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Review: Harry Potter & the Chamber of Secrets
Most of the cast is back again for the sophomore film. If you liked them before, you'll like them again, even if the boys voices have started changing and everyone is a little taller than they were last november.
The most substantial new character this time around is Gilderoy Lockhart played over the top and on the money by Kenneth Branagh. Alan Rickman's Severus Snape is practically a bit part here, but Richard Harris's Dumbledore gets a lot of scenes.
The general plot is as follows: Harry Returns to Hogwarts for his second year of wizarding school. He keeps getting signals and warnings that there will be trouble, but he ignores them and goes right on in anyway (Wouldn't you if you had his home life?). Anyway, at school students keep turning up petrified and the legend of the Chamber of Secrets revealed. Beyond that there's a little quidditch, rivalry with the other houses, and a mystery needing solving.
Generic, yes. But it's solidly produced and entertaining. Course I'm right in line for next year because I think the next 2 books are superior to the first 2.
As for the FX, I think they're a bit better than last time around. Especially during the Quidditch matches. The first films game sequences looked bad. Everything looked CG. This time around things are much more convincing. They also tackled Dobby the house elf and did him as a full CG character. The rendering on Dobby is just beautiful. Any still shot from his scenes would convince you that they just filmed a house elf right on set. And the fabric moves really well. Unfortunately the motion is all off. His weight feels wrong. His interaction with the set seems like he's a muppet. Hopefully they can nail him down before Goblet of Fire when there are many house elf scenes.
Anyway, I think this film is weaker than the first one, but I think that mostly this is because the book really doesn't add as much to the larger story. It's a solid movie and it stands well on its own feet, but knowing the bigger things yet to come gets me drooling for the next one. I'm hoping that handing the series off to someone besides Chris Columbus will give it a shot in the arm.
I almost fell asleep
fuck that article was annoying. ..
that is all.
I'm a big retard who forgot to log out of Slashdot on Mike's computer! LOOK AT ME.
If this is the type of people having the majority of our kids, it actually explains quite a lot.
Pitiful.
If Harry Potter falls under that heading then so do Grimm's Fairy Tales, Anderson's Fairy Tales, the Tales of a Thousand Nights and One Night, and a fair chunk of the Bible (both testaments).
But then, I don't exactly expect to convince your kind using logic.
I'm just way too tired to think coherently enough to rationalize out why I shouldn't be telling you this.
Integrate Keynote and LaTeX
And yet Tolkien's creation is one of the most profoundly Christian stories written in the last couple of centuries. Too bad fundamentalists can't get past their shiboleths to recognize that.
Lee Kaiwen, Taiwan, ROC
just the same wide-eyed blank stare.
This is what ruined the first movie for me, the simple fact that the poor kid they cast for the starring role of a blockbuster mega-$$$ can't act. This wouldn't be so bad if the director could direct, and tell the poor kid what to do (not what to 'think' or 'feel', but what to do), but apparently the kid is left to his own devices, which is the blank stare we get in every scene he's in, while the other kids act circles around him.
They could fix this by changing the script to say he's autistic or something...
**>>BELCH