people from going around and knifing everyone they see? Social pressure, basic human decency, and the tendency of society to deal with those who transgress. Again, explored a bit more in later books.
What is the mechanism by which unauthorized student casting is detected and acted on within the hour, and why isn't it used to monitor the baddies (or extra-judicial magical torture for that matter)?
Never fully explained, but it appears that all wizards have a charm placed on them more or less at birth, which monitors their actions. The charm auto-destructs on one's 17th birthday. This is *very* important in book seven.
What's the effect of the shattered prophecy? Just "no more answers for you", or something more metaphysical?
*Sigh*. All I can really say is, "Read the book", which spends about ten times as much time on the details of the prophecy. Suffice it to say, the shattering is largely irrelevant, except that it keeps a smidgeon of useful information out of Voldemort's hands.
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It was easy to miss, but was an important point in the book. Neville's parents were tortured into insanity by Bellatrix LeStrange, during the previous war. Hence, he has a particular dislike for the Cruciatus Curse...
Re: Harry Potter
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Thanks. I didn't realize.
What stops people from going around and knifing everyone they see? Social pressure, basic human decency, and the tendency of society to deal with those who transgress.
True to an extent, of course. I have the impression that Rowling's magic is more unbalancing than today's street weapons. Glad to hear it's covered more in the books.
Maybe I'll give the audiobooks a spin. I've actually "read" one that way, book 3, after I saw the movie and a friend said "here, listen to the whole book and not just that distillation". I took it on a road trip, which worked; I wonder how it would do for commuting. Hmm.
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It's easy enough to miss, since the people who dislike it are pretty vocal about that. But AFAICT, much of the dislike is because the book is rather painfully honest. The subtitle of Order of the Phoenix really should be, "Or, Harry goes through being a fifteen-year-old jackass". For instance, among the things that get left on the cutting room floor was Harry's first date, which is so painful that it took me three tries to get all the way through it. But that's not because it's badly written -- it's because it sounds too embarrassingly *right* to someone who once was a boy that age.
I've found that the books are reasonably pleasant for my 20-minute commute. I only get snippets at a time that way, but if I'm not letting myself feel rushed it works nicely. And the whole thing makes a *lot* more sense in book form. Not perfectly, I'll caveat: there are still a fair number of elements that I think Rowling glosses too quickly, and I don't think anyone thinks Quidditch is actually coherent. But they're far more coherent than the movies.
Just be warned that Book 4 drags more than the others. While it's not dreadful, my standard description of it is, "A fine 500-page novel that is, unfortunately, 800 pages long". While the later books are also a little long, they're not nearly as bad, IMO...