Harry Potter And The Movie Premiere
Monday, January 2nd, 2012 07:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tourmalineI just saw my first ever Harry Potter film, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. Some of you will be well aware of this, with me tweeting while watching.
Overall I did enjoy it, and I thought it was a well-crafted film. The only downside was that in their rush to spare no expense on the special effects they forgot the Polaroid camera so they could ensure continuity of hair length - Harry Potter's hair grows and shrinks between scenes, particularly in the second half of the film, like he's a Playdoh Barbershop customer.
Robbie Coltrane first appears looking exactly like he did in Blackadder's Christmas Carol, which is awesome at first, but then wears rather thin when you realise he's pretty much a one-joke character. John Cleese appears as a ghost called Sir Nicholas for about 30 seconds but he's really playing Billy Connolly. Alan Rickman does his usual baddie-acting of not really opening his mouth much, while if you blink you'd miss Julie Walters and Zoe Wanamaker. Maggie Smith is by far the best actor in the film, but then she's Maggie Smith, so yeah. I thought at one point that had he lived, Kenneth Williams would've made a great teacher in the cast.
Overall the kids are OK, once you get used to the hair, but I suppose when you're 12 no-one has really good hair that often. Aside from Harry Potter's hair issue I mentioned, Hermoine has hair like a lion, all crimped and splayed out all over the place, and she never ever ties it back. You would think it'd get caught round her magic wand but no. There's a section near the end where they play a giant chess game and for about 15-20 minutes it's just the three main kids and another one who looks like a vampire, it goes a bit flat there, they must have all been quite young because while none of them are anywhere near like the wooden boy in Bedknobs & Broomsticks, they're not quite fully-fledged actors to handle stuff on their own yet. It's a bit like watching Grange Hill, they'd have been better off with some of the adult actors in that scene.
I think this is one of those films you get more from if you've had these kind of life experiences. I didn't go to boarding school but I read those Enid Blyton books about it, and the story structure is exactly the same - new people starting, learning about the teachers, a sports game, then the showdown and resolution, before the departure. The broomsticks match looked like an insect swarm, I suppose that's what the special effects people took it from, like the Finding Nemo animators had to learn scuba-diving to get the realism (I think the Nemo people got the better deal here). On the other hand, there's stuff that's so unlike any reports you've ever heard about boarding school - there's scenes where they're in the dining hall and the tables are totally covered with what looks like edible food, for example. Though that could be part of the fantasy world thing, like how the trains are clean and not-squeaky and the guard is helpful.
Watching the movie made me want to see the DVD, for a few reasons - firstly, there must be tons on the DVD about the making of the film, I noticed on the credits it was made at Alnwick Castle, like the first series of Blackadder, the Monty Python films and no doubt most films featuring a castle. Also it would mean I could see the whole film, without 39 teeny ad-breaks where you can't always get back in time for the restart (what's wrong with the usual three great long epic ad-breaks, ITV?) and in the originated format rather than a cutdown 4:3 middle of the picture. At one point Robbie Coltrane says "You three kids" and you can only see the middle one on screen. And apparently Hugh Laurie has made a documentary about the movies, or one of them, if anyone has any more info about this I'd be grateful.
When I first tweeted about watching this I had lots of questions from tweeters, and some "OMG you've never seen any of the movies or read any of the books?" tweets. No, this is my first Harry Potter movie, I've never read any of the book and do not plan to, however I've seen the French & Saunders sketch "The Chamberpot of Azerbaijan" they did one Comic Relief year. I'm sure the books are a good read, and it's awesome that they've got lots of children into reading (we never had contemporary children's literature when I was growing up) but my original university plans were to study English Literature, I never got high enough grades but I've always wanted to read the classics. I've read some for school, a few more in advance of TV adaptations, and I have lots on my Kindle - I'm currently reading Brideshead Revisited. I'd like to read more Evelyn Waugh, plus more of the Bronte sisters, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and also maybe more American literature like Kerouac, Hemingway, Steinbeck. There's a lot to get through, and it's not easy to commit to reading through it when you spend your days trying to keep up with political & law changes and your evenings studying science.
The other reason I've never got into Harry Potter books & movies before is that they're really children's literature. I can see that the movies are family movies in a positive way rather than in a lame inoffensive way, like The Simpsons is and like Doctor Who is now (not the pre-resurrection Doctor Who). But, we never had that genre of films & TV until the Simpsons came along. Also, I was in my late 20s when the books & films first appeared, with no children in the family, so we have never been a target audience. And if you make a movie and don't put Stephen Fry or Hugh Laurie or real-life astronauts or spacecraft in it, I'm not your target audience.
I hope that clarifies a few things I couldn't express properly on Twitter. I'd be happy to see the other films, I don't know what's TV-age or what's only on DVD etc so I'll wait until the next one hoves into view in whatever form. So long as it's whatever the second film is, I'll watch it if I'm around.
