A mini-review of Deathly Hallows part 1
Yes, that's 'Part 1', not the latest/last HP movie. I move slowly. :-)
I hold Rowling's last book to be a literary disaster which stamps 'FAIL' on her entire series, so it is unsurprising that I felt no great motivation to see the film adaptation. However I've decided to pop along and view the final movie in a more timely manner - mainly so I can sample the fan hysteria for one last time, and from a vantage closer than my computer screen, as it were - so I found a movie theatre that was screening Part 1 and went along to see it last night.
Which proved to be a serendipitous move. I hadn't realised it at the time of my booking the ticket - I thought Part 2 wasn't being released until the 15th of July - but apparently it kicked off from midnight last night. Thus they were showing Part 1 for any HP afficionados who wanted a refresher immediately prior to viewing the sequel, I guess. But as a result I got to walk out of the cinema at about 11:30pm to witness a horde of HP fans all squeeing and eagerly waiting to be ushered into their midnight showings of the final movie. The last BIG THING of the HP phenomenon, which I got to sample largely by accident! :-) It was nice to see the teens running around, many dressed up as witches and characters from the books (I noted multiple mages, two human Hedwigs, one dead Fred and one deceased Dobby).
As to the movie I saw, DH Part 1 ...
It certainly wasn't a GOOD movie. But it wasn't BAD either. At least, not 'actively' bad. A film can never include all of the details within the book on which it is based, of course, and when it comes to Rowling's last novel that's a very good thing. Because there were less canon particulars in the movie there were less problems overall. But they didn't include much new 'film canon' either - right now I can only think of THE DANCE - so the film suffered from the major thematic flaw of the book - it was bloody boring. Usually a Potter flick is entertaining just from seeing how the book magic is translated to the big screen, how cool the special effects are. But when most of the movie consists of the three characters sitting in a tent or roaming around the countryside ... well, unless one has great fascination for the geography of the UK, one ends up quite underwhelmed. I continually discovered myself drifting, thinking about how to solve real-world work problems, while Harry and Hermione were walking on top of big rocks or hiding in trees or sitting in the tent.
THE DANCE. For months before the release of the movie all I heard about was THE DANCE. Both from my peermates in the Harry/Hermione subfandom but also - squawking even louder! - from some of the more staunch defenders o' Jo. These canon champions were really really REALLY threatened by all the H/Hr propaganda that was coming out prior to the movie's release. I think I've mentioned it before on my blog; witnessing the behaviour of this crowd was really interesting from a psychological perspective.
Anyway ... sadly I didn't find THE DANCE to be the uplifting Harry/Hermione experience that I know others were able to glean from the film. But I fully understand and approve of the reasoning that Yates - and the other Davids, the producers - employed in rendering it. At least according to how I saw it.
Sometimes I concentrate so much on the 'emotional' side of the Harry/Hermione OTP - the deep friendship evolving into romantic love, the meeting of minds, their complementing and supporting each other, the excitement in all of the permutations of how they cross the line from friends to lovers that I forget there's a very physical side to it all too. Which is all the canon H/G relationship has; maybe that's why I relegate it as of lesser importance when mixed in with all of the other facets of a healthy (H/Hr) pairing. But hey, it's there too in many H/Hr stories, it most definitely has its place. :-)
The last few months, too, I've come across various on-line pockets of HP fandom - the denizens largely male - and their opinion of Rowling's tent text could be summarised as something like this:
And I think that was the sole aim of THE DANCE scene; the movie folks went as close as possible to what many people think is an *inevitable* result of putting two attractive young people of opposite gender in a small confined space for weeks. That was the interpretation I got out of it. Hermione was miserable; Harry, as a good friend, tried to cheer her up. LOUD CHEERS TO THIS CANON CORRECTION, by the way - I *abhored* Rowling's treatment of Harry in the book, writing him as a cold-hearted bastiche who left Hermione sobbing herself to sleep, night after night, without a single gesture of solace or comfort (maybe he draped a blanket over her one night, I'm not sure). But, see, Rowling *had* to write Harry that way; it was the only way she could keep R/Hr in the picture. Write a sympathetic and caring Harry and, well, all but the most die-hard of the pro-Jo zombies would be asking "uhm, why in blazes is Hermione still hankering after Ron, please?". So, since she couldn't lift Ron up in the readers' eyes - he *was* the one who abandoned his mates - she instead had to lower the competition. A sad and sorry corner into which she'd written herself. So, 'good show!' to the movie crowd for fixing this!
