facts, oddities, pluses and whines, big and small

[frantyck at yahoo.com]

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A bunch of responses to responses.

Genevieve said:
"I agree that Daniel wasn't extrordinarily expressive all the time, 
but I think that is more the character than the actor."

Yes and no, I'd say. My experience of and reaction to the film is 
subjective, but I didn't really get the sense of Daniel being in 
control of his role. One knows when emotions/reactions are being 
shown honestly, because the actor must imagine himself or herself 
into a state something like that which he/she is trying to portray. 
It rings true when you, as part of the audience, recognise emotion, 
at some level apart from your cerebral cortex. Daniel-Harry is faced 
with some immensely moving and difficult moments, but really, apart 
from rearranging his face, Daniel doesn't convey even suppressed 
emotion very well. Convincing representation goes beyond facial 
expression to the rest of the body -- and then much deeper than 
that. An effective actor seeks to evoke or remind the individual 
members of the audience of some powerful emotion, whose eddies the 
involved audience will feel.

Daniel is a kid, I know. He has the most challenging part in the 
movie: how to show turbulent feelings that even he does not quite 
understand without excessive dramatics. Rupert Grint and the adult, 
more accomplished, actors in the cast have a relatively 
straightforward task. Precisely because Harry has to show so much 
while doing so little, I'm a little disappointed. The movie thus 
focuses on the plot rather than the much tougher and more important 
thread (in the long term) of Harry's conflicting emotions and 
personal growth... high thrill and great sadness.

Take for instance his reactions to pain in his scar. Surely you 
wouldn't look at him and know that Dan-Harry is experiencing 
physical pain beyond any he has experienced so far. And pain is not 
the hardest of sensations to depict.

There are some effective moments, though, such as the chess task, 
when he realises Ron must sacrifice himself, and when he crashes to 
the ground. When Harry leaves the hospital wing and sees his two 
best friends on the staircase, that's moving too. At the end of the 
movie, the departure from the station is not bad, but Dan-Harry's 
reaction to the photo album... where's the hunger?


VoldemorT or Voldemore, Steve sticks with Voldemore:

I wasn't making a Final Case for the T version. Just pointing out in 
some perplexity that the movie chose the apparently non-Rowling 
pronunciation. I was very surprised. I do prefer the T, being an 
Italian speaker myself, but.

Steve cited the Scholastic pronunciations as part-proof of the non-T 
Voldemort. Personally, and not entirely relevantly, I think the 
Scholastic rendering of some words is pretty awful. 'Accio' is 
pronounced AH-see-oh?? Not in Latin it isn't. Ah-VA-da ke-DA-vra? 
Does that possess any punch at all? Sounds like 'Wingardium 
leviosa.' The Beauxbatons pronunciation would make any rudimentary 
French-speaker's nerves stick out two inches and curl at the ends. 
It is for an American readership. Surely it isn't the last word, no 
more than Warner Bros' use of VoldemorT should be.


Cornflower O'Shea on the medieval wimple. It wasn't in the painting, 
actually (thought that painting was a very clever touch). A woman 
does walk across the background briefly, wearing the wimple.


Luke, who wields Caliburn against my use of episodicity:
"Though several people have mused on this, I think I find the 
prospects somewhat doubtful.  Why?  Because unlike what you said, 
the books *aren't* truly episodic.  A truly episodic work is one in 
which every event stands to more or less on its own--meaning it has 
its very own conflict and resolution that is completely seperate 
from any larger plot.  You could do just one scene and have it make 
a *rounded* story by itself.  In episodic works, the overall 
continuity is not one of plot, but of theme.  Beyond theme, the tie 
between the individual episodes is so loose its virtually non-
existant."

This is a bit literal... I used the wrong word there. I did not 
*literally* mean that wholly self-contained episodes should be 
carved out of the HP books. What I mean is that to fill the need for 
a thorough and unhurried exposition of the books in film, one could 
make use of a series rather than an unsatisfactory-in-some-ways two-
and-a-half hour film. One *can* split the books along chapter lines, 
because it seems to me that each chapter is built about one event or 
important stage in the story. Like _I, Claudius_, only better.