POA music, Cauron, werewolf

[dan]

Thank goodness Williams wrote some original, different music for this 
one - some nice renaissance pieces, some good jazzy stuff for the 
Knight Bus, some waltz for Marge's expansion, and so forth. Not that 
kitschy drivel he plastered all over the action scenes in 
Philospher's Stone and Chamber of Secrets (especially music for the 
scenes with Voldyspirit in the forest or Quirrelmort at the mirror). 
Williams AND Columbus is a scary combination. I worry how dreadfully 
Newell and Williams will schmaltz it up. But Cauron, at least, has 
given the fellow some wise instruction, and Williams ended up having 
to actually produce almost an entire new score. With the right 
direction, John Williams CAN write good music, it seems. Jackson made 
Howard Shore up his level of invention in the same way, I might add.

Thank goodness Cauron went hand-held appropriately. The movie didn't 
look like a series of wizard photographs, as the first two did (with 
the one exception of the parts inside Riddle's diary, which were all 
that was good about CoS). Too wide a shot at the Dursleys feels too 
comfortable, too predictable, to expository. POA, unlike the first 
two after school specials, created a mysterious, rambling Hogwarts, 
instead of Disneywarts, partly through camera work and partly through 
set design. And the Hogwarts Express was no longer a too-precious, 
spotless tourist train, but a functioning, worn delivery mechanism 
for rambunctious students with portable power devices. Fits my vision 
of the books fine, and looks reasonably like a passenger train 
running between Manchester and London, say. And POA had, of all 
things, realistic weather - good, variagated skies, unlike the 
fabulously blue Greek ones Columbus apparently imported.

Cauron appears to have wanted to break clealy with some of the worst 
aspects of Columbus' Disneywarts as well. He dispensed with goofy 
pristine (read, artificial) lawns (pristine lawns, I submit, are 
anathema to any witch not in the St. Mungo's outpatient program for 
wannabe muggle lawn-competition winners), he jumped on opportunities 
to play up the humourous potential of the Whomping Willow and other 
Hogwarts features, which I take as a sign of his having digested and 
processed enough of POA to feel confident taking such liberties. 
Columbus, in contrast,always seemed afraid of stepping out of the 
line he conjured, which was clearly the result of an inadequate 
understanding of the material. I won't go on and on about how much 
better a film POA is than the first two, speaking as both a Rowling 
freak and as a cinema buff. (My favourite directors are Tarkovsky, 
Kurosawa, and Herzog.) But, put bluntly, Cauron's film has beauty and 
vision, where Columbus' efforts had adequacy (or not).

Finally, Cauron did state that the werewolf was deliberately less 
scary, less exaggeratedly animated than we might expect, in deference 
to the kids (as he put it) or to the ratings boards (as I expect he 
might have meant).

Dan