Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
Jun. 5th, 2004 10:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ravenI left home at about five, terribly late, and in a state of extreme paranoia, I rang ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
hathy_col while I was going down the pier. She seemed surprised but not inclined to kill me, which I decided was a good thing, and I ambled on again. While I was dodging the tourists, I went past a load of utter tossers hanging off the rail. Think the worst type, with the rings and trackies. Yeah.
Right. So, one of them calls across to me, "Hey, would you get off with my mate 'ere?"
I did the whole hair-flip-head-toss thing and said, "Sorry, I'm a lesbian."
Clearly they weren't expecting that reaction, but Tosser #1 recovered in time to shout back, "What if I put my dick between my legs..."
"Small, is it?" I shouted, getting pissed off, and ran off down the stairs to meet Colleen (hathy_col) and Simon (hammer_strike).
"We've got a gallery of tossers," she said, and I was just about to remark on the coincidence when she pointed back and I saw they were the same ones.
"What did they say?" I asked. She pointed at her t-shirt, and it was the "I Like Women" one, which made me laugh. Perfect. And they could still see us, jumping up and down at the sheer joy of seeing each other.
"How is five people a gallery?" Simon asked as we went into the cinema, and thus the fun began. We bought tickets without any trouble (I'd even had the foresight to get pick 'n' mix from Woolies on the way up), but the queue to get in was enormous. They had a full house, and kept rearranging people to make them fit. And once we were finally in the cinema, the adverts seemed to go on forever. The amount of kids in the cinema made me feel less reticent about expressing my emotions, so we were constantly playing the role of the peanut gallery while Simon looked on in amusement and bemusement.
Then the film started. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, my favourite of the books, with my favourite character introduced in it, and I couldn't have forgiven a fim as bad as the other two were. So with fairly mixed expectations, we stopped it with the MST3K-ing and settled down to watch it.
Squee. Just kill me now from the sheer beauty of it. From the very beginning, the darker tone of it. The Knight Bus was fabulous, what with the Jamaican shrunken head and the squeezing between double decker buses, and so was the brief appearance of the Dursleys (they're watching Come Dancing!). The fact Daniel Radcliffe can act better now is good, as is the fact his voice has broken! He sounds like Patrick. Seriously. Shut your eyes and he is Patrick.
When they got into the train carriage and Lupin was there, Colleen and I simulataneously started squeeing. Eee! And as she said later, we could forgive him the child molestor moustache after he'd been on screen five minutes. I will never say a word against David Thewlis again. He was Remus - Remus as the book Remus Lupin but with just that little bit extra, swing music and chocolate in his pockets and just such an air of eccentric teacher that I fell in love with the character over again.
And how appropriate that Alan Rickman's first appearance is in drag! He's too cool to be Snape, but oh, Snape. How do we love thee, Snape, in all thy deranged and swishy behaviour. He sweeps off like a bat into the distance at one point and I found myself thinking, I really shouldn't have enjoyed that so much. You don't need Dementors (although they were good, too, and I liked their sudden ability to fly), you just need Alan Rickman.
But all my favourite scenes were Hary with Remus. I loved the sense of his being Harry's mentor, as that was something that always bugged me about the books - Harry loves Sirius, spends so much time thinking about him, but he doesn't know him! He saw him for one night in PoA, and maybe twice in GoF with a few letters in between. It's Remus - quiet, unassuming Remus Lupin - who is Harry's teacher, friend and mentor for an entire year, and yet Harry more or less mentally sidelines him.
But that wasn't the case in the film. I just loved the scene on the bridge, which all this beautiful, spreading wild landscape beneath them (it reminded me incongruously of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) and Lupin on one side and Harry on the other, and they're just talking, and just sigh. Lovely. And something Lupin says, that isn't in the book, about Lily and how "she could see beauty in people, even when they couldn't see it in themselves." He's so obviously talking about himself, and the darkness in that line - the self-loathing juxtaposed with the beauty all around them - made me fall in love with the moment. That's the only film appearance of Remus's utter self-loathing, one of the darkest themes of the book and shown in the way he rips himself to pieces every full moon, and it works so well and just guh.
And then the other random moment, also with Harry and Remus, which is a real change from the book - we're supposed to see Lupin with the Wolfsbane - and they're out in the forest by the lake in springtime, surrounded by gleaming green tree ferns, and I just can't articulate what I love about it. Again, the mentor aspect, because Lupin is leading and Harry is following, but just something about it. Huh.
