Here's a little ditty I found that was pretty sweet. B)
(Thanx to Mugglenet :flowersmile: )
There's something about the Harry Potter books, and there's something about the Harry Potter movies, and most fans are exhaustively willing to explain the gulf separating the two.
The hard part is getting them to stop.
The gap is wider than the leap between the ordinary non-magic Muggle world most of us inhabit, and the magical world populated by wizards, witches, unicorns, giants and unspeakable personages like Volde ... er, the dark wizard commonly referenced as You Know Who.
It's not just the difference between the "Harry Potter" movies - the third is to be released later this year - and author J.K. Rowling's famously popular series about the boy who belatedly discovers that he's a famous neophyte wizard.
There's the difference between Mary Grandpre's likable, scruffy Harry Potter illustrations in the Scholastic edition of the books, and the chunky mouth-breather interpreted by artist Cliff Wright for the British Bloomsbury books.
There's the vast gulf between the charming Daniel Radcliffe as the Harry Potter in the Warner Bros. movies, and the ungainly Harry Potter in some illustrations whose sneakers and outsized glasses have almost nothing in common with the wry boy described in Rowling's books.
We won't even go into all the Harry Potter tchotchkes - the board games, the figurines, the Christmas ornaments, the backpacks, sweat shirts, Wizard Chess sets and similar blatantly Muggle-made imposters aimed at the extremely gullible.
Fifth book awaited
But nearly everyone familiar with all four books - and eagerly awaiting the release of the fifth installment on June 21 - and both (so far) of the projected seven movies has a definite opinion on whether the silver screen or printed page is preferable.
"The biggest difference is that the movies have a lot of the books' great parts cut out of them," said Nick Brown, a third-grade student at Park Hill Elementary School in Denver.
"For example, in the first movie, some funny stuff - some really funny, good stuff in the book - was left out. But," he conceded, "the books are really long, so I can see why they'd have to take something out for the movies. If they'd left everything in, it would have made the movie a lot longer."
Among other things, even such a stellar actor as the late Richard Harris cannot fully convey the nearly visceral bitterness of biting into a particularly nasty Bertie Botts Every Flavour Bean. From "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone," here is Albus Dumbledore tentatively sampling an Every Flavour Bean:
"'I was unfortunate enough in my youth to come across a vomit-flavored one, and since then I'm afraid I've rather lost my liking for them - but I'll be safe with a nice toffee, don't you think?' He smiled and popped the golden-brown bean into his mouth. Then he choked and said, 'Alas! Ear wax."'
Exactly how Harris delivers the line in the movie, but somehow, reading about an ear wax-flavored jelly bean provokes a visceral wince that's far more immediate than merely witnessing someone else's grimace.
Seeing someone's teeth chatter upon biting into Ice Mice - wizard candy guaranteed to make your teeth squeak with cold - is not at all the same thing as imagining the experience.
Even Orson Welles or Alfred Hitchcock would have trouble conveying the experience of consuming a Peppermint Toad, a sweet that disconcertingly hops around in the stomach well after it's been consumed.
On the page, a reader's imagination invests personal experience into author J.K. Rowling's descriptions. Biting into Ice Mice, for example, might call to mind the time someone unwittingly chomped down on a bit of cold aluminum foil. And though nobody, including Rowling, has ever sampled the tantalizing Butter Beer described as a favorite Hogwarts beverage, the name conjures up something sweet, creamy, comforting and indescribably delectable. Who hasn't had the sort of day that could be turned around by a nice mug of Butter Beer?
Just special effects
On the screen, these things, and the animate souvenir cards featuring famous wizards and witches, become so many special effects. In the best scenarios, the special effects happen to twine with a reader's (or viewer's) imagination.
Several young readers have trouble envisioning young Harry and his classmates aiming themselves and their luggage into the pillar that takes them to Platform 9, the invisible threshold between the Muggle world and the place where the Hogwarts Express train waits to take them to school. Seeing director Chris Columbus' interpretation of how that threshold is crossed was easier than imagining the transformation, said Kennedy High School sophomore Mike Boyles.
"In the books, it got sort of confusing," he admitted.
On balance, Boyles said, he favors the book over the movies. He likes picturing the characters and the situations, particularly the classroom scenes where stunningly magical creatures are presented as the wizardry equivalent of a dull algebra class.
In both book and movie versions of "Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets," Harry and his classmates warily confront a lesson in repotting Mandrake seedlings. Mandrakes are used as a restorative for people unfortunate enough to have been transfigured or cursed to an undesirable state of being. In the book, Rowling describes one as resembling "a small, muddy and extremely ugly baby" with "pale green, mottled skin" and "leaves growing right out of his head." Its scream is "fatal to anyone who hears it," recites Hermione Granger.
But in the movie, Mandrakes are presented as a cross between the evil plant in "Little Shop of Horrors" and a Teletubby gone bad, not nearly as menacing as they are in the book. Their cries are annoying but not fatal, and the wizards' efforts at repotting resemble new parents struggling to master a diaper change.
From the novel's description of the young wizards attempting to repot Mandrakes:
"The Mandrakes didn't like coming out of the earth, but didn't seem to want to go back into it either. They squirmed, kicked, flailed their sharp little fists and gnashed their teeth; Harry spent ten whole minutes trying to squash a particularly fat one into a pot."
Toned down in film
Much too vivid for a movie audience's tender sensibilities - that's Boyles' guess.
"From the book, you think of them moving like babies, wiggling and screaming and stuff, but in the movie, they didn't really seem much like babies," he said.
But, as Teller Elementary School student Christina Johnson pointed out, the movies are more immediately terrifying when no punches get pulled. She considered the movie's Mandrakes "kind of cute," but found herself rigid when she was watching a climactic scene between Harry Potter and his nemesis.
"Watching something happen is a bit scarier, because you're seeing it, and not just reading about it," she noted.
She has mixed feelings about whether she prefers to draft her own image of Harry Potter, Ron Weasley and the others, or accept the children who play those roles in the movie.
"I think Harry, in the movies, looks the way he does in the book, and Ron, too," she said.
"But Hermione - I didn't expect her to look like she did in the movie. I expected her hair to be really, really curly. But the hair, in the movie, looked like braid curls."
Nick Brown votes with her. Details count.
Like, (Harry's despicable cousin) Dudley looks different, because in the movie, his hair is brown, and in the book, it's blond," he observed.
"And the descriptions of other characters aren't always how I imagined. My friend's mom didn't even want to see the movies because she had her own picture of the characters. Now, the books are obviously better than the movies, because they have all the parts the movies leave out, very cool stuff. But if you looked at the movies just as movies, by themselves, not compared to the books, they're still pretty good movies. If you haven't read the books, they're even better."
One issue that the books left vague but was resolved almost immediately in the first Harry Potter movie: How to pronounce Hermione Granger's name.
It's her-my-oh-knee.
Denver Post Article w/pictures  |