Silver screen Sunday

[sigma7]

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince bothers me. I haven't read the book -- really, none of the books save for the finalé -- but still, I got the idea that I was watching half of a really good movie. Even in a three-hour movie, how do you walk out wanting more? And worse, how do you walk out wanting less of the plot and more of the characters milling about in their natural environment? Weird, isn't it? There was no sense of wonder or intrigue in the plot, really, and maybe just a little sense of danger, heightened by one of the scenes (I understand) shoehorned in, not even in the original text. I don't know if Rowling or Yates fails here -- I'm putting more probability in the latter, though. Of all the scenes to omit, though, the end? Where's the closure, the curtain call for one of the mythology's iconic characters? Baffling. But by all means, let's see more Slughorn dinner parties. (Broadbent does a great job, even if I find his scenes a bit repetitive.) Maybe it's just me, but I walked out more than a little bit disappointed, despite the Hedwig content.

Speaking of disappointment, which sticks in your craw more: the idiot who brings his hyperactive and restless three-year-old to the movie, the child asking constant questions of the film's narrative in his outdoor voice and proceeds to run up and down the theater aisles when he gets restless -- or the idiot adult who, whenever he hears a funny line, while laughing, repeats what he thought he found funny to his companion? At least there was no instance of the obnoxious loud-talking frat boy with cell phone; thank God for summer matinees.

Upon reflection, I think I like Shaolin Soccer more than Kung Fu Hustle for just one reason: pacing. Soccer builds gradually, dialing up the, well, cinematic aspects slowly until reaching its peak in the film's climatic showdown with the Evil Team. I'm not sure Hustle has the same pace -- if Soccer dials up from 0 to 11, Hustle hits 11 at least an hour in, and keeps the throttle flooded for the rest of the film. And both films are fun -- it's just that Hustle's narrative arc doesn't keep pace with its audacity, and maybe that's what throws me off about it. Not that either film's worth missing -- they're live-action cartoons in the best way, ambitious and insane, and they know what they are and revel in it. Time well-spent.

Comments

[rainfletcher.livejournal.com]

Due to my disappointment in the last two books, I'm not asking for much from this movie: just sufficient oddball behavior from Luna Lovegood.

This may be the first time we wind up waiting for DVD on a Potter-pic. Hitting the drive-in during the height of summer for a movie this long means having the kids out until oh-dark-thirty, and I'm not so sure that would be a happy time.

The world needs more drive-ins, though. Then at least most of the obnoxiousness gets contained within individual vehicles.

Now I need to look into Shaolin Soccer. I'm glad I'm not the only one who found Kung Fu Hustle to be a little skewed: I thought maybe I just wasn't getting the joke.

[sigma7.livejournal.com]

Funny, there's a good chunk of Luna, relatively speaking -- more Luna than Neville, which is odd.

And I enjoyed Kung Fu Hustle very much -- I just thought its narrative was a bit muddled in the beginning and its characteristic Stephen Chow madness peaked a bit too soon. Soccer at least follows the traditional underdog sports film mold, and it's a much more forgiving gradient from "oh, well, that was a bit too much" to "all right, that was perfectly insane."

And I have to recommend non-dubbed versions. My experience with English dubs has soured me -- I don't think they catch the inflection and enthusiasm of the original actors.

[kansel01.livejournal.com]

Run Lola Run dubbed is absolutely awful. But then again English language shows dubbed into foreign languages sound just as bad, do they not?

I have to thank you for introducing me to Shaolin Soccer. I have enjoyed it several times (both dubbed and not) though I have not yet convinced the Mrs. it's worth watching.

[patchsassy.livejournal.com]

This was the best Potter yet, in my opinion. Was I annoyed by the fact that the filmmakers didn't want to overshadow the epic final battle, so they cut this battle and added an attack on the Burrow for no apparent reason except to make the watchers know the danger they all face? Yes.

Was I disappointed in the development of characterization, especially in the younger kids who change from movie to movie? Yes.

Was I really annoyed with the fact that they basically cut most of the information that Dumbledore gave Harry about what he's going to have to do to off Voldemort? Very much so.

However, I think it was the best dialogue for the movies thus far, gave a good sense of what was going on in the wizarding world without spending too much time on the gloom and doom and was hilariously funny at times.

I liked it, but I still had problems with it. However, I had fewer problems with this one than most of the other ones. I think the series as a whole would have been better if they had hired one director and held him to doing the entire series. There's a reason why the Lord of the Rings movies (and I'm sure the Hobbit will be as well) are so much superior to the HP movies - because Peter Jackson had a vision and didn't change everything around every movie.

[sigma7.livejournal.com]

I think you're absolutely right in terms of where the film's strengths lie, and that's almost counter-productive -- the plot becomes a distraction from the meat of the movie, these actors really making the characters their own. I remember being very uncertain about the plan to split Deathly Hallows into two films, but they should've split Prince as well...I don't think the films sustains its narrative enough in its current incarnation. Maybe that can change in the DVD release, but I don't think so -- I'm afraid that there's just too much going on.

But for me the fascinating thing is that we're going to get to the end and we're going to have eight films by different directors and, with only one prominent exception, the same cast all the way through. That's a continuity unprecedented in cinema and only rivaled in much earlier days of film-making -- I don't think we'll ever see its like again.

