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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