Where was I? Oh, right. So, Harry starts the dance to cheer her up ... but I really think he was 'making a move' on her as well. She cheers up, they act silly, younger ... but then came the point where things could have easily ended with Harry and Hermione clinching, lip-locked, fade to black. If Hermione had moved just a *little bit nearer* and closed her eyes ...
But she made her choice. Well, Rowling made it for her, and the movie people couldn't break this most sacred of canon edicts (second only to 'Voldemort is vanquished' I guess). In the movie, the way I saw it, Hermione saw that she had that choice ... and she knocked it back.
Silly girl. I is sad. :-(
That's how THE DANCE scene hit me, anyway. I'm very happy that so many of my H/Hr brethren got more out of it than I did, and I was delighted by the frenzy of despair and disbelief that was conjured by the threatened pro-canon crowd, but in the end, while I thought it was a charming scene, and I think it worked *perfectly* to do what was intended - if my thoughts above are correct - I guess it's the ending that counts, for me. Which was never in doubt.
Oh, and I should say, now that I've finally seen the movie, I now fully understand the angst that was exhibited by some of my H/Hr friends, the agonising over Hermione's choice. Parkergray and sunny_serenity, I'm looking at you. :-) But yes ... Rowling was too scared to touch it, and she couldn't do so without making R/Hr even more of a joke, but those film people took Hermione right. Up. To. The. Brink. No wonder I saw so many examinations of Hermione's Choice And Why She Was Held Back after the movie's release.
Okay. Boring movie, THE DANCE, what else?
One of the great things about these movies is how the flow of canon corrections confirms the fans' opinions as to the poor quality of Rowling's work. With DH Part 1 I felt vindicated in particular by the removal of one of the absolute *worst* (and, with DH, that's saying a LOT) examples of Rowling's writing - the junking of Rowling's horribly contrived and completely unbelievable Taboo gimmick. Remember that? Ron says "don't say the word 'Voldemort' that you've made a point of saying for the last 6 years against all pressure to do otherwise". And so Harry doesn't. For *months*. And then, when Ron *abandons* Harry, when Harry is furious for the abandonment - when Harry has a definite motivation to say the word to spite his betrayer, let alone the freedom regained in the simple elimination of the reason why he was refraining in the first place - Harry still. Doesn't. Say. It. Oh, and let us not forget the RIDICULOUS artifice of Rowling's that Ron only begged Harry not to say the word based on a 'feeling'. What terrible writing!
Anyway. Movie. The Taboo word. Eliminated. Vindication, yay!
I *love* it when the movies just quietly jettison the Rowling errors that we've been talking about for years! Very satisfying.
Miscellanea ... I enjoyed Dobby's scenes. Almost the only touches of humour in the film, other than Ron's occasional quips. "I am an elf". Heh. :-) (Oh, that's another one of Rowling's overall world failures, by the way.) I think that got the biggest laugh. Biggest theatre-wide *cringe* was Ron's 'ball of light' dialogue. Gawd, after the last 6 movies I guess the scriptwriter was desperate to put some runs on the board to support R/Hr. Hermione's torture - brrrr. Poor girl. The terror of that moment escaped me when I read the book - I guess I was pretty much disengaged by that point - but yeah, stuck up there with Bellatrix, oh dear.
So, on to the last movie! From the trailers and other snippets I can see two or three further canon corrections which can only improve on the book. Sadly, this time round, there's at least one bit of inserted dialogue which I think is just stupid - I have no idea what made the scriptwriter add it. I won't possibly spoil anyone by mentioning it now. Still, I expect the movie to be much better than DH1, simply because it will be chock-full of all of those snazzy special effects and lots and lots of action. Plus a much more effective ending (not including the epilogue), courtesy of at least one of those canon corrections.