[lady-findel.livejournal.com]

Indeed, the end of the Half-Blood Prince was left out and that was a great pity. The film did have a problem with pacing, with all the "action" at the end. Actually there wasn't too much action in the film.

I really think they wanted to make it a 'calm before the storm'. Too bad, because I never perceived the book that way.

Despite all its faults, I think it is one of the better films in the series, together with The Prisoner of Azkaban.

[sigma7.livejournal.com]

I think you put it where I would, with Azkaban -- I think Goblet and Phoenix were the two I've enjoyed the most up to this point. I can rarely distinguish Stone and Chamber anymore, as they feel so formulaic (here's a scene where Draco's a douche, here's a scene where Harry's alienated, here's the Dursleys being obnoxious...) and I can't tell you how happy I am that that mold was broken, because they were monotonous the first time I saw them. The earlier films were too expository because they chose to exposit information we already knew or, having minds, were able to figure out on our own. But now we get "I'm the half-blood prince" with literally no explanation or clarification, no observation on its significance.

I think it's an incomplete film, but even so, what's there impresses and entertains me. It's excellent in terms of what it does, but I wish it'd done more.

[lady-findel.livejournal.com]

I think my biggest problem with the films adapted from Goblet of Fire and Order of the Phoenix is that these left things out that were very dear to me in the books. I do think that as films they function very well. I guess it's just a reader's bias, because Azkaban and Half-Blood Prince were my favourite books as well.

[daethkow.livejournal.com]

Shaolin Soccer is a fantastic movie, for all the things you've mentioned and more. I've yet to see Hustle, only because we rented it once and tried to watch it with Henry and the opening scene kind of put us off of viewing with The Boy.

I read the first four books. When I got to Book Five it all started getting so depressing that I just stopped. It suddenly became work to get through a novel, and unless it's Tolstoy and I'm getting a grade for it, that isn't happening again.

[sigma7.livejournal.com]

Hustle's well worth watching, though it is much darker than Soccer -- the latter is outright comedic, where the former is occasionally comic but with life-and-death stakes and a few fatalities along the way. The chase scene between Chow's character and the landlady is pure Wile E. Coyote, and I'm not exaggerating in the slightest -- it's pure Looney Tunes in live-action and it's in the middle of the movie. The finale goes a bit Matrix Reloaded (but only in a slightly derivative way, not a "oh God let's torpedo the franchise" way), but statistics alone don't make a good crescendo.

[aardy.livejournal.com]

Overall, I enjoyed the movie. It's not the best of the bunch, but it's much nearer that end of the scale.

I was disappointed that they seemed to have gutted the CGI budget for the "little things" that made the movie's world seem so real.

For example, not one staircase or wall moved (all shots that in previous movies would contain animated castle bits seemed to have been replaced with shots of random teenagers snogging), not one painting was three dimensional let alone moved (especially not even the painting of Dumbledore at the end), and of all the times the Daily Prophet pages took up most or all of the screen, I can only recall two photos moving. And those are just the most obvious bits.

[sigma7.livejournal.com]

I was okay with that aspect, actually -- what I hated about Columbus's two movies was that they overlapped each other, revealing more about Hogwarts and Harry's situation that we knew from not having fallen asleep in previous films. (And Dobby. Augh, Dobby.) They were conservative, and maybe that's what the franchise needed to gain a foothold, but in retrospect, neither of his films compel me the way subsequent offerings do. And if you want to get completely pretentious -- maybe this is Yates's way of saying that the truly magical at this point in the trio's lives is that raw human chemistry bubbling...

I think what disappoints me is that the sense of loss isn't as profound as it should be -- this is the Empire Strikes Back moment of the franchise, and we get a bit of that in Radcliffe's lines in pursuit of the Death Eaters (I grouse quite a bit, but a round of applause for the excellent casting of Radcliffe, Watson and Grint -- they've done one hell of a job in some of the most scrutinized roles in modern fandom)...but even when I say that, looking at the earlier scenes, I can't think of any I'd cut (well, maybe some Slughorn schmoozing, but that's probably just taste).

It's good, but not as balanced as some outings -- made more difficult by the text being hard to compartmentalize. It's an interesting dilemma, and I don't have answers, but I like pondering it....

[aardy.livejournal.com]

And here I thought the "Empire Strikes Back" moment was Cedric not getting his taco in #4. (And everything since then has just been more piling on of misery. Despite being good stories, books/movies 5 & 6 could be largely removed if the plot seeds of #7 were sprinkled throughout #1-4 rather than leaving half of them for the infodump that was #6 and not revealing the other half until #7 itself.)

I don't think either of Columbus' films are the best in the series, but I also think that, with five films establishing certain standard elements of the basic setting--such as even animating the cat plates in Umbridge's office--that, even though the movie was shot in such a way that such scenes were largely not needed (and I say that in admiration of the craft of the cinematographer who pulled off that trick), the points where they were needed--such as the pan shots across Dumbledore's wall o' headmasters paintings--seemed, well, threadbare for the lack.

Whosshisname as Malfoy is also looking to have a decent acting career ahead of him. He had what-- four lines in the whole film? And yet still made me start to care for the traitorous, ungrateful little git much more than Rowling's prose ever did.

And the less said about Dobby, the better; though unless they make some pretty significant story changes, he'll unfortunately have to appear in at least one of the next two films.