Amandageist's review

[Amanda Geist]

If anyone's interested after the plethora of reviews, my impressions after
one seeing (must take children now, will see it again).

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Bottom line? I have no problem with adaptations; it just seems to me that
the screenwriter sacrificed plot development for humor, and Cuaron
sacrificed it for atmospherics, and between the two, a lot got lost in the
translation.

Not to say it was *all* bad, but I certainly don't think it's the best one
of them all. I'm not particularly looking forward to sitting through it
again with the kids. Specifics follow:

The pace was too fast. I felt bombarded. There was no time to digest
anything, it was like eating a five-course meal in fifteen minutes.

I *love* book Lupin; I find him compassionate, sympathetic, warm, sensitive.
Which makes it so odd that I didn't warm to the movie Lupin at all; he was
not a sympathetic character for me, I didn't develop any attachment to him,
there was no emotional response. This may be because there were so many
little interactions between him and Harry in the books, that the movie could
not accommodate, and it is the "built up" relationship that I respond to.

I had had my doubts about Gary Oldman's casting. No more. He was superb.

Buckbeak is not a computer generated creature. No, they went out and found a
hippogriff. That was *amazing.*

I fail to understand why it helped this movie to have things like a
welcoming choir, at the expense (assuming time was the factor) of critical
plot material:
--nobody mentions that Snape also knew Lupin and Black at school
--nobody mentions why Lupin knows the map is a map
--the only mention of the the wolfsbane potion was in a shouted comment by
Sirius, when he was restraining Lupin; audience is left thinking Dumbledore
really *did* put the school at risk by having a werewolf on staff with no
means of controlling it.
--why did Snape appear at the Willow hard on the heels of Lupin? there was
no explanation of why he was following him
--there was no explanation of why Snape hated Black so; this is a bit
crucial to the plot, and the character development of both.
--we are left hanging with respect to Harry's attack on Snape; in the
absence of the infirmary scene, we do not hear Snape excusing it as the
confundus charm.
--why did Prongs appear when Dying!Harry saw it, but not when Later!Harry
was casting the spell?
--why did Prongs appear at *all*, if they cut everything else out about the
Map and the history of the Marauders?

The total lack of any emotion from the executioner made the execution scene
less than believable. There needed to be anger there, or disgust, or
disappointment, or something, to explain why the hell he'd chop a pumpkin in
half. It looked thrown in as a quick fix to explain what they'd seen before,
not a convincing replay of something that logically already happened.

I'm getting a little tired of Hermione getting all the good lines.
Especially when Rupert Grint is turning out to be the best actor of them
all.

My children do fake crying every single day better than Dan Radcliffe can.

After the Boggart scene, in the later conversation with Lupin, why did Harry
say he thought of Voldemort first? He manifestly didn't, or Voldemort would
have appeared. In the movie, Harry *does* face the boggart and so we know
exactly what his reaction was.

I thought it was stupid beyond words to make Lupin's boggart the actual
moon, behind clouds. Why not just tattoo "werewolf" on his forehead? I
considered that change a bit insulting to the intelligence of the audience.

I did love the deflating balloon. I do not understand why they didn't
destroy the boggart instead of just putting him back in the cupboard.

I didn't think the substitution of the corridor encounter for Snape's office
was effective. Nothing about the dialogue, but it's so out of character for
Snape NOT to dock Gryffindor points for Harry being out of bed at night,
much less to not give him a detention for insulting him (even if it was just
the map).

Lastly, I didn't even realize that *was* Flitwick.

~Amanda
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Those who cannot hear the music, think the dancers daft.