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Monica ([personal profile] cellio) wrote2007-08-19 05:51 pm
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Harry Potter movie

We finally saw the fifth Harry Potter movie today. As usual, I have not read the book. (From what I hear, if I do decide to read the books I should still skip this one.) Overall... eh.

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?
There were some fun moments. I liked Hermione's eavesdropping spell being defeated by her own cat, and the various magical effects in the school (portraits, the room that appears when you need it, and others) were well-done as usual. The appearance of the mistletoe as needed by the love interest was cheesy but cute. (I assume she conjured it.)

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.
Two for six (one of which we would have seen anyway) is a better-than-average hit rate for me and trailers.

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[identity profile] starmalachite.livejournal.com 2007-08-19 11:30 pm (UTC)(link)
Nearly all of your Harry Potter questions are addressed in the books. Lots more on wands in Volume 7 in particular.

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?

[identity profile] tangerinpenguin.livejournal.com 2007-08-19 11:39 pm (UTC)(link)
The prior movie drilled into some specific areas of the book that the filmmaker found interesting, at the (loudly bemoaned) expense of several threads. This one, although it did lose a lot of the schoolyard color of class year in the original, generally seemed to try harder to at least give summary lip service to all the major developments in the book. I'm not sure yet which approach I liked more.

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

[identity profile] murmur311.livejournal.com 2007-08-20 12:33 am (UTC)(link)
The books really are much better than the movies. It is best to view the movies and the books almost as 2 separate entities. Book 5 happens to be one of my favorites (though I do love them all) and is incredibly detailed. The movie barely skims the surface; if it did every plot line and every character the justice that it deserved you'd be sitting in the theater for 3 days straight.

[identity profile] ralphmelton.livejournal.com 2007-08-20 03:00 pm (UTC)(link)
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?


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.)
jducoeur: (Default)

[personal profile] jducoeur 2007-08-20 10:01 pm (UTC)(link)
(From what I hear, if I do decide to read the books I should still skip this one.)

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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