The last Harry Potter

Well, the last of the Harry Potter movies is upon us, and my wife and I went to an early morning session (along with about 20 other people) yesterday to catch up on it.

Yes, you still need to know the backstories if you're to make complete sense of things, and some high points from the last book get a little less room than they deserve (no doubt through constraints of time - the twin's death consists almost entirely of Ron in mourning, and the battle between Molly Weasley and Bellatrix is truncated to the point where it's just another fight with wands. Both of these are losses). The backstory about Severus Snape and his deep love for Harry's mother is done in moment after moment and succeeds, in spite of being whipped past your eye at a rate of knots. Again, it helps if you have some understanding of what's being said and shown here. Other things seem to take longer than necessary: the opening scene with John Hurt seems quite slow to me, for instance.

But there are delights as well: Helena Bonham Carter playing Emma Watson playing HBC was one of the highlights. (The three almost unknown actors who played Ministry of Magic workers in the previous episode who were supposed to be the three main actors in disguise were also fun in this regard.) Maggie Smith saying in her inimitable way - after having cast a spell she's never had to use before - 'I've always wanted to say that!' And seeing Neville Longbottom come into his own (after having been unduly neglected by the directors in some of the other episodes) is great.

The CGI is impeccable, and so believable that you no longer give any thought to how it's all done. Many of the huge range of British actors who've appeared throughout the series reappear briefly - some get no more than a single shot - and it's like a coming-together of the cast for a final fling at the thing.

The story has room enough to breathe, although I'm not sure if the audience always has the same amount of breath: I found the film made me fell quite tense, which is probably an intended plus (!) It even seemed more emotionally strong than some of the others, though I can't tell you now which particular bits made me feel that way. The woman sitting next to me seemed to be finding it moving enough to be wiping her eyes a good deal at one stage.

All up this is a strong contendor in the series, and perhaps shows how far the the movies have progressed from the original Chris Columbus episodes. This isn't a movie for small children, however much they may enjoy Harry Potter. I wouldn't take them near it unless you want to contend with nightmares for a week.

And the epilogue, with the characters grown up, actually gave them all a chance to look like they really are. For once Ron actually looked reasonably respectable - the hair had been combed back off his face. And the Potter 'son' is very appealing....

PS: Does the poster above make Harry look like something out of some violent action movie - or is it just my reading of it?

Joe's Palace

Stephen Poliakoff's latest tv film was shown last night. It’s one of two ‘companion’ pieces, the other (which stars Maggie Smith) will show next week.

Thomas Sutcliffe, of The Independent, wrote:
[it had] “a looping, elliptical style of storytelling that can make it very difficult to say, once the final credits start rolling, exactly what the whole thing was about.”

Never was a truer word said without quite being said. I don’t think Mr Sutcliffe intended to disparage Poliakoff’s piece; I think he meant to say it was full of meaning that wasn’t quite graspable. Unfortunately what his words actually say on the surface is exactly what I felt about the film – and so did the other three people watching it with me.

There was so much wrong with it: its sluggish pace, the dreadfully-acted main character Joe (if it was dreadful acting; maybe this boy can’t act) who seemed to be an empty shell; the overdone sex scenes which added nothing to the film – couldn’t we have been left to guess, along with Joe, what was going on upstairs?

Then there was the Michael Gambon character, which Gambon did his utmost to invest with some intelligence. Unfortunately, Poliakoff gave him so little to work on, and such a poor motivation for his long-standing reticence to do anything useful with his life, that in the end you thought: Get on with it, you silly old duffer. He finally did, and not before time.

People kept coming into The House and saying there were strange vibes – all except Joe, who didn’t seem to know a vibe from a vibraphone. He just sat listening to his CDs with his headphones on (including a very silly pair he picked from a host of silly gifts) or writing his notes, and people kept interrupting him. His response was to sound as dull as possible so that hopefully they’d go away and leave him alone. Eventually they pretty much did.

HitTails Stats

I’m not going to go into all the HitTails that have turned up in the last few days, but it’s interesting to note that a search for AIMPromote (which I wrote about the other day) brings up my blog as the first result on Google! Most intriguing.

Someone even searched for ‘blackheads in the neck’, and we got picked up. The knitting poem I quoted back in February came third on the list of Google results, and even my mention of the Fred Astaire movie,Second Chorus, gave us seventh place in line. And a search for ‘most religious country and survey and Japan,’ gave us about tenth place. I’d be interested to know if someone was searching on these words because of an article that appeared in the ODT the other day by the usually reliable Gwyn Dyer. In it he talked about some study that had stated that religious countries (including the US) have higher degrees of immorality, from murder down to child abuse. Secular countries, such as New Zealand, supposedly have less immorality. Now this is curious, because the post I did on this topic goes back to late 2005 and in it I discussed at some length a column written by George Monibot, who’d written in The Guardian about the same issue. It’s curious because normally I would read Dyer and find him most credible. However, this column was not only out of his usual field of world politics, it was blatantly wrong. New Zealand is a very secular society: yet we have child abuse, murder, teen pregnancies, divorce, and pretty much everything else to a fairly high degree. We are certainly not a moral society as a whole.

Another search, this time for Dame Maggie Smith, again brings this blog to the top of the list, this time on the Google blog search, rather than Google as a whole. And another search, for Hornby and Gilead, brings us back to the top of the whole Google results. We’re sixth in the list for a search for Shaun Tilby, the Otago Nuggets basketball player. (Go, Shaun!)
And finally, people are continuing to search for our old friend, Brent Stavig. And because we’ve given him mentions more than once recently, we turn up twice in the Google results, in sixth and seventh place.

Why am I excited by all this? Does it mean anything at all? Well, yes. Presumably it means that if I turn up on the first page of the Google results then I’ve got a good chance of being looked at. Things that turn up on the next page, are vastly less likely to be seen.

More news on Peter Jackson

If he directs the Harry Potter series he’s going to insist on them being filmed in NZ. "Not only is Weta Workshops extremely capable, but we have the scenery. Some of the scenery in previous Potter movies has been all CGI. Here we can make a complete reversal of this process, and use real scenery!"
There’s been some concern about him having to drag a large cast all the way to NZ to film the last two movies in the series. One agent particularly mentioned that Dame Maggie Smith is now quite elderly, and prefers not to travel far to make movies. "If she could shoot the film in her own living room, she’d be happy!"
Jackson is not fazed by this. "We could get Andy Serkis to do the part, and then use CGI to turn him into Maggie Smith! It’s quite simple. She could do the vocal part of the role. We’d probably need to do a moderate amount of filming of her, to get the movements right, but these could probably be done in her living room, in fact!"