Saturday Night
Okay, so I’m posting an unprecedented two days in a row. On one hand, I know I need to be more spontaneous with my posts, because that’s the only way I’ll ever post anything. On the other, spontaneity interferes with any kind of organization to the posts. I don’t really want this blog to be about me. I do want it to be about my thoughts and opinions. In any case, this current post is about me, regardless.
I would say that I’m a socially inept loser, but that would sound like every other blog on the net, so I’ll try to avoid whining ad nauseum about my a various problems and failings, both real and imagined. That said, I’m in the apartment alone again tonight, and once again I’m struggling to find anything on the tube (see my previous post). Tonight I was lucky enough to stumble across “A Time to Kill”, which I’ve never seen all of. It took about 5 minutes for me notice that this movie has an unbelievable number of well-known actors. Matthew McConaughey, Sandra Bullock, Kevin Spacey, Samuel L. Jackson, Donald Sutherland, Keifer Sutherland, Ashley Judd, and Chris Cooper (who played the father in “October Sky”, among other things). I’m also pretty sure I spotted the annoying police officer from “Flightplan” and the woman who tried to get off the bus and got herself blown-up in “Speed”. (Incidently, John Grisham is a large part of why I decided not to try to become a lawyer. The other factors were the massive surplus of lawyers in this country and the fact that all lawyers are scumbags. They may not mean to be, or even be conscious of it. It’s just something about the whole process of law school and the Bar exam and the rest of it that reduces them to worms. But I digress…) I haven’t read A Time to Kill but I know Hollywood has a nasty habit of twisting Grisham’s books – Runaway Jury for example – so I’ll take the movie with a grain of salt.
Here I am, stuck eating hot dogs without buns and ramen. This is kinda sad. I need to study for the Chinese and CS tests I have Monday, but I guess I should be thankful I don’t have a Chinese CS test.
I guess I’m gonna sign off now. Nothing great to say.
Oh, just noticed that major jerk who plays Eddie Murphy’s annoying medical colleague from “Doctor Dolittle”. And wow, just realized that Ashley Judd uses this awesome, cold monotone for almost everything she says. It may not be good for acting purposes, but it’s very distinctive.
John Carpenter’s “Halloween”: As good as candy-corn at Christmas
Tonight was the first time I saw John Carpenter’s “Halloween”, yet another example of my haphazard efforts to watch horror movies just to prove to myself that I can. There was nothing else on the Tube, so I started watching the movie with my laptop on hand to provide a distraction if need be (I was also finishing Macroeconomics hw).
I’ll say right away that if I had anyone with me, that movie wouldn’t have been scary in the least, but I was in the apartment by myself and given my overactive imagination, I was a little creeped out. Emphasis on little
“Halloween” may have been terrifying back in the late 70’s, but given the special effects available today, there wasn’t much to it. It’s hard to be afraid when a first person camera view requires the cameraman to do the stabbing. The most effective element was undoubtedly the music, but as it was essentially the same theme throughout the film, it began to lose its ability to create suspense and uneasiness after awhile.
It was interesting to see a young Jamie Lee Curtis, who I think did a great job with the character she was given. (Incidentally, I barely recognised her at first, not because of how she looked compared to what I’m used to, but because the first 30 minutes of the movie used all these incredibly distant shots that made it difficult to see anything.) It’s easy to hold a poorly written character against the actor, rather than against the writer or director. Jamie’s Laurie Strode, while supposedly intelligent, was essentially an idiot. How many times can you turn your back on a monster/villain you think is dead, only to find out it’s not. OK, so that only happened twice, but that’s 2 times too many. Do you really need someone to tell you not to take your eyes of your attacker, especially when you know he’s a murderer?
I did like the movie’s fairly obvious moral stance, which Carpenter denies exists, according to Wikipedia.
In the end, the movie scared me enough that I waited until my roommate got in before going to bed, but I’ve been known to do that without having watched a horror picture.
Worth watching once, but hardly a favorite. I won’t be making a point to watch any of the sequels either, but if the opportunity arises out of convenience, I may sit one out. I’ll go middle of the road and give “Halloween” 5 out of 9 tails.
