sielwolf's Journal: Misadventures of the Sorting Hat *Spoilers*

So the theater was packed but my brother (along with Charlie and Jerri) were able to catch the latest Harry Potter (The Goblet of Fire) on opening weekend. So a couple of caveats: I have never read any Harry Potter book. Personally the enjoyable escapism is fine for movies (which are a passive activity unless particularly muscular in their concepts) but I have much better things to spend my time reading (such as Murakami's nonfiction about the Aum-Tokyo subway attacks). This of course means I can only give marginal detail to the "intention" of the original lit and the final product refracted through the lens of the director. That being said-

• The movie starts off right with all the principals (Harry, Hermione and Ron) heading off to the Quidditch World Cup. In rapid fashion you are introduced to Cedric ("Hey"), Krum ("Look, its the world's greatest seeker!"), and the Deatheaters. All very important characters and all very important to this specific book and all given the bare minimum amount of time to be aware of their existence. This sets the table for this adaptation: they cut out that Privit St. bullshit and went straight into the story. They had to: the HP books are growing linearly in size while the average tolerable movie length is still just about 2 and a half hours. So this means a compromise of telling what is important and keeping it true or telling everything and making bold alterations.
• So the pace of the movie is relentless. As a first time viewer and unfamiliar with the source material, I couldn't for the life of me remember Cedric's name. And he exists in the plot almost expositorially: he is older, he is in the Tri-wizard, Harry helps him, he helps Harry, he takes Cho to the Winter Cotillion, he makes The Ultimate Sacrifice. All important to the story. But I can't tell you one distinguishing thing about him beyond a generality (older, handsome, nice, popular).
• A lot of characters who were important to the arc of GoF were that way: Cho, Krum, Cedric's father, the Crouches. Ok, some were only secondary. The Crouches fall in importance as the annual Teacher of the Dark Arts (interesting color, no depth needed). What house of magic were each of them then? And other than being a cute girl, why should I give two shits about Cho? Especially since Harry then drops his infatuation with her all together in the next book and begins to start rubbing it out to Ginny Weasley?
• Also, they're going to have to replace the actress who plays Ginny. If she is supposed to turn into a witchy woman sex kitten, this girl ain't it. It's about as plausable as that mongoloid who play's Zoey Barlett on The West Wing being a hottie.
• I guess I can feel the creative team's gambit: they gave one scene to Sirius Black, two to Snape (who totally needs more. Fucking Rickman, man! I just rewatched Die Hard last week: "OH GOD! OH GOD PLEASE DON'T KILL ME!" Priceless), three lines to Draco, and his dad. These are your meat and potatos secondary characters. They are the established foils and require no introduction. GoF sort of takes them for granted and they receed into the background, only to appear when necessary to move the plot or as glorified cameos.
• They smartly gave some face time to the main three and Dumbeldore. Such as the budding romance between Ron and Hermione and the ensuing complications or the fatherly mentoring of Harry.
• How I would've solved this amount of content v. time constraint: instead of extending the movie out and covering many individual points, I would've reduced it to the three major characters, focusing mostly from their perspective. Anything that occurs outside of their experience is out, and anything that they are not directly involved in only occur in the background. You want to have Hagrid and Le Femme Gigante fall in love? Have it happen in the back of the frame in several shots. Narrative and dialogue require more than strong structure. Showing them being bashful, falling ever closer in orbits, exchanging glances, then dancing would tell the extact same story while saving them 5 minutes of specialized scenes. All the fans would know exactly what was going on, what was being said and the movie could have focused on the heart of it: Harry and his folks against Voldemort.
• Of course that might not have been the best: the young actors aren't... the best. They don't take anything from the table but their scenes sort of skip the record. Only Ron gasfacing everything from his horrible tux to dancing with Dame Maggie Smith is perfect. Hermione's lopsided grin at the end or her fighting with Ron just never seem to hit true intensity. Nor did the fighting between Ron and Harry. It felt more like a put-on. Radcliffe does two things well though: look scared and look frazzled. Since that's about 80% of the Potter character it works.
• Of course if they followed my advice, they could've spent more time working on the relationships between the three and finding a stronger heartbeat.
• Can Harry finally be not impressed by magic anymore? Him getting giddy and shooting off a "Brilliant" is starting to wear.
• Emma Watson is going to break some hearts. If Hermione's supposed to be a big geek well that never fucking worked. Emma doing this role is akin to trying to ugly up a model in a teen comedy with glasses and a ponytail. Not that anyone is complaining.
• At the heart of GoF is the Triwizard tourney which is absolutely satisfying in all three phases as a complete vision of the fantastic. Sadly they are frustratingly short. Also they seem to be needlessly lethal. Were they going to let Le Cour's sister just die? Harry could've been eaten, burnt, crushed, flattened, or drowned just as easily as surviving. Such behavior in the real world is considered child endangerment, magic or no. It wouldn't make a riveting story otherwise but still, just something I thought about.
• I liked all the other schools but why was Sturmdrang populated with Slavs? Shouldn't there be some Goethe and Schiller references up in that bitch? Their intro dances were a nice character foundations. Still, what would Hogwarts students do if the roles were reversed? Sing "Another Brick in the Wall Pt 2."? Seemed to be a sort of Colorful Natives from a Foreign Land thing.
• Also GoF had a strange sort of affirmative action going on. Suddenly their's Indians, Chinese, more blacks, etc. Of course none of them are in any important role (other than Cho who is just some East Asian eye candy with three lines and a Scotsman accent). Did Hogwarts institute new admission standards? And if I was Ron I definitely would've hit it with that Patel sister. ef oh ex why. Me thinks Rowling got bit by the criticism.
• Jarvis Cocker? Jonny Greenwood? Hmmm. This sort of wink-wink tongue-in-cheek thing never ages well and always comes off as a bit creaky. As a gag it always falls flat. Bodysurfing uptight teachers? What, is this a fucking beer commercial?
• If Draco's dad is a Deatheater why the fuck was he there at the wake at the end? His ass should be hanging from a meathook in Azkaban and a wire tied around his nuts, the other end hooked into a car battery. I mean, that's how we roll in this motherfucker.