Other things I liked mostly involved the darker tone, because it just really worked. The dark aspect made the rest of the film more real, which I can't really explain - like, because they're not afraid to show this lovely magical world has its dark side, they're also not afraid to show it has its pleasantly mundane side. I liked the reminder that Harry and co. are kids, when they're messing about in the dormitory eating sweets, and you can really say to yourself, hey, I do that with my friends. Ron as comic relief might have grated, but you can see how he's Harry's best friend from the way Harry treats him. His continued response to spiders, his irritated, "What the hell was that all about?" when Dumbledore leaves the dormitory, but best of all, his dream. "The spiders are making me tap dance."
And Harry's affectionate response: "You tell those spiders, Ron." It's very funny and sweet. Other funny-and-sweet bits are the twins (Colleen loved the twins!) and Hermione, who is a wonderful character in this film compared to the other two.
Of course, there were bits I didn't like. The Shrieking Shack scene is much too quick, and there isn't enough made of it. The fact we never get the full details of the Fidelus Charm and the Secret Keeper aspect takes away from its impact, and so does the fact we never find out that oh, Lupin is Moony (and that's Moony without the E; that really annoyed me) and Sirius is Padfoot, and yes, that's why Harry's Patronus is a stag. And they never explain that the three friends became Animagi for Remus's sake, which seems to me to be a major omission, especially as Harry later talks blithely about "my father's best friends" when he hasn't actually heard anything about the level of friendship they achieved.
But the scene did have its redeeming features. The hug, for one thing. Sirius says, "You'd know all about the monster inside," and then they don't hug, they cling to each other in desperation. It's such a charged moment, and it had me and Colleen more or less clinging to each other as well. The slash is incredible.
Snape's arrival seems almost superfluous, because without the explanation and backstory, he isn't really needed, and he only gets a couple of lines before passing out. And you don't get him talking to Fudge later and acting totally deranged, so it's not really needed. And my inner kinkmonster was really a little peeved that he didn't tie Lupin up.
But Snape did have a redeeming feature in The Line - "Bickering like an old married couple!" Because that's what they are, that's what they so are, and the other change to the book was a welcome one. Sirius clinging to Remus as he looks at the moon in absolute horror, and what he says there: "This heart is where you live, this flesh is your only home, here..."
Tell me they're not in love. I mean it.
The werewolf. Oh, lord, the werewolf. Please, no. He's supposed to be a real wolf, dammit! Not some strange ape-like CGI monster coming face to face with a Hipppogriff. Although, I must say, Harry's line as the werewolf gets ravaged is classic - "Professor Lupin's really having a tough night."
The final bit, where Harry says goodbye to Lupin, is rather sweet, not least because of the screamingly unsubtextual subtext. He doesn't say "werewolf", he says, "people like me." I just love it, the whole wry, self-deprecating aspect, and merest hint of bitterness - "I'm used to it." I said something later to Colleen about the blatant references to being gay rather than being a lycanthrope, and she jumped up and down and looked incredibly happy. I think that hadn't occurred to her.
When the film ended, the three basic responses from Colleen and me were:
"Ohmygod they can make a good Harry Potter film!"
"Squee!"
"Theirloveissocanon!"
Colleen then said, talking about the people sitting in front of us, "They want to kill us." And they must have done. We were making more noise than the kids.
We walked out of the cinema in a state of extreme overexcitement. Simon looked on in bemusement, while Colleen went off to the loo. Five seconds later, she came back and said, "Come with me, I need someone to squee with!"
So I went, and pretty soon we were wondering off down the pier, talking happily (mostly about the slash and the squee) and when we got down to Lord Street, we went to McDonald's for some strange reason, braving the scallies and terrible food. It was an interesting experience. First of all, while we were walking down the street, we did the canon-round thing with the song. You know, the song.
Simon did the bass part, Colleen did the soprano part, and I did the middle one. We got to "He's Arnold, Arnold, Arnold Rimm-" before collapsing into giggles all over the pavement. Colleen had a brainwave - for our Not-Christmas, we ought to go not-carolling and sing not-carols. I promised I'd mention it toamchau.
Once we got there, I threatened to buy a Happy Meal but didn't. So we sat there in the window, eating slowly and sharing a McFlurry. While we were doing it, Simon explained why he has a medieval-type-thing going on. "You're a stereotypical wannabe archaeologist," I said.
"You've got two types of archaeologists. Me, and the gay-Daniel kind."
"I like the gay-Daniel kind," I said. "He's a failed academic, what more do you want?"
"The guy's not a real archaeologist," Simon said. "He gets thrown out of academia, and yet he doesn't drink!"
"That's only because they get him to the other side of the galaxy in time," I said.
