re.the M word

[dan]

Dean wrote:
 
> Umm...  Shakespere references in Harry Potter. Seems to me like the 
> new director is making his mark.
> 
> I think that mayby will can live in hope for some inprovement. Lets 
> face it the movie can't get much worse though.

Shakespeare:

>"When 
>will we three meet again? In thunder, lightening, or in rain?  When 
>the hurly-burly's done. When the battle's lost... and won."

Lauri:

> MacBeth quote fits quite well. 

Goodness me, Columbus is a trite director - like he was afraid of 
stepping too boldly or something, so he opted for lame. Cauron 
doesn't seem to have done that, don't you all think? And, the best to 
ask for is a film that is a work of art in it's own right, as Jackson 
has so ably done with LoTR. To ask for a film that slavishly follows 
the line of a book is a pretty silly thing to do anyway - I mean, why 
make a film at all if it's just the book? I don't get it... What 
movie has ever been just a slavish retelling of a book? Examples, 
please. (There are NONE.) When Jackson canned most of the kitschy 
singing Hobbits in favour of choral iterations, I knew he was dead 
on - a "true" rendition of that series would have been very, very, 
very droll. (Witness the little snip of singing in the extended 
version of Fellowship.)

As for the choir - I thought it was absolutely wonderful. For one 
thing, it does at least give an opportunity to show, more than at the 
start and end of year feasts, that there are more than 20 kids in the 
school. It plays on the traditional image of witchcraft and wizardry, 
just as Rowling does. It supplies a kind of Greek chorus, which can 
occur in novels on many levels, in narrative styles or techniques, 
which need to be translated somehow to film. (Indeed, how can a film, 
with a narrator, fulfill the narrative role of a book? Or without a 
narrator? It literally cannot do either, unless its someone reading 
the book aloud to the actions of people in front of a camera, or 
something.) It's indeed rather sinister, either directly or by 
juxtaposition, as children's choirs often are in film - the choir in 
Rhapsody in August singing a playground tune around the monument (a 
set of half melted climbing bars) to the dead at Nagasaki, the Harlem 
boys choir in the film Glory, and so forth.

In other words, "faithfulness" to a book by a director literally 
cannot occur - the director chooses to incorporate parts of the 
narrative in various ways. Asking a film to be "true" to a book is 
like asking a refridgerator to get 40 kilometres to the litre.

dan