Never again

[nrenka]

--- In the_old_crowd at yahoogroups.com, "kneasy" <arrowsmithbt at b...> 
wrote:
>
> I made a terrible mistake a couple of weeks ago.
> I watched the PoA DVD.

I haven't seen it.  It came out when I was in France, and I (perhaps 
having cheery thoughts that it might be worth seeing) refused to see 
it in French.  Anyways, I had far better ways to spend something like 
7 euros--that'll buy a few demis, or a nice bottle of wine.

Then, reading of what all was done, and what all was cut, I 
decided "Eh, probably not worth it".  By the time I got back 
Stateside, I had other things to think about, and now--well, I'd 
rather buy other things, and a movie costs enough that it's more 
worth it to buy opera tickets.

I do agree with Kneasy here (hear the sound of hell freezing again?) 
that movie is almost always best thought of as a vision of a book.  
There are those few, rare, happy situations where book and movie are 
comparable yet palpably different.  I adore Tarkovsky's Solaris.

But Rowling's work, IMO, doesn't lend itself so nicely to that kind 
of poetic reimagination.  It's too fundamentally about the 
storytelling--so if you botch that, you botch the real depths of the 
thing.  And unlike the operatic reimaginations of novel, where one is 
expected to know the original when seeing the stage work (and that 
forms a good part of the aesthetic of the opera--tends to be a 
Russian thing, naturally), I doubt there's enough in the movie of 
originality and beauty, enough space filled in by the visual aspects 
of the film (as music does for the literature-operas), to redeem the 
failures to the spirit of the original.

I'd probably watch it if you showed it to me.  With enough beer.  
Good beer.

Now, it's back to writing papers.  And being miserably sick.

-Nora sniffles and moans in the corner (quietly, in a minor mode)