Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Bunnyman]

But that's not commercially viable.  Don't you get it?  Sheesh.

Saw it.  Liked the theater I saw it in rather more than the film proper.  It was a really nice theater - the Fox in Westwood (That's LA, for you non-SoCal people).

[Mnementh]

Okay, what the hell people.

Willow.

First three movies:


Goblet of Fire:

[LiterSize]

The Swan:  Wizards Edition?



WHat?  DON'TJUDGEME!

[Praeserpium Machinarum]

I finally saw it this friday and it was good entertainment. The special effects were fantastic and everyone acted reasonably well. Though I would have liked Christopher Lee to be Voldemort, but I suppose he can't be the villain every time. And Ralph Fiennes did a good job anyway.  Sure some of those teenager being awdward scenes made me cringe. But on the whole it was good,  best Harry P movie to date.

[yelley]

i saw it last night... it opened in theatres on the 26th here so i made myself not read this thread until now. yay!

i was wholly disappointed. the fourth book was my favorite but i thought the movie was junk. sure it looked good... the special effects were nice... but i just can't overlook the cut characters and scenes and the way things were changed. character development was practically zero and many of my favorite parts from the book were cut.

was anyone else completely unintimidated by voldemort? i thought he looked cool but then he started talking and all was lost. the voice... not nearly sinister enough.

[Tactical Error]

My two cents lifted from my post in another forums(pardon some of the language)...


As far as being faithful to the books goes, it was utter shit. I'd heard rumor that they were removing Dobby and Winky but WTF! So much cutting and a bit of "poetic liscense" here and there seriously fucked the pacing. Way to much "lets get this over with so we can hit the main plotpoints" business going on. What happened to classes? What about Bertha Jorkins? And Rita Skeeter the unregistered Animagus? I'm quite disgusted with this treatment. Nevertheless, I did enjoy the film for what it was, a mediocre movie loosley based on an excellent book. The SE were quite well done. Did anyone else think the Dragon scene dragged on a bit much(and we didn't even get to see the figure of the Chinese Fireball, lame)? I could go on for hours about what exactly was wrong, going into hundreds of minor details, additions, and omissions but I'm sure you already get the picture.

See it if you must, it's not the worst movie out there. True fans will be dissappointed though.

[Johnny C]

Okay, what the hell people.

[Flitwick]

I KNOW

Anyways, the third film stank like a fish market but this one was excellent. Dobby's subplot, pardon my blasphemy, is utter shit, boring and unneccessary. Including his important figure in the plot would have been great; however, they smoothed it over by fleshing out Neville instead, a character who could seriously use some more dimension. The absence of Skeeter's subplot irked me, but again it was unneccessary. And you'll notice, too, that the Dursleys were also excised.

The film was made as a meat-and-potatoes version of the story, and by focusing on that, they accomplished what they set out to do. It was beautiful and well-written, if you can be arsed to put by-the-book purism aside.

[I Am Not Amused]

People who compare movies to the books they are based on infuriate me. THEY ARE TWO COMPLETELY DIFFERENT ART FORMS.

Books - Directed at a certain set of readers, make money via appeasing these sets of readers. Books that try to sell themselves to everyone always end up being tripe, ones that are specialized and write to a sub-audience are the ones that are successful. Books make money by pleasing the target audience.

Movies - Directed at the population as a whole, and thus a much larger and much different target audience. For movies that are going to be viewed on such a wide-scale as the Harry Potter movies, they have to appease a FUCKUVALOT more people, and a wider bredth of people types. In order for a movie to make money, they have to make a movie that will please just about everyone, and if that fucks over the (comparitively) small audience of people who read the books, then so be it.

The next time you see a movie of a book, don't expect it to be point-for-point true to the books. Try to view it as a movie, a piece of art on its own merits.

As far as a two-part Goblet of Fire, if they start doing that, there is no way these kids won't be twenty-five or twenty-six by the time the last movie gets done. These kids aren't getting any younger, and they have to get to the 8th movie before nobody can believe they're 18. So, two-parters are definitely out of the question.

[yelley]

while it is true that movies and books are two completely different art forms, it is nigh impossible for a fan of the book to completely separate that from the movie. leaving out characters, changing the roles of characters, leaving out entire subplots.... while i do understand that a lot of stuff needs to be cut to keep the movie within time constraints, it still makes me sad. and yeah, that is going to have an effect on how i feel about the movie as a whole no matter how hard i try to not let it bother me.

you're right that people shouldn't go into a movie thinking that it will be exactly like the book. but i do think it's okay to expect some things to be the same, or at least similar.

that being said, i think it was kind of a junk movie. sure it was fun to watch and the special effects were good, but that just can't make up for poor character development and that rushed feeling i got from the movie. i obviously can't ignore what i know about the book, but even people that i know that have never read the books agree that the movie felt rushed, moody's character could have been made more interesting, voldemort wasn't scary enough, the passage of time was skewed and confusing...

but i guess nowadays all it takes to make an awesome movie are some great special effects...

[Bunnyman]

Agreed, special effects have gone amok in Hollywood.  I don't dislike CGI on principle, but rather its effect on the look of movies.  Instead of carefully crafted aesthetics, everything looks uniformly shiny, like a tech demo.  "Look, bitches, we can do particle effects, and our HDR doesn't suck!"  Compare Minority Report to Blade Runner, for example.

Special effects need to be used to support a movie's aesthetic, not define it.  Ridley Scott is one of the few directors with enough integrity to craft a coherent world and use CGI as a tool instead of an end (witness the seamless depiction of Mogadishu in Black Hawk Down).

And, DAMN, was there a single shot in that movie that wasn't digitally embellished?  It just got silly after a while.

[ASturge]

That's why i really like the sound of DOOM. It appears they relied more on robots than CGI.

[amishgirl281]

I was somewhat dissapointed in the movie, they cut too much out as far as I'm concerned. However, I was quite pleased with one little bit that they added onto in the Graveyard scene.

I was quite pleased with the whole Lucius/Voldemort interaction. I was hoping that they would keep at least some of that in the movie, and they did, thankfully. They even had Voldemort take off Lucius' mask which made everything so much better.

What I was most angry about them cutting was one of the ending scenes when everyone is in the hospital wing talking about the rise of the Dark Lord. In the book, Severus Snape marches up to Fudge, pulls up the sleeve of his robe, and displays his dark mark and provides a nifty explination.

Well that obviously didn't happen, and I'm quite angry. They should have kept that scene, it was the one I was looking forward too most of all. Though, they did make up for it by having a little Snape/Harry confrintation.

I saw the movie twice, and I had two diffrent reactions to Voldemort. At first, I was somewhat pleased that they got him to look slightly distorted and creepy. But the second time around, I found that he looked a little too built. Did you see the muscles on his arms? Plus, I didn't think I should have left the theater attracted to him. I like enough of the bad boys as it is.

[Praeserpium Machinarum]

Now I realise that the reason I like the movie might actually be because I don't remember the book. In detail anyway, I speedread the books(except the fifth, took ages) and now I can't remember a bloody thing

[Bearer]

I think the only way to describe the movie is Cliff Notes with pictures...>_>
I was dissapointed by the ammount of stuff they left out (Dobby, colin, Rita, etc...).  I understant cutting stuff out for length, but still.
Also, Voldemort wasn't scary enough...

Still, overall, it was a good movie.