Overall I did enjoy it, and I thought it was a well-crafted film. The only downside was that in their rush to spare no expense on the special effects they forgot the Polaroid camera so they could ensure continuity of hair length - Harry Potter's hair grows and shrinks between scenes, particularly in the second half of the film, like he's a Playdoh Barbershop customer.
Robbie Coltrane first appears looking exactly like he did in Blackadder's Christmas Carol, which is awesome at first, but then wears rather thin when you realise he's pretty much a one-joke character. John Cleese appears as a ghost called Sir Nicholas for about 30 seconds but he's really playing Billy Connolly. Alan Rickman does his usual baddie-acting of not really opening his mouth much, while if you blink you'd miss Julie Walters and Zoe Wanamaker. Maggie Smith is by far the best actor in the film, but then she's Maggie Smith, so yeah. I thought at one point that had he lived, Kenneth Williams would've made a great teacher in the cast.
Overall the kids are OK, once you get used to the hair, but I suppose when you're 12 no-one has really good hair that often. Aside from Harry Potter's hair issue I mentioned, Hermoine has hair like a lion, all crimped and splayed out all over the place, and she never ever ties it back. You would think it'd get caught round her magic wand but no. There's a section near the end where they play a giant chess game and for about 15-20 minutes it's just the three main kids and another one who looks like a vampire, it goes a bit flat there, they must have all been quite young because while none of them are anywhere near like the wooden boy in Bedknobs & Broomsticks, they're not quite fully-fledged actors to handle stuff on their own yet. It's a bit like watching Grange Hill, they'd have been better off with some of the adult actors in that scene.
I think this is one of those films you get more from if you've had these kind of life experiences. I didn't go to boarding school but I read those Enid Blyton books about it, and the story structure is exactly the same - new people starting, learning about the teachers, a sports game, then the showdown and resolution, before the departure. The broomsticks match looked like an insect swarm, I suppose that's what the special effects people took it from, like the Finding Nemo animators had to learn scuba-diving to get the realism (I think the Nemo people got the better deal here). On the other hand, there's stuff that's so unlike any reports you've ever heard about boarding school - there's scenes where they're in the dining hall and the tables are totally covered with what looks like edible food, for example. Though that could be part of the fantasy world thing, like how the trains are clean and not-squeaky and the guard is helpful.
Watching the movie made me want to see the DVD, for a few reasons - firstly, there must be tons on the DVD about the making of the film, I noticed on the credits it was made at Alnwick Castle, like the first series of Blackadder, the Monty Python films and no doubt most films featuring a castle. Also it would mean I could see the whole film, without 39 teeny ad-breaks where you can't always get back in time for the restart (what's wrong with the usual three great long epic ad-breaks, ITV?) and in the originated format rather than a cutdown 4:3 middle of the picture. At one point Robbie Coltrane says "You three kids" and you can only see the middle one on screen. And apparently Hugh Laurie has made a documentary about the movies, or one of them, if anyone has any more info about this I'd be grateful.
When I first tweeted about watching this I had lots of questions from tweeters, and some "OMG you've never seen any of the movies or read any of the books?" tweets. No, this is my first Harry Potter movie, I've never read any of the book and do not plan to, however I've seen the French & Saunders sketch "The Chamberpot of Azerbaijan" they did one Comic Relief year. I'm sure the books are a good read, and it's awesome that they've got lots of children into reading (we never had contemporary children's literature when I was growing up) but my original university plans were to study English Literature, I never got high enough grades but I've always wanted to read the classics. I've read some for school, a few more in advance of TV adaptations, and I have lots on my Kindle - I'm currently reading Brideshead Revisited. I'd like to read more Evelyn Waugh, plus more of the Bronte sisters, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and also maybe more American literature like Kerouac, Hemingway, Steinbeck. There's a lot to get through, and it's not easy to commit to reading through it when you spend your days trying to keep up with political & law changes and your evenings studying science.
The other reason I've never got into Harry Potter books & movies before is that they're really children's literature. I can see that the movies are family movies in a positive way rather than in a lame inoffensive way, like The Simpsons is and like Doctor Who is now (not the pre-resurrection Doctor Who). But, we never had that genre of films & TV until the Simpsons came along. Also, I was in my late 20s when the books & films first appeared, with no children in the family, so we have never been a target audience. And if you make a movie and don't put Stephen Fry or Hugh Laurie or real-life astronauts or spacecraft in it, I'm not your target audience.
I hope that clarifies a few things I couldn't express properly on Twitter. I'd be happy to see the other films, I don't know what's TV-age or what's only on DVD etc so I'll wait until the next one hoves into view in whatever form. So long as it's whatever the second film is, I'll watch it if I'm around.
