Whew. Yesterday was Harry Potter marathon day. In the morning, my sister and I caught a preview of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, which I will review later this week. Then, we joined a few friends for a DVD marathon of the first three movies in the series.
I was amazed, once again, to see how the children have grown up — not just Harry and Ron and Hermione, but Neville and Seamus and Fred and George and Draco and Crabbe and Goyle, etc. Have we ever seen an entire community of children grow up over the course of a four- (and eventually seven-) part movie series like this? And it was especially startling to come out of the newest film, in which Harry deals with so much high-school stuff, and to jump right back to the beginning of the first movie, in which Harry is so short and his face so round and his voice has not yet broken.
I won’t give any opinions of the newest movie just yet, but I can definitely say that seeing the first three movies back-to-back — the first time I’ve ever done this — has confirmed for me that the second and especially third films were significant improvements over their predecessors. The third film is particularly fantastic; the acting is better, the visual effects are better, the direction and cinematography are so much more cinematic, and John Williams’ music is suddenly versatile (with touches of jazz and medieval folk) and inspired (I love the way it soars whenever Buckbeak takes to the air) in a way that it had never been before.
Granted, the script for the third film leaves out a bit too much of the book — one of my friends at yesterday’s marathon has never read the books, and so the rest of us had to fill in the gaps and explain the significance of the stag, etc. But the movie still retains enough of the book to invite us into the mystery of these characters’ lives in a way that the first two films never quite did.
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