Monday, November 28, 2005

The New Harry Potter Movie

I didn't particular care for the last movie... Prisoner of Azkaban for the same reason I didn't particularly care for this movie: Huge parts of the movie were left unexplained due to time constraints.

OK people: You are making a movie for 12-year-olds. You need to explain stuff. If I had never read the books, I wouldn't have understood half of this movie. JK Rowling explained it in the books, why couldn't they explain it in the movie?

Oh... and if you happen to be Mike Newell, director of Goblet of Fire, reading this and you want to write and tell me that all of that info couldn't have been fit into a 2 hour movie, well I sort of agree with you... but the question is this: If you increased the length of the movie to 3 hours do you think any of the 3 zillion people who went to see it would have complained? Do you think that the $1 billion profit this movie is going to bring in would have suffered greatly by spending another $100 million for an extra hour of movie to include all of the information contained in the book?

My advice? Read the book. At least read the book before you see the movie.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Where did you see the movie? Guess it was a good thing you read the book.
JWW

Anonymous said...

LOL....you conveniently forgot that the book is 700 pages and the movie covers the first 500 pages in 15 minutes; then goes on to concentrate on the TriWizard tournament which is only the last 200 pages of the book. Sooooooooo expanding the movie another 30 minutes certainly won't do 500 pages of plot justice.

But considering that more people have read the book than will see the movie, making the assumption that you've read the book before seeing the movie is probably valid!!

WH

Jil Wrinkle said...

Yes... actually they did expand the "action bits" substantially. In the book, the "get the egg from the dragon" part was 3 or 4 paragraphs. In the movie it was a full 5 or 10 minutes. I can understand doing movie adaptations of books as one-shot deals, but this is a series of 7 movies of the most widely-read books on the planet. Why cut corners? Which person who went to see the movie would say "less is better"?

Anonymous said...

The book is almost always better than the movie.
jww