Harry Potter and the hourglass of conversations

1. The film adaptation of The half blood prince is awesome.
2. The film adaptation of The half blood prince is not awesome.
3. There is this nifty little hourglass that reminded me of similar conversations.

I saw the film yesterday, after not wanting to see it pretty bad. I did not see the fifth one at all. Sumukh took me to this one and hence this post.

I hate the Harry Potter films, because they are dumb dumb dumb films. There is no drama, no sense of realism, only a cheap circus like quality where the camera throws the next specacle at you. The novels were not like that. They were heartfelt, inventive, realistic, playful, had genuine bits of drama, suspense and were masterpieces of plotting (and for the most part story telling). The films? zilch. I wonder if anyone who has never read the novels (or heard about Harry Potter) would actually understand what was going on in any of those films?

JK Rowling also appears to be massively well read! In contrast, each of the films were led by an almost mediocre director (I know Chris Columbus could be good and inventive etc, but he gave nothing to those first two films. Ditto Cuarón) who puts in almost no effort in translating the film to screen. All the HP films are a very literal line by line rendering of their novels. The lines that do not fit the time/budget are not translated to screen. Simple. There's probably an excel sheet somewhere behind the scenes going: line 1 - OK, line 2 - OK, line 3 - OUT...

I am very fond of quoting Steve Jobs in such cases, because his words really hit the mark: "The problem is that they have no taste... What that means is that they don't think of original ideas and they don't bring much culture to their products... I mean propotionally spaced fonts come from typesetting and beautiful books, if it hadn't been for the mac these would not have been there..."

See? These films are there, gaudy, glossy with pseudo hot Emma Watson in it, but they have no idea of what a film can be, no sense of drama, no direction. No Taste. No culture. They look like they are directed (in part) by the SFX heads (this may justify the use of less than accomplished directors) and championed by uncultivated accountant-managers. The director is conspicuous by his/her absence.

But this time it was a little different. I am going to make an exception for Harry Potter & the half blood prince and say that I actually enjoyed it!

Don't get me wrong, what I said above still holds true. It's a sucky movie, true to its traditions.

What got me hooked this time was all the visual appeal. I mean you've got to see this one to understand what I mean. It looks bloody gorgeous! I was in love with each and every one of those frames of filthy filmaking that were paraded naked in front of me. WOW! Ah! heart breakingly beautiful to look at! What a waste that so much beauty was shed on such a shitty flick.

The Quidditch matches,finally look like sports coverage on TV (tho they are still not half as exciting to watch as the ones that Rowling wrote). The way Hogwarts was rendered from within, the way Ron's Burrow was rendered from within (tho only for a painfully short sequence in the beginning), the way the pensive worked - beautiful! The production design/art direction/sfx departments have far exceeded themselves in this one. I cannot praise these qualities in the film enough.

Still, its a bad film. The novel starts with a BANG, the movies starts with a whimper. The novel ends with a louder BANG! The movie ends up taking a poop. Hermione, Ron were of no importance to the film at all. Mr Malfoy Jr. looked sinister but just opened a cupboard in the end. (oooh! be scared I am going to open the dooor! oooooh! loook there is nothing inside! ooooh! hear the eerie music! ooooh! the cupboard looks really pretty). Helena Bonham Carter is completely wasted in the film (compare this with her awesome evil witch act in Big Fish)...and the list of wasted opportunities goes on...

Please watch this film. Please watch it. It will make you wish that there be better Harry Potter films in this world. A truly good book deserves a truly good film.

Finally, a singular point where I connected with the film. There is this hourglass with Prof. Slughorn, a peculiar one that brought back nice memories of a few nightfuls of conversations. The hourglass would go slow if the conversation was interesting and it would go fast if it was boring. You could have long interesting conversations for a long interesting time. Harry/Tom Riddle "ting" the hour glass and with each ting I tingled with conversations. I feel happy to I have had a Dumbledore full of mentors with awesome conversations to go with around me.

Nice hourglass.

:)

S.