From July 18, 2009

[mapsedge]

Cleaning out the Facebook closet.

Finally saw Half-Blood Prince. Meh.

Let's skip through the prelims: my how the kids have matured. Harry's losing his baby fat, Ron still can find a decent barber, holy shit Hermione got tits!, holy shit Ginny did too!...etc etc etc.

Moving on.

I haven't read the book, so I'm not handicapped by the assertion that the screenwriter cut a bunch of stuff. It's a 600+ page book, so of course they condensed it down. What they did keep was rushed through: the direction was inept, and the final product badly paced. We spent some minutes listening to Ron whine to Harry about Ginny's love life, and almost nothing on Malfoy's stand-off with Dumbledore.

The cinematography was equally bad: the photographer flew back and forth from bleach bypass (such as Ron's entrance to the dining hall prior to the Quidditch match) to warm filters to soft filters to ultra-hi-def handheld action photography...gods, dude, pick a style and go with it, eh?

So, it was okay, but only just.

And answer me this question: no, on second thought, don't. Just let me kvetch for a minute more. What's wrong with walking places? And, if we must have magical transportation, why something new in every friggin' story? First we have floo powder, and that's pretty cool. Next we have an old moldy shoe. What was wrong with floo powder? Then we have hyperdrive, installed, apparently, in Dumbledore's forearms. What was wrong with the shoe? For that matter, what was wrong again with floo powder?

Comments

[theslice.livejournal.com]

To answer your last questions: because the writing was a bit hackery. The books became quite formulaic real fast and that's one of the "gimmicks".

Laughs

[wyckedgood.livejournal.com]

The sad thing about this series is that it could have been epic. It had such potential...then around book 4 I think, J.K. fired her editor and decided to go it alone. Yikes.

The series is entirely one dimensional and everything is strictly black and white. Yawwn.

The world itself fun and fanciful and awesome. The actualy storytelling. B+

Re: Floo Powder

[the-themiscyran.livejournal.com]

In answer to your question - nothing. I'm betting that Rowling just forgot about it and then came up with other "cool" modes of transport as she went along. She did that a lot in the later books, including creating some plot holes so huge that the films completely ignore them. They're splitting the seventh book into two films - which might help with the pacing, even if right now it only sounds like a way to wring yet more money out of the franchise.