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Harry Potter strikes back
theefer writes "Harry Knowles from Ain't It Cool News has posted a link to the Harry Potter & Chamber of Secrets trailer. RealVideo, WindowsMedia and Quicktime versions available. Looks better than the first movie.
Muggles, start your crossover plugins."
(And coincidence or not, Pete Abrams has been doing a Potter parody at Sluggy Freelance for the last couple of weeks, based weakly off the first book/movie).
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
So what's worse - HP or LoTR?
LoTR has shallow characters, and everybody knows that (even the fans). Tolkien prefered to concentrate on his universe rather on the characters, and the result is that I don't care about the protagonists, so why would I care about the story?
HP has much more interesting characters, and they develop through the books. The main problem is that it's childish. There are gags which repeat through the series, like for example the usual mess Harry Potter leaves in the Dursley's place before his school year start. I get sort of an industrial feeling when I read it.. especially during the fourth book.
But what, at least HP is a page turner. I couldn't finish the first LoTR book - I had an urge to fall asleep each time I read it.. (especially after the gang left the Elven village).
And about the movies.. HP was more interesting than LoTR.. but what, I think the HP book is more enjoyable. After all, the movie has to cut a lot of stories.. and besides, it's still fun to imagine the story yourself.
Slashdot community, please notice: I am looking for a girlfriend.
Nave H. Weiss
The Harry Potter books are the best books that I read in the last few years. I've read many good fantastic books (including, LOTR, evidently) and what striked me with the Harry Potter books is that they are so much fun to read. The Harry Potter's universe is very magical with a lot of funny touches and mystical creatures. It's a world you'd like to be part of. I can't wait to read the fourth book which I bought yesterday since I heard it covers even more the magical world of Harry.
It took me a month to go throught the first book since I wasn't so much in it, but it took me a week to go through book 2 and 3. They are that good.
People shouldn't put anyway Harry Potter books because the first books are written toward a younger audience. They are for everyone, as Bilbo the Hobbit, a book Tolkien had written for his kids.
I think the biggest problem was that so much of the movie's focus was about being faithful to the book. Chris Columbus et al were so concerned with making the book's fans happy that they lost a lot of opportunities to make a better movie.
One of the reasons Fellowship of the Ring was such a great movie was that the screenwriters and director took real liberties with the _story_ to make it better for the film medium. Tolkien's books are not nearly as plot-driven as the Harry Potter series - there's a huge amount of character development and background information, providing a rich palette from which to draw when translating to another medium.
Jackson's team recognized this, and were incredibly faithful to Tolkien's vision of Middle Earth, even as they altered the plot of the story to fit into the new format.
While the Harry Potter books are great, they are ultimately children's books. They just don't have the enormous depth of Middle Earth; Columbus's team had a much less rich palette to draw on. I thought they did a good job with the look and feel of the place. But the simpler world, combined with rabid (and very young) fans demanding a movie very closely matched to the book, lead to a film that's perhaps not as strong as it could be.
-Alex
Rowling is likely to feel about this the way Tom Clancy did about the movie version of "Patriot Games". It's customary in Hollywood to ignore the writer, but Rowling and Clancy write books that translate well into screenplays. Rowling, in fact, is better at it; Clancy's books have several times as much material as will fit in a movie, but Rowling's books translate well scene for scene.
There are a wealth of reasons to dislike the first Potter movie. It was, on the technical level, a piece of crap.
/. are notable b/c the staff are mostly camera nerds: the Matrix brothers had to hack together their systems for the stop-n-rotate scenes, there's so much being done with DVcam for portability, etc. Go watch the Potter movie again, and see if you can count more than 5 tracking shots in the whole freakin' film. Columbus had full lockdown for almost all footage, and tried to fake fluidity in editing. He's a hack.
First and foremost, Chris Columbus's direction of shot construction. That movie had the least mobile camerawork of any film I can remember. Even "My Dinner With Andre" was more fluid, and it's just two guys sitting around a table! I can't overstate how significant this is: working the camera *into* a scene, instead of locking it down and having characters face the camera and narrate, is the very foundation of a good scene. Hell, half the movies discussed here on
The casting was mostly remarkable, except for Dumbledore. The guy playing him isn't going to live to the third movie! What was Columbus thinking? Oh, wait, we covered that deficiency already. Nevermind that for a minute. The actors were very good, but they were constrained by camerawork that was no better than a TV soundstage. So excellent casting and delivery, hobbled by poor framing.
Similarly, the stunts were crap. In the Quidditch scene, did anyone else get the feeling they were watching a late-80's graphics demo? Like from 2nd Reality or something?
The score was repetitive and totally forgettable. I intellectually recall the existence of background music, but can recall and feel none of it whatsoever. The best score this year, btw, is in The Bourne Identity, if you like scores.
Costumes & set construction was unusual: I wasn't expecting steampunk. But that's only stylistic, and not a point of contention, unlike the stupid 'flying staircases' scenes: they 1) weren't in the books, and 2) didn't develop anyone's character. It was typical kids-movie tripe: pointless onscreen toys for gefingerpoken und mittengrubben. Besides that, I was thinking, "didn't I already see this in Labyrinth?" Although, if they added David Bowie in tight pants to the later films, you bet you'd find me in the theater more often.