Reviews of the two movies I saw and the book I finished this weekend (with spoilers, of course):
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire: The best of all the HP movies, in my opinion. Just the right amounts of satisfying and creepy, and unlike the previous movies, it held together as a story rather than feeling like a filmed outline of the book. As the moviemakers have so wisely done before, they picked the most annoying part of the book (Rita Skeeter, the tabloid journalist) and shrunk her part down to a couple of scenes. And the climactic scene in the graveyard was foreshadowed beautifully, and filmed perfectly. Voldemort avada-kedavra’d Cedric right away, no muss, no fuss - he didn’t care that Cedric was a main character.
The one complaint I have isn’t a complaint about the movie so much as the story in general: what the hell is with the adults who keep putting these kids in horribly dangerous situations for fun? “Hey, everyone, let’s have a Tri-Wizard tournament in which we set up life-threatening tasks for you to complete…and then we’ll all watch like Romans throwing Christians to the lions! Oh, and P.S. — your friends who didn’t even sign up for this insane tournament? We’ll kidnap them and give them to the mer-people to drown. But it’ll all be ok — you can rescue them!” The hell?? When the Watcher’s Council makes Giles do that to Buffy, he feels so awful about it that he rebels and quits the council! In my dream 7th book, the kids all figure out that it isn’t about Gryffindor vs. Slytherin…it’s about kids vs. adults, because almost none of the adults have a shred of sense and have created a horrifying childhood for no reason. …Ok, rant over.
Rize: This is a documentary about hip-hop clowns and “krumping” (a type of dance) in LA. It got all kinds of great press, but I was underwhelmed. It was incredibly cool to watch the kids dance. But there was no story — I didn’t feel like I got to know characters, or see any arc of plot or character development. The point of the movie was, “This dancing makes us believe we can be somebody, that we can escape our crappy situation.” Which — that’s fantastic, but I get it. As C said, it wasn’t so much a story as a way to introduce white people to this aspect of black LA culture. Rather than trying to include me (the white viewer) in the story, get me to see it through the eyes of the people involved, it kept me on the outside. (Critical theory folks, I’m sure there’s a term for that — post away!) By the end of a documentary, I want to feel that I understand the people, that I can laugh and cry with them; this movie seemed to emphasize the differences between us. But I seem to be the only one who felt that way about the movie, so your mileage may vary.
Son of a Witch by Gregory Maguire: The long-awaited sequel to Wicked! And oh, Gregory, how strange you’ve gotten in the intervening years. Wicked was a strange book, no doubt. But it had enough of the conventions of storytelling — beginning-middle-end, character development, love story, friendship, an enemy — to make it gripping. Mirror, Mirror (his retelling of Snow White in Borgia Italy, which I read a couple of years ago) didn’t, and neither does Son of a Witch. It’s like there’s this metaphor Maguire wants to create, a psychological study he wants desperately to construct, but it always eludes him. Liir is an odd, inconsistent main character. His book-long quest comes to naught. Hints are dropped that go nowhere. By the end of the book, he’s lost everyone he cared about (and we have no idea what happened to most of them, either), and yet he’s supposed to have had some sort of moral achievement? The substance of the book slipped through my fingers like sand.
4 responses so far ↓
1 Doug Orleans // Nov 22, 2005 at 1:58 am
it’s about kids vs. adults, because almost none of the adults have a shred of sense and have created a horrifying childhood for no reason.
That’s because J.K.Rowling grew up in the ’70s, which were pretty much exactly like that. Ever seen the movie Over the Edge? or Bad News Bears, or even Bugsy Malone…
2 tom // Nov 22, 2005 at 8:15 am
I’m fascinated you thought the HP movie held together as a story. I thought that if I hadn’t had my knowledge of the book holding it together, I would have been quite confused, what with the unexplained death of Crouch, the unexplained (in the movie) escape of Crouch junior, the great build-up to the quidditch match that wasn’t, and so on. I also wondered why they didn’t just cut out Skeeter storyline entirely (as they did with the Dobby storyline in this book, which they quite nicely transformed into a Longbottom storyline).
That said, it’s hard to imagine you haven’t read the book when you watch the movie, so it’s hard to know what would have made sense, what would have slipped by, etc. — my sense that the movie was confusing and awkwardly paced may have been heightened by the boys next to me (whose father was stuck a few rows back–crowded theater) who kept asking each other what was going on.
Final note: what kind of villain can’t think of a better way to get Harry to touch a portkey than to make him win the triwizard tournament?
3 Martini-Corona // Nov 22, 2005 at 11:19 pm
Just saw it. I have read the book… Goblet of Fire was my least favorite book so far, because it just sort of plodded along episodically without having any sort of dramatic arc. But I read it when it first came out, and only the once, so when I watched this movie I had only the vaguest memory of Wormtongue — I mean, -tail, much less Bertie Crouch. The movie was good in a mix-of-scary-and-laugh-out-loud-funny way, but yeah, the story was MAD confusing. Why did Fleur drop out of the mer-people tournament? I missed one line… Why was Hermione all gorgeous one minute and messy and sweaty and screaming at Ron the next?
Eh, back to the more important things in life — downloading wallpaper of Fred & George Weasley.
4 Jaime // Nov 22, 2005 at 11:33 pm
To be totally fair, in the book Dumbledore says that after the hour is up the kidnapped underwater friends would have been returned unharmed. Harry didn’t know that, but they weren’t really in danger. HE was, though, so for the most part I agree. The entire triwizard thing never made much sense to me, but it was far more obviously a Plot Device in the movie than in the book. (Mostly because books have more distractions.)
I loved the movie. But you knew that.
Leave a Comment