The Requisite Harry Potter Post (Part 2)
I’m all but too late in posting this, because Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows comes at midnight tonight. I wanted to have a trio or perhaps a full quartet of posts on this topic, but events have conspired against me and I just haven’t had any time until now.
The subject of Part 1 was essentially a timeline of my reading of the books, which I admit is hardly an engaging read. Part 2, however, is about the Harry Potter movies and I hope that I can make it a little more interesting.
I actually didn’t see “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” when it was released in theaters, and was forced to rent it at a later date. I’ve seen all of the subsequent films on the big screen, however, and have been pleased, if not bowled over, each time. At the time of my last post I actually had not yet been able to see the fifth film, but that problem has now been happily remedied.
Most people who have read the books will tell you that they also love the movies. The thing they usually dislike is that the movies stray so far from the book. I can understand this, but I also have to tell these people: get over it. Film is a different artistic medium than the novel. Each has its strengths over the other. Books are excellent for explaining systems, such as the rules of how magic works in a particular fictional world. Explaining this is a film would be both tedious and confusing. Books are also better, most of the time, if the author wants to tell what a character is thinking. Movies, on the other hand, are excellent for depicting action sequences. They can show a complicated maneuver that would be boring when read. For example, a gymnastics routine or a sword fight is much more fun to watch than to read.
In short, movies are objective for the audience, while books are subjective. These simple facts effectively control the media and dictate what can be accomplished through them from an artistic viewpoint. There are, of course, other parameters. Readers are willing to invest hours upon hours in a book, something an audience will never do in the case of a movie. Movies also require massive amounts of money and coordination among individuals working on the whole. Money is usually not paid for a book until it is finished. If it doesn’t work out up to that point, only the author is affected. That’s really all there is to it.
What makes the Harry Potter films interesting, artistically, is that we actually see a group of child stars growing up from one film to the next. That has never happened before, at least as far as I know, on this scale. What’s sad about that is that the previous films look progressively more outdated. Not only are the kids older, but the special effects are better too. Why should we watch “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone,” with its scratchy CGI and poorly acting 11 year olds when “Order of the Phoenix” is new and improved with smooth graphics and fewer cracking voices? Another drawback with the films is that the various directors seem almost to operate on the assumption that their audience has already read the books, which is usually, but not universally, the case. This leads them to poorly explain things. Readers of the books may not even notice these skips because they were expecting the unexplained thing to happen anyway.
Spoiler Warning: Don’t say I didn’t tell you because you just read it.
That said, I’ll admit that “Order” didn’t quite agree with me. I thought too many liberties were taken with the story and too many events left unexplained. It was clunky for Cho to have betrayed to D.A under the influence of veritaserum and then Harry not forgive her for it. Also, Ron and Hermione didn’t become prefects, Ron wasn’t attacked by a brain, a Death Eater didn’t have his head turned to a baby’s, we never saw St. Mungo’s Hospital for Magical Maladies and Injuries, and Helena Bonham Carter, who could have been an excellent, sinister Bellatrix Lestrange, just acted like a female Jack Sparrow, with her hair in a big wad on top of her head. Additionally, we saw extensive use of montages, which, while sometimes useful, is something I hate.
On the other hand (which is a phrase I use far too much) I particularly enjoyed the Patronus scene in the Room of Requirement and Evanna Lynch was a great choice for Luna Lovegood. She was amusing and sympathetic at the same time, which is difficult to pull off.
All that said about the most recent film, my favorite so far would probably be “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban” which also diverted from the book, but in all the right ways. This would probably be followed a near three-way tie between “Chamber”, “Goblet”, and “Order”, with the first film being a definite last. I also don’t care for Gary Oldman as Sirius. When I read the books now, I still don’t see him as Sirius. He just doesn’t fit the illustrations or the descriptions. He’s too old. However, Maggie Smith is good as McGonagall and Fiennes is decent as Voldemort. Another plus for the first three films was John Williams’ music. It’s unfortunate that he couldn’t or wouldn’t continue for the entire series.
Alright, that is pretty much it for Part 2. Part 3 will hopefully appear later today and will cover my thoughts and predictions for Book 7, which will be here in a matter of hours.
To Be Continued…