Ok, this is starting to come off whiny. I enjoyed this movie. I could enjoy this movie because I was familiar with all the previous movies. GoF is built specifically with that in mind. And for those looking for their next fix of HP, it goes down well, more easily than The Prisoner of Azkaban which was a bit confusing in the plot department. The movie does this by making calculated assumptions about what you know and what you need to know. What is sacrificed is depth. I liked it mostly because I liked the first three. I never felt two ways about Cedric eating it nor about Cho as a person. In part if feels like a lot of setup but I also think it is different to be introduced a character and lose them in the course of 500 pages as compared to a 2.5 hour movie. This level of storytelling you can do with a miniseries or a TV show, you can't with the hard edges of film. Paring down the movie to the core elements (the Tourney, the big three, Cedric, Dumbledore and the lead secondaries) would have made for a more gripping and resonant movie. Still, the one we're given is a good and satisfying investment of your time. Recommended.

Sounds like the book

[gmhowell]

Sounds like the book. Who cares, who cares, what is this character for? Oh, he dies? Who cares?

Like the others, it sounds like this was designed by a committee, specifically to appeal to the initiated. Some commentary on HP fans [youtube.com].

And if reading even the longest HP book took more than a couple of hours, you need to call 1-800-ABCDEFG. This isn't the most dense prose ever written.

At least in the most recent book (name unimportant, released last summer) is a bit shorter than the previous two.

Re:Sounds like the book

[sielwolf]

I was thinking the best way for me to get through the HP books would be for me to loan them from the library on CD, rip them to a data disc and then play them in my car. I could polish off a book each way back to Ohio.

When it turned out Sirius died in the second to last book and I first heard of it as "A Major Character Dies" I thought, "Oh so one of the principals dies. Either Ron or Hermione". When I found out it was Sirius I thought "Who gives a shit? He doesn't show up until the third book. You got

Meh

[leoPetr]

I haven't seen the movie, but JK Rowling botched Hermione in the book too. She had no business even bothering going to the damn dance for starters... Bah. Oh, and the SoCon, conformist teen drama gets even worse in the later books. The Harry-Ginny interaction is a complete WTF in Half-Blood Prince. Rowling's about as intent to contradict her foreshadowing as a cliff looming over Wiley Coyote's head is intent to send Wiley pizza and flowers.

Re:Meh

[sielwolf]

Now I could accept one thing: that Hermione starts as a sort of introverted smarty-pants at twelve, realizes she is a Hot T at fifteen and then shucks it all to become one of the beautiful people. We've all seen this more than once and with the crucible of puberty and a final autonomous interaction with a large body of her peers (Hogwarts) away from parental guidance makes it plausible. She could grow up to be Single Female Lawyer or something.

Of course that would be a different book, a different feel an

Re:Meh

[elmegil]

So you're a Harry-Hermione shipper then?

Re:Meh

[leoPetr]

Nah, I am just anti-destiny and anti-contrived-plot.:P