I hold Rowling's last book to be a literary disaster which stamps 'FAIL' on her entire series, so it is unsurprising that I felt no great motivation to see the film adaptation. However I've decided to pop along and view the final movie in a more timely manner - mainly so I can sample the fan hysteria for one last time, and from a vantage closer than my computer screen, as it were - so I found a movie theatre that was screening Part 1 and went along to see it last night.
Which proved to be a serendipitous move. I hadn't realised it at the time of my booking the ticket - I thought Part 2 wasn't being released until the 15th of July - but apparently it kicked off from midnight last night. Thus they were showing Part 1 for any HP afficionados who wanted a refresher immediately prior to viewing the sequel, I guess. But as a result I got to walk out of the cinema at about 11:30pm to witness a horde of HP fans all squeeing and eagerly waiting to be ushered into their midnight showings of the final movie. The last BIG THING of the HP phenomenon, which I got to sample largely by accident! :-) It was nice to see the teens running around, many dressed up as witches and characters from the books (I noted multiple mages, two human Hedwigs, one dead Fred and one deceased Dobby).
As to the movie I saw, DH Part 1 ...
It certainly wasn't a GOOD movie. But it wasn't BAD either. At least, not 'actively' bad. A film can never include all of the details within the book on which it is based, of course, and when it comes to Rowling's last novel that's a very good thing. Because there were less canon particulars in the movie there were less problems overall. But they didn't include much new 'film canon' either - right now I can only think of THE DANCE - so the film suffered from the major thematic flaw of the book - it was bloody boring. Usually a Potter flick is entertaining just from seeing how the book magic is translated to the big screen, how cool the special effects are. But when most of the movie consists of the three characters sitting in a tent or roaming around the countryside ... well, unless one has great fascination for the geography of the UK, one ends up quite underwhelmed. I continually discovered myself drifting, thinking about how to solve real-world work problems, while Harry and Hermione were walking on top of big rocks or hiding in trees or sitting in the tent.
THE DANCE. For months before the release of the movie all I heard about was THE DANCE. Both from my peermates in the Harry/Hermione subfandom but also - squawking even louder! - from some of the more staunch defenders o' Jo. These canon champions were really really REALLY threatened by all the H/Hr propaganda that was coming out prior to the movie's release. I think I've mentioned it before on my blog; witnessing the behaviour of this crowd was really interesting from a psychological perspective.
Anyway ... sadly I didn't find THE DANCE to be the uplifting Harry/Hermione experience that I know others were able to glean from the film. But I fully understand and approve of the reasoning that Yates - and the other Davids, the producers - employed in rendering it. At least according to how I saw it.
Sometimes I concentrate so much on the 'emotional' side of the Harry/Hermione OTP - the deep friendship evolving into romantic love, the meeting of minds, their complementing and supporting each other, the excitement in all of the permutations of how they cross the line from friends to lovers that I forget there's a very physical side to it all too. Which is all the canon H/G relationship has; maybe that's why I relegate it as of lesser importance when mixed in with all of the other facets of a healthy (H/Hr) pairing. But hey, it's there too in many H/Hr stories, it most definitely has its place. :-)
The last few months, too, I've come across various on-line pockets of HP fandom - the denizens largely male - and their opinion of Rowling's tent text could be summarised as something like this:
- Harry and Hermione, together, for weeks, on the run and under pressure, alone in a tent in the wilderness. Please. You just *know* they got it on.
And I think that was the sole aim of THE DANCE scene; the movie folks went as close as possible to what many people think is an *inevitable* result of putting two attractive young people of opposite gender in a small confined space for weeks. That was the interpretation I got out of it. Hermione was miserable; Harry, as a good friend, tried to cheer her up. LOUD CHEERS TO THIS CANON CORRECTION, by the way - I *abhored* Rowling's treatment of Harry in the book, writing him as a cold-hearted bastiche who left Hermione sobbing herself to sleep, night after night, without a single gesture of solace or comfort (maybe he draped a blanket over her one night, I'm not sure). But, see, Rowling *had* to write Harry that way; it was the only way she could keep R/Hr in the picture. Write a sympathetic and caring Harry and, well, all but the most die-hard of the pro-Jo zombies would be asking "uhm, why in blazes is Hermione still hankering after Ron, please?". So, since she couldn't lift Ron up in the readers' eyes - he *was* the one who abandoned his mates - she instead had to lower the competition. A sad and sorry corner into which she'd written herself. So, 'good show!' to the movie crowd for fixing this!