"To save him from alcoholism?" Colleen asked, and continued, "And push him into heterosexuality."
Giggling was the order of the day, particularly as that was when some scallies chose to throw themselves against the window. I gave them the finger.
At length, we departed. Colleen and Simon had just missed the bus, and resigned themselves to waiting for an hour while I darted off to get the train. I got home to an empty house and couldn't help but feel a little let down. I wanted to tell someone about it.
Well, my journal will have to do. And I need a Remus icon.
hathy_col while I was going down the pier. She seemed surprised but not inclined to kill me, which I decided was a good thing, and I ambled on again. While I was dodging the tourists, I went past a load of utter tossers hanging off the rail. Think the worst type, with the rings and trackies. Yeah. Right. So, one of them calls across to me, "Hey, would you get off with my mate 'ere?"
I did the whole hair-flip-head-toss thing and said, "Sorry, I'm a lesbian."
Clearly they weren't expecting that reaction, but Tosser #1 recovered in time to shout back, "What if I put my dick between my legs..."
"Small, is it?" I shouted, getting pissed off, and ran off down the stairs to meet Colleen (
hathy_col) and Simon (hammer_strike)."We've got a gallery of tossers," she said, and I was just about to remark on the coincidence when she pointed back and I saw they were the same ones.
"What did they say?" I asked. She pointed at her t-shirt, and it was the "I Like Women" one, which made me laugh. Perfect. And they could still see us, jumping up and down at the sheer joy of seeing each other.
"How is five people a gallery?" Simon asked as we went into the cinema, and thus the fun began. We bought tickets without any trouble (I'd even had the foresight to get pick 'n' mix from Woolies on the way up), but the queue to get in was enormous. They had a full house, and kept rearranging people to make them fit. And once we were finally in the cinema, the adverts seemed to go on forever. The amount of kids in the cinema made me feel less reticent about expressing my emotions, so we were constantly playing the role of the peanut gallery while Simon looked on in amusement and bemusement.
Then the film started. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, my favourite of the books, with my favourite character introduced in it, and I couldn't have forgiven a fim as bad as the other two were. So with fairly mixed expectations, we stopped it with the MST3K-ing and settled down to watch it.
Squee. Just kill me now from the sheer beauty of it. From the very beginning, the darker tone of it. The Knight Bus was fabulous, what with the Jamaican shrunken head and the squeezing between double decker buses, and so was the brief appearance of the Dursleys (they're watching Come Dancing!). The fact Daniel Radcliffe can act better now is good, as is the fact his voice has broken! He sounds like Patrick. Seriously. Shut your eyes and he is Patrick.
When they got into the train carriage and Lupin was there, Colleen and I simulataneously started squeeing. Eee! And as she said later, we could forgive him the child molestor moustache after he'd been on screen five minutes. I will never say a word against David Thewlis again. He was Remus - Remus as the book Remus Lupin but with just that little bit extra, swing music and chocolate in his pockets and just such an air of eccentric teacher that I fell in love with the character over again.
And how appropriate that Alan Rickman's first appearance is in drag! He's too cool to be Snape, but oh, Snape. How do we love thee, Snape, in all thy deranged and swishy behaviour. He sweeps off like a bat into the distance at one point and I found myself thinking, I really shouldn't have enjoyed that so much. You don't need Dementors (although they were good, too, and I liked their sudden ability to fly), you just need Alan Rickman.
But all my favourite scenes were Hary with Remus. I loved the sense of his being Harry's mentor, as that was something that always bugged me about the books - Harry loves Sirius, spends so much time thinking about him, but he doesn't know him! He saw him for one night in PoA, and maybe twice in GoF with a few letters in between. It's Remus - quiet, unassuming Remus Lupin - who is Harry's teacher, friend and mentor for an entire year, and yet Harry more or less mentally sidelines him.
But that wasn't the case in the film. I just loved the scene on the bridge, which all this beautiful, spreading wild landscape beneath them (it reminded me incongruously of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) and Lupin on one side and Harry on the other, and they're just talking, and just sigh. Lovely. And something Lupin says, that isn't in the book, about Lily and how "she could see beauty in people, even when they couldn't see it in themselves." He's so obviously talking about himself, and the darkness in that line - the self-loathing juxtaposed with the beauty all around them - made me fall in love with the moment. That's the only film appearance of Remus's utter self-loathing, one of the darkest themes of the book and shown in the way he rips himself to pieces every full moon, and it works so well and just guh.
