Seventeen points against the movie...

[Andrea]

Some interesting points. :)  I'll comment here and there.

--- pigwidgeon37 at yahoo.it wrote:
> (to say nothing of the fact that they 
> have what must be breakfast at the LEaky Cauldron and Harry eats some 
> kind of soup which for breakfast is a tad unusual)

Well, this was *after* they'd done all their shopping, so I assumed it was
lunch.  Soup's not that unusual then. ;)
 
> 2) My strongest objection to the film: Richard Harris as Dumbledore. 
> Where is the smile, where is the fundamental goodness of this great 
> man, where is his wonderful eccentricity? Here is an inaccessible, 
> rather authoritarian personality who would never ever say (and in 
> fact he doesn't) that his heart's desire are warm socks.

Yes!  I sorely missed this about Dumblydore.  Harris just didn't have that
twinkle we've come to know and love about him.

> 3) From what I saw, the Sorting Hat has already been argued about- 
> anyway, it remains incomprehensible to me *why* on earth it's 
> impossible to give the hat a tiny little voice, and why the children 
> cannot be called in alphabetical order.

Alphabetical order was dispensed with for dramatic purposes. (Did you
honestly want to wait through the whole sea of kids getting Sorted before
Harry?  And who would wait around *after* Harry was Sorted to see where
Ron ended up?)  I sort of liked the hat's voice, though.  Where did it say
it was supposed to be tiny?

> 4)To somebody who hasn't read the book, it cannot be clear why Harry 
> doesn't want to become a Slytherin. There is one short thing Ron 
> mutters to him (originally Hagrid's line) about all Dark Wizards 
> being ex-Slytherins, but that is certainly not enough.

His only friend so far just got Sorted into Gryffindor, after telling him
that all the bad ones go to Slytherin.  The one he *doesn't* like just got
put into Slytherin.  I think that's sufficient to make an 11 year old boy
want a different House.

> 5) It is never stated that McGonagall is Head of Gryffindor and Snape 
> Head of Slytherin, albeit it is vitally important to the plot, above 
> all to make Snape seem to be the Bad Guy.

I have seen so many people saying this!!  The FIRST thing we hear about
Snape is Percy saying, "Oh, that's Professor Snape, *HEAD OF SLYTHERIN
HOUSE*."  Harry asks what he teaches, Percy replies with Potions and the
spiel of how he really wants DADA.  It is certainly established that Snape
is head of Slytherin, although I'll admit that McGonagall is not described
as head of Gryffindor.
 
> 6) The way the HRH friendship develops has, IMHO, been completely 
> bungled. The three of them are shown together in a not so unfriendly 
> way when Hermione leads Harry to the showcase with James Potter's 
> brass plaque (a totally unnecessary scene, and Hermione's line "It's 
> in your blood" is of such striking banality!). Anyway, besides from 
> being unnecessary, the scene spoils the effect of the trio becoming 
> friends after Harry and Ron have knocked out the troll.

This is a bit that I think worked fairly well on screen, where it wouldn't
have worked in the book.  Hermione *thinks* she's Harry & Ron's friend
before the troll incident.  I think she decided, "I met them on the train,
they're my House-mates, of COURSE we're friends."  Which is why she spoke
up about James being a Quidditch player.  And *that* is why it hurt her
feelings so much when she heard Ron saying she was a nightmare and didn't
have any friends.  Just hearing a random kid you don't like saying that
isn't bad enough to send you to hide in the bathroom crying all day, but
hearing someone YOU thought of as a friend say that is much worse.

> 8) Did JKR *tell* Columbus that Voldemort went to Godric's Hollow 
> unaccompanied? Or did Columbus make that up by himself? That would re-
> raise the question of how V.'s wand and clothes got into Pettigrew's 
> hands.

We heard that she wrote a new scene especially for the movie.  I assumed
this was it.

> 9) Another one in the interminable list of small things that are 
> different from the book but wouldn't need to be: Why does the 
> Invisibility cloak have to look like a Persian carpet instead of 
> being silvery grey?

I thought it was *really* cool looking, but I don't understand why it
couldn't have been grey, either.

> 10) What's everybody's opinion about the moving staircases? For my 
> taste, they are much too scary and exaggerated.

I liked them, for the most part, and as someone else said, it was an easy
way to get them to the forbidden floor while leaving out the
time-consuming "duel" challenge from Malfoy, etc.

> [snip "We need the potion challenge] Important because she 
> is awarded 50 points "for the use of cool logic in the face of 
> danger", which certainly doesn't refer to the Devil's Snare, but to 
> the potion puzzle.

If you'll notice, Hermione acted a great deal more on her own in the
Devil's Snare here than in the book.  She's the one who figured out how to
get them all out, and quite simply saved Ron's life.  He wasn't far from
being strangled, but she remembered the plant's weakness and the spell to
stop it.  I'd say that's worth 50 points.  The potions challenge, frankly,
would not have translated well to screen, no matter how much I loved it.

> 14) What are they going to do about characters like Binns, Peeves and 
> Sprout? Spout f.ex. will be essential in the next film, let alone 
> that she's also Head of House, but then the fact that there *is* such 
> a thing as heads of houses is completely neglected (see above)

They'll just introduce them in the next film.  It's clear that we don't
meet EVERYONE in Hogwarts during this movie (or during the books, for that
matter!).  We'd never had any reference to Trelawny before POA, but we
accepted her arrival as a long-established Hogwarts prof who Harry simply
hadn't come across before.
 
> 15) *Very* personal POV: I simply hate Gred and Forge! They look like 
> they were two Percys- I cannot imagine them as the super-pranksters 
> they should be!

I really missed the Christmas scene with the Weasleys!  I'm hoping and
praying it's in the DVD (along with the Platform 9 3/4 bit).  They
certainly seemed like pranksters to me - the first time we meet them they
pull the "He's not Fred, I am!" bit which is just hilarious - although not
quite as much as in the books.  I'm confident that will be established bit
by bit through the next two movies so the Marauder's Map won't seem out of
place.  (BTW, to those who've complained about it, since they didn't have
the bit about blowing up a toilet at Platform 9 3/4, Dumbledore mentioning
the twins sending a toilet seat wouldn't make a lot of sense!)

> 5) A detail I liked immensely: Harry taking those completely 
> nonsensical notes at the beginning of the Potions lesson.
 
Wasn't that *cute*?  I was so ANGRY with Snape for accusing him of not
paying attention when he was dilligently taking notes.  Poor kid.



Andrea

=====
"Reality is for people who lack imagination."

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