Fun at the Movies

[Carol]

Montavilla47 wrote:
> <snip> It's funny, because I hated the "blowing up Aunt Marge" scene the first time I saw it, but now I really like it.  Much more than the book version.  I also like Aunt Marge more, because the actress was really good at being horrible.  

Carol responds:
I laughed out loud at that scene in the theater, which is odd because I don't like it all that much in the book. But Aunt Marge "blowing up" like a balloon with all her buttons popping off and her stockings running and floating out into the garden and Vernon trying to hold her, letting go and yelling "Sorry!" as she floats off into the air and Ripper the bulldog is attacking Vernon as if it's his fault is just so well orchestrated that I really enjoy it. 

And, as you say, the actress, Pam Ferris, is, as you say, "really good at being horrible." In fact, if they hadn't already cast her as Aunt Marge, she'd have been perfect as Umbridge, at least as far as looks are concerned. I don't know if she could have pulled off the sickly sweet act, though. Imelda Staunton had the personality down; she just didn't look the part (short, dumpy, and toad-faced). Merge the two and you have the perfect Umbridge--but, then, Pam Ferris was the perfect Aunt Marge.

I also liked some of the other special effects in that film, especially the Dementors, which seemed more loathsome and terrifying than they did in OoP, and the scene with Harry flying over the lake on Buckbeak that SSS mentioned, which is both beautiful and believable. But the werewolf is all wrong, and I don't like the line they give to Snape about the difference between a werewolf and an Animagus. I suppose it was their way of foreshadowing the transformations of Sirius Black into a dog and Scabbers into the travesty of a man, but I didn't care for it. Still, any line or scene that they assign to Rickman!Snape is a bonus just because it's so much fun to watch him.

Carol, who just discovered that Pam Ferris has appeared in half a dozen film adaptations of nineteenth-century novels and that she was the horrible Mrs. Squeers in "Nicholas Nickleby." Who knew?