I'm about half way done with a death-penalty piece, but it's not ready yet. I can probably get it posted this weekend though. We'll see. You guys gave me a bit to think about in the comments of the last part.
In the meantime...
We just got back from seeing Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, part 2 and I've just got to say that it was absolutely amazing. I was completely blown away. I can easily pay it the best compliment I can to a movie of this type:
It lived up to every bit of the hype, and exceeded my rather high expectations.
To compare it to some of its contemporaries, it was (much) better than Revenge of the Sith, better than The Dark Knight and on par with Return of the King. Simply incredible. Perfect, actually.
Might as well disagree since I'm the only one. The telltale thing for me was all the slow scenes with nothing happening but slow talking with long pauses in silence. This is just a trick to make small moments look big. And JK Rowling is not a master storyteller - the events in this climax to 7 books are less inventive than a typical episode of True Blood. And the effects didn't even try to be better than those of two dozen movies this year.
ReplyDeleteOf course liking movies, and even their quality, is subjective. But I'll stake objective truth to the claim that there was less effort put into this movie than was put into Dark Knight or Return of the King. (Have you seen Return of the King lately? It's four orders of magnitude grander than Deathly Hallows, and it's years older.)
LOL. Well.... I LIKE TRUE BLOOD! And YOU SUCK!
ReplyDeleteYeah, I'm kidding. I realize it's a guilty pleasure and nothing more. LOL. (But come on: I got to see Anna Paquin naked for like five seconds! That's GOT to be worth the price of admission! No?)
I'll have to get into why I'm a fan of the Harry Potter series in a later post - because it's actually POLITICAL! Seriously!
But the seventh movie, both parts, stands out in mind mind for being true to the books in ways that movies 3-6 could NOT be, due to so much of the story having to be removed to fit into the "under-two-to-three-hour" format that Hollywood insists on.
Hey: I can understad that people don't like it. It gets a lot of hype and it's NOT GREAT storytelling. But it IS GOOD storytelling.
As for Return the King? Hey... I STILL have to fight back tears when Aragorn says "My friends! You bow to no one!" (And I'll still cry lke a baby, if no one's around!) But this movie still managed to move me just about THAT MUCH.
Hey: I'm a fan.
And if you're not? Then it won't. And that's OK.
But for me? It was the first of the HP movies since 'Chamber of Secrets' (#2) that really captured the spirit of the books. And considering what the books did for children's literacy, in general?
I'll say the hype was well founded.
(Although no, she's not Tolkien, Stoker, or Poe. Maybe Lewis. HE was overated too. LOL)