And then the other random moment, also with Harry and Remus, which is a real change from the book - we're supposed to see Lupin with the Wolfsbane - and they're out in the forest by the lake in springtime, surrounded by gleaming green tree ferns, and I just can't articulate what I love about it. Again, the mentor aspect, because Lupin is leading and Harry is following, but just something about it. Huh.
Other things I liked mostly involved the darker tone, because it just really worked. The dark aspect made the rest of the film more real, which I can't really explain - like, because they're not afraid to show this lovely magical world has its dark side, they're also not afraid to show it has its pleasantly mundane side. I liked the reminder that Harry and co. are kids, when they're messing about in the dormitory eating sweets, and you can really say to yourself, hey, I do that with my friends. Ron as comic relief might have grated, but you can see how he's Harry's best friend from the way Harry treats him. His continued response to spiders, his irritated, "What the hell was that all about?" when Dumbledore leaves the dormitory, but best of all, his dream. "The spiders are making me tap dance."
And Harry's affectionate response: "You tell those spiders, Ron." It's very funny and sweet. Other funny-and-sweet bits are the twins (Colleen loved the twins!) and Hermione, who is a wonderful character in this film compared to the other two.
Of course, there were bits I didn't like. The Shrieking Shack scene is much too quick, and there isn't enough made of it. The fact we never get the full details of the Fidelus Charm and the Secret Keeper aspect takes away from its impact, and so does the fact we never find out that oh, Lupin is Moony (and that's Moony without the E; that really annoyed me) and Sirius is Padfoot, and yes, that's why Harry's Patronus is a stag. And they never explain that the three friends became Animagi for Remus's sake, which seems to me to be a major omission, especially as Harry later talks blithely about "my father's best friends" when he hasn't actually heard anything about the level of friendship they achieved.
But the scene did have its redeeming features. The hug, for one thing. Sirius says, "You'd know all about the monster inside," and then they don't hug, they cling to each other in desperation. It's such a charged moment, and it had me and Colleen more or less clinging to each other as well. The slash is incredible.
Snape's arrival seems almost superfluous, because without the explanation and backstory, he isn't really needed, and he only gets a couple of lines before passing out. And you don't get him talking to Fudge later and acting totally deranged, so it's not really needed. And my inner kinkmonster was really a little peeved that he didn't tie Lupin up.
But Snape did have a redeeming feature in The Line - "Bickering like an old married couple!" Because that's what they are, that's what they so are, and the other change to the book was a welcome one. Sirius clinging to Remus as he looks at the moon in absolute horror, and what he says there: "This heart is where you live, this flesh is your only home, here..."
Tell me they're not in love. I mean it.
The werewolf. Oh, lord, the werewolf. Please, no. He's supposed to be a real wolf, dammit! Not some strange ape-like CGI monster coming face to face with a Hipppogriff. Although, I must say, Harry's line as the werewolf gets ravaged is classic - "Professor Lupin's really having a tough night."
The final bit, where Harry says goodbye to Lupin, is rather sweet, not least because of the screamingly unsubtextual subtext. He doesn't say "werewolf", he says, "people like me." I just love it, the whole wry, self-deprecating aspect, and merest hint of bitterness - "I'm used to it." I said something later to Colleen about the blatant references to being gay rather than being a lycanthrope, and she jumped up and down and looked incredibly happy. I think that hadn't occurred to her.
When the film ended, the three basic responses from Colleen and me were:
"Ohmygod they can make a good Harry Potter film!"
"Squee!"
"Theirloveissocanon!"
Colleen then said, talking about the people sitting in front of us, "They want to kill us." And they must have done. We were making more noise than the kids.
We walked out of the cinema in a state of extreme overexcitement. Simon looked on in bemusement, while Colleen went off to the loo. Five seconds later, she came back and said, "Come with me, I need someone to squee with!"
So I went, and pretty soon we were wondering off down the pier, talking happily (mostly about the slash and the squee) and when we got down to Lord Street, we went to McDonald's for some strange reason, braving the scallies and terrible food. It was an interesting experience. First of all, while we were walking down the street, we did the canon-round thing with the song. You know, the song.
Simon did the bass part, Colleen did the soprano part, and I did the middle one. We got to "He's Arnold, Arnold, Arnold Rimm-" before collapsing into giggles all over the pavement. Colleen had a brainwave - for our Not-Christmas, we ought to go not-carolling and sing not-carols. I promised I'd mention it to
amchau.Once we got there, I threatened to buy a Happy Meal but didn't. So we sat there in the window, eating slowly and sharing a McFlurry. While we were doing it, Simon explained why he has a medieval-type-thing going on. "You're a stereotypical wannabe archaeologist," I said.
