(no subject)
I like each Harry Potter movie less than I liked the previous one. Each has moments that shine out from the rest of it: the climax of Order of the Phoenix and when, in the current flick, Potter says “I am the chosen one” and Hermione smacks him “upside his head.” These are the moments that remind me why I keep thinking these movies are a good idea. They tell a story that is as important as it is familiar. The scenes of daily life remind us of the joy that we can find in reality and the heroic antics of our, uhh, hero remind us of what it means to do all those things we’re told we should be doing. And why we do them. There’s a magic in the movies aside from the obvious. Seeing Potter and his friends overcome adversity and the “magic of cinema” really holds in the creation of a dreamworld.
I like Harry Potter. So, why don’t I like the movies? It’s easy: they’re bad.
They really are. They’re pretty and shiny and beautiful. But they’re not good movies. That is to say they have become not good movies. The first few movies, much like the first few books, function well as standalone stories, but beyond those books, the story changes. Potter becomes a long overarching tale of how a boy turns into a hero, and how a hero becomes a legend. Each books leads to a terminating end point with the climax of Deathly Hallows.
The Half-Blood Prince is very much an inbetween point.
Movies based on books ought to be more accessible than the books. The Harry Potter movies have become love letters to the fans: they show moments of the books that the fans like, sacrificing accessibility and plot. For example, in the Half Blood Prince, Ginny is given significantly more screen time, but this is not time with Potter. Yes, she was a larger player in this book, but she appears as a face in a window, the camera lingers on her in a crowd. This is not to demonstrate how Harry comes to notice her as a sexual object and not just Ron’s little sister-it’s to make us go through this transition. This is fine, but for the non-initiated viewer, the worth of these scenes is lost. It is as though the movie and the fans in the audience have an inside joke they won’t explain because “you’ll get it eventually.”
There are, I have noticed, several common forms of stories in cinema. (These are all terms I make up.) There’s the linear story, which functions not necessarily chronologically, but you generally can feel the plot going in a specific direction. Dialogue, characters, actions, and everything else about the linear story pushes the viewers towards the climax and then the ending. There is a bow tied at the end and the story is, in and of itself, complete. There’s the stepping stone story, in which individual moments lead to an end. Each scene is something in and of itself, and outside of the ending the movie can still exist. Slice of life flicks are this way. Each stone is a scene, or series of scenes, that may or may not entertwine with others, but by the end you can understand the necessity of all the scenes.
Then there’s what I call the 26-series story. It is thus named for the twenty-six episodes in a standard television season. I felt bad calling it the anime story, but a lot of anime goes like this. The beginning is plot heavy, it sets up what is going to happen and it pulls you in. Then, there is a long meandering period of scenes that have little or nothing to do with the plot, the occasional plot moment in there. If you watch carefully, you can pick out in these hi-jinks laden scenes looks or words that you can extrapolate and argue point to the ending, but only after you have experienced the whole thing. Then, towards the end, plot is thrown at you with such a fury you look around yourself as you try to brush the dust off your ass wondering how you ended up on the ground.
Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince is one such plot.
I enjoy the hi-jinks. Rowling’s books become significantly different as they progress. She takes opportunities to develop her setting and show what life as a wizard is like. This is cool. Sure, there is character development, but, seriously, have you seen the movies? The childhood acting goes down with each one. And poor Ron Weasely, being turned into the comic relief. Regardless of my own feelings about Rupert Gint, we’re past the point of learning about the personalities of our three from special scenes. Yes, they change as they age, but we don’t need to see Hermione attacking Ron in jealous anger. It’s unbecoming, and her and Harry pining away in a stairwell alone is a much more touching sequence.
On that note, Lavender Brown. What the frack? I felt lucky I remembered who she was, because they certainly never explained it.
The Quidditch scenes in this movie serve entirely to demonstrate and lead between Hermione and Ron’s relationship. Normally these scenes are some of my favorites. They’re /fun/. In HBP, they felt forced, weak. I wondered why they were even there. Quidditch didn’t look fun, as it normally is depicted. It looked like just another part of life.
I imagine the production crew sitting around a room, the script outline on the table and everyone arguing about it. “We could cut X,” one would say. “No,” someone would counter. “We need it because it leads into Y, which ends up at Z, where Harry sees Q.” So they kept more than they needed to.
Z, a person I call my friend, also pointed out something I hadn’t noticed. What has made successful fantasy adaptations successful, in part, has been the ability of the crew to recreate the world down to small, subtle details that you usually don’t notice. Something about the castle seemed off to me. Something about a lot of the movie seemed off to me, but I couldn’t place it until it was pointed out to me: it wasn’t magical. A lot of the small things that remind us Harry’s world is a magical one weren’t there. Pictures didn’t move as much or at all. Stairwells were generally static. The ceilings, lights, candles, doors, everything was normal. The magic of the first sights we have of Hogwarts are gone and replaced by teenagers mooning at one another in windows.
I guess I could argue that shows Harry’s adaptation and age, how the wizarding world becomes normal and girls become more important, but that feels like a weak argument.
As an aside argument, the movies cause me a cognitive dissonance. Harry Potter is older than I am. When reading the books, I felt like a friend was telling me about their life before we met. When I watch the movies, I felt a little dirty. This wasn’t my friend, Harry. My friend Harry who is some seven years older than I am. This is a kid who is growing up in the modern world. My modern world. I don’t even know how they accomplished that. Maybe it’s just me.
I’m fairly strongly attached to the books. I was given the first one when I was eleven by my middle school librarian. Each year, while they came out, my dad bought me the next one. I grew up with Harry, quite literally. As he aged a year, I aged a year. Yeah, I was 19 when book seven came out, but I’ll forgive that publication oversight because all along this was a story an older friend was recounting to me. Sitting in the theatre gave these thoughts words as I looked out over the audience, people within a five year buffer of my age (or so), with the occasional statistical outlier. I feel sorry for children who will miss out on the experience of books actually aging with you. Each one has slightly higher concept material. Yeah, they’re all good at any age, they say, but there was something special, to me. I was the right ages for the books to have that feeling.
I remember coming back from Space Academy (shut up) and my dad giving me the most recent book. He was proud of me, he explained, to have gone off on my own and accomplished so much. In that book, Harry set out on his own. That was special to me.
I like to think that every few years something like this will occur, media we can grow with. Sometimes, it feels forced-like with some TV shows when they all end up going to the same college and their beloved teacher is now a professor there. For Harry, it was natural. I hope the final movies will be able to reflect this.