Where was I? Oh, right. So, Harry starts the dance to cheer her up ... but I really think he was 'making a move' on her as well. She cheers up, they act silly, younger ... but then came the point where things could have easily ended with Harry and Hermione clinching, lip-locked, fade to black. If Hermione had moved just a *little bit nearer* and closed her eyes ...
But she made her choice. Well, Rowling made it for her, and the movie people couldn't break this most sacred of canon edicts (second only to 'Voldemort is vanquished' I guess). In the movie, the way I saw it, Hermione saw that she had that choice ... and she knocked it back.
Silly girl. I is sad. :-(
That's how THE DANCE scene hit me, anyway. I'm very happy that so many of my H/Hr brethren got more out of it than I did, and I was delighted by the frenzy of despair and disbelief that was conjured by the threatened pro-canon crowd, but in the end, while I thought it was a charming scene, and I think it worked *perfectly* to do what was intended - if my thoughts above are correct - I guess it's the ending that counts, for me. Which was never in doubt.
Oh, and I should say, now that I've finally seen the movie, I now fully understand the angst that was exhibited by some of my H/Hr friends, the agonising over Hermione's choice. Parkergray and sunny_serenity, I'm looking at you. :-) But yes ... Rowling was too scared to touch it, and she couldn't do so without making R/Hr even more of a joke, but those film people took Hermione right. Up. To. The. Brink. No wonder I saw so many examinations of Hermione's Choice And Why She Was Held Back after the movie's release.
Okay. Boring movie, THE DANCE, what else?
One of the great things about these movies is how the flow of canon corrections confirms the fans' opinions as to the poor quality of Rowling's work. With DH Part 1 I felt vindicated in particular by the removal of one of the absolute *worst* (and, with DH, that's saying a LOT) examples of Rowling's writing - the junking of Rowling's horribly contrived and completely unbelievable Taboo gimmick. Remember that? Ron says "don't say the word 'Voldemort' that you've made a point of saying for the last 6 years against all pressure to do otherwise". And so Harry doesn't. For *months*. And then, when Ron *abandons* Harry, when Harry is furious for the abandonment - when Harry has a definite motivation to say the word to spite his betrayer, let alone the freedom regained in the simple elimination of the reason why he was refraining in the first place - Harry still. Doesn't. Say. It. Oh, and let us not forget the RIDICULOUS artifice of Rowling's that Ron only begged Harry not to say the word based on a 'feeling'. What terrible writing!
Anyway. Movie. The Taboo word. Eliminated. Vindication, yay!
I *love* it when the movies just quietly jettison the Rowling errors that we've been talking about for years! Very satisfying.
Miscellanea ... I enjoyed Dobby's scenes. Almost the only touches of humour in the film, other than Ron's occasional quips. "I am an elf". Heh. :-) (Oh, that's another one of Rowling's overall world failures, by the way.) I think that got the biggest laugh. Biggest theatre-wide *cringe* was Ron's 'ball of light' dialogue. Gawd, after the last 6 movies I guess the scriptwriter was desperate to put some runs on the board to support R/Hr. Hermione's torture - brrrr. Poor girl. The terror of that moment escaped me when I read the book - I guess I was pretty much disengaged by that point - but yeah, stuck up there with Bellatrix, oh dear.
So, on to the last movie! From the trailers and other snippets I can see two or three further canon corrections which can only improve on the book. Sadly, this time round, there's at least one bit of inserted dialogue which I think is just stupid - I have no idea what made the scriptwriter add it. I won't possibly spoil anyone by mentioning it now. Still, I expect the movie to be much better than DH1, simply because it will be chock-full of all of those snazzy special effects and lots and lots of action. Plus a much more effective ending (not including the epilogue), courtesy of at least one of those canon corrections.