Hey, Things Must Be Looking Up- I'm Talking About Harry Potter!

[poliphilo]

We watched Harry Potter and The Chamber of Secrets last night- Ailz on her nine-inch bed-side TV and me on the wide screen at home. Afterwards we discussed it on the phone.

What did you think?

It was fun.

Yes- fun.

I like the Harry Potter films. Like not love. I don't find myself getting drawn into that world- enjoyable as it is- and I don't identify with any of the characters. As I've said before, I actually spent my teenage years at a faux-gothic boarding school in the middle of nowhere and- well- I find Rowling's vision a little starry-eyed.

God, but I bet all the other kids really resent and hate Harry and his chums for repeatedly saving the world and being feted and feasted at the end of the day!

Bloody, little, do-gooding teachers' pets!

And all the stories are exactly the same- and all the villains far too easy to defeat and that wimpy little Malfoy kid must be the least threatening (and worst-acted) screen villain in the history of the movies. All you have to do is look at him funny and he falls over.

Comments

[lblanchard.livejournal.com]

The books get more richly textured, more nuanced, and darker as the series progresses. The books are also more complex than the films, and I think that reading the books first makes the films better -- they're faithful enough to the texts that one's mind fills in the blanks.

I've read forward in the thread and note your objection to the unambiguity of the Potter victories. That, too, changes as the series progresses. Partly, I think, it's because the characters age a year between books and are more able to understand conflicting values and ambiguities.. Additionally, I believe that Rowling -- whether by design or by happenstance -- pitches her books more and more toward the age group of the characters. Book 4 is considerably darker than Book 3, Book 5 darker still, and by Book 6 Harry ends the adventure with a great deal of despair, very little hope, and the fatalistic soldiering on that's the hallmark of the epic hero.

As an aside, I believe that critics consider Chamber of Secrets to be the weakest of the novels and the films.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I haven't read the books. Perhaps I'll give one of the later ones a go.

I think I'd agree about Chamber of Secrets being the weakest of the films. It adds very little to what we learned in the first movie- and, of course, it's not as fresh.

But I liked Moaning Myrtle.

[ibid.livejournal.com]

Actually I think the books suffer later on because no one wants to edit JK Rowling and they are less disciplined and more unweady.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

It can be a bad thing if an author becomes untouchable. I seem to remember Iris Murdoch got to a stage where she was allowed to dispense with an editor and it's a pity- those enormous novels of her later years could really have done with some sharpening.