Helen McCrory to play Narcissa in HBP

[Carol]

artsylynda at ... wrote:

> There were Mexican references in  POA?... Do tell!<<
> 
Lynda responded:
> The "Day of the Dead" sweets in Honeydukes; the eagle and snake 
sculptures around the fountain in the courtyard (taken from the
Mexican flag);  the shrunken heads, which seemed to be Caribbean
(voodoo influence??), but  there was certainly not anything British
about them; there were others, but I can't think of them right now. 
There were interviews with Cuaron at the  time where he talked about
them.  You can probably still find them online  somewhere.  It just
annoyed me that he was sticking Mexican references into  a film set in 
> England that had no references to Mexico at all in any of its 
source material.  
> That was just out of line.  

Carol responds:

While I didn't like the shrunken heads, either (particularly the very
un-British Caribbean accent of the one on the Knight Bus), I think
that Cuaron may have gotten the idea from the CoS film, in which Harry
peers into a jar of shrunken heads (silent and dead) in a glass jar in
borgin and Burke's. I thought they might have been mentioned in the
CoS book, but it lists only "a withered hand on a cushion [the hand of
Glory], a blood-stained pack of playing cards, . . . a staring glass
eye[,] [e]vil-looking masks  . . . an assortment of human bones . . .
, and rusty, spiked instruments [hanging] from the ceiling" (CoS Am.
ed. 49). The skulls that Harry mistakenly as being in the Slytherin
common room (he describes them, along with more accurate details, in
DH) are mentioned on the next page, as are a hangman's rope and the
cursed opal necklace. Shrunken heads would fit right in, and it seems
that Chris Columbus or his set designers added them to the decor.
Cuaron, I think, just took the heads a step further (too far, in my
view). Nothing comic about them. And, as you say, they seem out of
place in a film whose set and actors are supposed to be British, per
JKR herself.

Carol, wondering whether the glass eye, which book!Draco nearly picks
up, is the one that ended up in Mad-Eye Moody's eye socket (not to
mention Umbridge's door)