I Saw PoA! (finally so, longish)
Sara_ELL
sara1412au at yahoo.com
Thu Jul 8 14:51:11 UTC 2004
Well, better late than never for me, I suppose - I finally saw POA
(after it had been out for a MONTH.. long story). I assume that I
join many others in saying that it was a dark, dark film and I would
be absolutly aghast if anyone took young kids to see it. I loved the
dementors (the shots of them hovering around in the sky around
Hogwarts "protecting" it was terrifying) and would undoubtely have
given me nightmares. Professor Trelawney's "posession" was also
rather disturbing and I half expected her head to turn around a la
Linda Blair in the exorcist (it was effective in scaring my very
cynical and grown up brother).
I was pleasantly surprised by how well Buckbeak ended up looking
(having seen only the very dodgy looking plastic standin of him from
one of the set pictures, ages ago). The "titanic" scene with Harry
and Buckbeak over the lake was quite moving as well as the whole bat
and ferret-eating touches. The Whomping Willow was much better
depicted than in COS (not surprising, given the improvement in CGI
effects since that film was last made) though I was disappointed
that I didn't get to see Sirius touching the knobby bit of the tree
with his paw as in the book (sedating the tree by using "Immobilus"
spell just seemed too easy for other people not to have worked it
out).The Disney-esque bluebirds getting whomped by the trees were a
nice touch (or should that be touche to Chris Columbus) though I
couldn't quite believe what had just been shown after the first
episode of avian homicide.
Crookshanks was terrific though obviously with much smaller
screentime and Timothy Spall was appropriatly disgustingly ratty. I
really look forward to seeing him in anything onscreen actually as
both he and David Thewlis are very intelligent and intuitive actors.
Obviously there were many differences from the book (which I'll
always enjoy to the films) but I thought that it was interesting
that Harry's power as a great wizard was emphasized to a much
greater extent in the films (his Patronus was brilliantly done as
well as his expeliarmus spell knocking out Snape single-handed or
wandedly when others would just disarm their adversaries).
It is nice to see that the kids are growing as actors though having
them wear "normal" clothing for the greater part of the film
certainly would have helped them retain their naturalness (or
perhaps they are too professional to be influenced by such a trite
thing as costume). Daniel Ratcliffe has certainly grown - the scenes
with him and Lupin were very nicely done as mentioned in an earlier
post; I noticed the little touch with the candles too. Gary Oldman
was *perfect* as Sirius (IMO) - he certainly had Sirius' physicality
(anyone who saw his ribs poking out of his skin would be hard-
pressed to deny that he wasn't skinny enough to play Sirus) and I
loved that Mr Oldman of a thousand accents, used a relatively
refined one (distinct from Lupin's softer one) to hint at his
somewhat upper-crust wizarding background.
My main nit-picky point would have to be that after all of the
references made to Lily's GREEN eyes, we still get to see Daniel's
obviously blue ones. I know that he could not tolerate contact
lenses however, given the extensive amount of money spent on the
special effects and what not, I wonder whether some could have been
used to digitally changed Daniel's eyes to the requisite colour. A
small point perhaps, but one that would at least emphasize that
Harry is NOT just a "mini-James".
I look forward to seeing the next installment though will miss
Cuaron's involvement. I suspect that the bar (in terms of maturity
of the storyline and hopefully, artistically) has been raised by
Cuaron and doubt that the next director will intentionally revert to
the "safer", earlier cinematic installments.
My two knuts anyway...
Sara_ELL
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