"You've got two types of archaeologists. Me, and the gay-Daniel kind."
"I like the gay-Daniel kind," I said. "He's a failed academic, what more do you want?"
"The guy's not a real archaeologist," Simon said. "He gets thrown out of academia, and yet he doesn't drink!"
"That's only because they get him to the other side of the galaxy in time," I said.
"To save him from alcoholism?" Colleen asked, and continued, "And push him into heterosexuality."
Giggling was the order of the day, particularly as that was when some scallies chose to throw themselves against the window. I gave them the finger.
At length, we departed. Colleen and Simon had just missed the bus, and resigned themselves to waiting for an hour while I darted off to get the train. I got home to an empty house and couldn't help but feel a little let down. I wanted to tell someone about it.
Well, my journal will have to do. And I need a Remus icon.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
on 2004-06-05 04:12 pm (UTC)Loved your PoA review -- gah, I love this movie. I'm seeing it again tomorrow. Possibly tonight if i can find any theaters with tickets, because I am obsessed and insane. :)
no subject
on 2004-06-05 04:45 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2004-06-05 04:26 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2004-06-05 04:47 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2004-06-05 04:39 pm (UTC)& where has Simon been? He hasn't been online & this makes me sad.
no subject
on 2004-06-05 04:42 pm (UTC)Sirius clinging to Remus as he looks at the moon in absolute horror, and what he says there: "This heart is where you live, this flesh is your only home, here..."
I don't know where he's been, but he was there tonight! Twas fun.
no subject
on 2004-06-05 04:43 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2004-06-05 04:49 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2004-06-05 07:54 pm (UTC)I love you.
I don't know what you're talking about with this Harry Potter thing, but I love you.
no subject
on 2004-06-06 03:37 am (UTC)no subject
on 2004-06-06 01:09 am (UTC)HAH, me too. Not only that, but I was really looking forward to Snape saying "I'll drag the werewolf," so I could vent at him for being a right bastard, and then giggling to myself at his ironic use of the word "drag."
no subject
on 2004-06-06 03:39 am (UTC)Although, I think it may have restarted my Sirius/Remus kick, so maybe perversion is forthcoming...
no subject
on 2004-06-06 05:43 am (UTC)And I need a Lupin icon too..
Can you clear something up for me? I get slash - but what does canon mean? x
no subject
on 2004-06-06 06:21 am (UTC)Canon is everything that happened in the books, basically. Like, if someone writes a fic where Aragog and the giant squid are having a torturous affair at the bottom of the lake, obviously you can ignore that, but if you're writing a fic, you can't ignore the fact that, say, Harry has green eyes or Remus Lupin is a werewolf without going for the alternate-reality route, because those things are canon.
Of course, now there's lots of movieverse canon like the swing music and the totally slashy theirloveissocanon bit outside the Shrieking Shack, which will make life complicated, but still. Such a good film.
no subject
on 2004-06-06 11:13 am (UTC)Yeah, I've heard the theirloveissocanon! phrase quite a lot, and was wondering about it. x
no subject
on 2004-06-06 05:45 am (UTC)no subject
on 2004-06-06 06:22 am (UTC)no subject
on 2004-06-06 11:15 am (UTC)I guess I'm getting old. I didn't think the movie was as good as it could have been and I'd have to label the second one as my favorite. When Remus and Sirius did their overenthusiastic hug thing in the shack, I thought about you because my first thought was, "The slashers will LOVE this one!" If you'll pardon the pun, there was more there just shrieking to be written about...but I'm no good at that sort of thing. I'll leave it to you young'uns.
no subject
on 2004-06-06 04:11 pm (UTC)I didn't like the first and second ones. Maybe it's because the books weren't so good - I mean, I did really like them, but it's PoA that made me really love the books, mainly because of Sirius and Remus. And their hug, yes. Hee. It's so nice to think I'm influencing the thoughts of someone six thousand miles away.
I did want to ask you something. I read in your journal that you hadn't read the book, so I wondered if without the benefit of prior knowledge, were you able to figure out that Remus is Moony, Sirius is Padfoot, James is Prongs, etc, and they wrote the Marauder's Map? I really didn't like the way they rushed the scene, and left lots of important stuff out.
And you're never too old for slash. :)
no subject
on 2004-06-06 04:35 pm (UTC)I might have to break the rules and try reading the series again. Like you, I found the first two books intolerable. It's just possible that the third might be better.
no subject
on 2004-06-06 04:37 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2004-06-06 03:57 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2004-06-06 04:04 pm (UTC)