MetaFic

Don't worry. Hermione will always be Harry's in Kloves' mind. No chance of Remus getting involved.

Actually I saw that too…gave me quite a start!

I'll bet he practically wet himself when he realised he could write that Horcrux Nightmare sequence for Ron's benefit!

I know JKR has gone on record as saying that Harry and Hermione probably shared some "intense" experiences during their lonely weeks in that tent, but I suspect Kloves dials that up to eleven…

The further into the books the films have gone the less I've liked them. The worst aspect has been the promotion of Hermione over everyone, even Harry. They make Ron look stupid, Ginny plain and you really wonder why Harry exists at times.

I didn't see the last one, and I won't see the next one. My daughter is now studying film at Uni and my hope is that one day she will make an old man happy by redoing them.

I have come to appreciate the movies in their own right. A story told in a different medium is portrayed differently. Has anyone at this site read L. Frank Baum's book: "The Wizard of Oz"? There is little that survived into the movie besides the title and the main character's name! But we all love that movie, right?

I have always grimaced over Klove's take on the characters. Movie Hermione I can live with but you're right, Ron is made out to be an idiot, Ginny is missing the vivaciousness of the book character, and for me the worst sin is Lavender Brown. He turned her into a ditz! Good God man, only a true Gryffindor would deliberately step into the middle of Hurricane Heron. :-)

Unfortunately, ranting about Kloves misses the point for the poster shoots. The violet lighting Emma was shot in makes her clothes and hair look somewhat like movie Tonks.

Psst... Not A Cat, did you notice the absence of 'myy's in this post! :-)

I hate the films. Always have. To be fair, I could only bring myself to see 3 of them. The last one I allowed myself to see was movie 6. What can I say? The acting is putrid in places. Watson can not act, and shorty Dan (the midget supreme) overacts. Rupert makes Ron a real idiot and Bonnie Wright is a doormat/lumberjack next to tiny Dan. There is only so much for Snape to do. Comic relief?

I don't mind the H/Hr push by Kloves. As bad as they are, they are heaps better then Dan/Bonnie. So I plan to see the DH only for the Dan/Emma kiss, with heaps of popcorn. I'm only sorry Harry does not die at the end of this one.

Oh, and I said this before. The film will and have already replaced the HP books.

...as someone who's had a sneak peak at the movie's design assets and photostills since last March, I can safely say that this one looks to be one of the best in terms of art direction. And from what I've seen, Tonks (while still looking the same) isn't all about the purple in this film...if we see her in a promo shot, she won't have that same treatment as Hermione in this one. I absolutely love the prop design on all of the movies: great detail going into little things barely glimpsed at onscreen (textbook covers! The Daily Prophet! Weezes!).

My main problem has always been what plot points are left out, (PoA film, anyone? Horcruxes w/the last one??) so I'm sure this will have it's own share of disappointment...just like any other book adapted to film. But the books are so vivid in my mind that it's hard for me to see the character flaws (bad acting aside) since I just fill in the missing bits in my head.

From a marketing standpoint, Hermione makes perfect sense as the one to call attention to: she's a strong, intelligent, brave female role model that draws in the female demographic to what can undoubtedly seen as a "youth male" film to the film industry. And she makes way more marketing sense than Ginny as she has more page/screen time than Ginny does. (That the Ginny romance is downplayed in the books doesn't help this either...) You don't need to market Harry as the books have already done that (plus he's the title character), and Ron is superfluous from a marketing standpoint as sidekicks never get their share of the limelight because young male fans don't need another hook/role model. (Fancy ever seeing Robin in the limelight in a Batman poster?...but Catwoman on the other hand...) Similarly, look at Disney's upcoming holiday release, Tangled. The story is Rapunzel, but the name was changed to be more unisex than "just another princess movie," and all trailers released focus on the male lead rather than the princess to bring in the youth male audience.

As a fan of the series, do I necessarily agree with these decisions or how they are written into the screenplay? Not really...(don't get me started on the role of Arwen in the LotR movies...) But I can see why they happen and in some cases would have probably made the same decisions... Despite the fact that the HP fan base is large enough to carry the box office w/o these decisions, Hollywood plays everything very conservative with their money at all times. The main thing is that the films get people reading the books: I know for a fact that my brother never would have been the avid reader he is now if we hadn't dragged him along to see Sorcerer's Stone on opening night.

Oh man... The book Harry/Ginny is an epic romance compared to book Aragon/Arwen! :-)

I like the movies and I'm looking forward to both parts of Deathly Hallows.

Traitor!!!!!!

I would like to see them redone as TV mini-series. This would allow sufficient scope to explore all the little extra bits that cannot be fitted into the feature-film format.

A question about Bluray: I know they can cram higher-resolution pictures on to these new discs, but does anybody simply add more of the existing lower-resolution pictures? So could you, for example, fit the existing Extended Edition of LOTR onto fewer Bluray discs than DVDs? and could you therefore maybe fit a possible Harry Potter mini-series onto a reasonably small number of such discs?

you have long known this about me! Be not surprised now! LOL

Oo!! Count me in on the mini-series! Although, I really can't picture Snape or McGonagall played by anyone else...

I always live in hope when it comes to my friends.....

My willingness to watch a movie adaptation from a book is tied to how much I like the book.

Very good books make horrible movies. With HP, I stopped watching around the second movie, and feel constantly rewarded for that decision as I hear rumblings anew with each movie that comes out. It's kind of like "Starship Troopers" and how it was turned into a movie - the characters have (mostly) the same names, but that's about as close as you can get to the book from the movie.

That said, if you are capable of disassociating all book knowledge, then you might be able to enjoy a movie version as though it were just another random one-hit-wonder candidate. One drawback to such, however, is the risk of redefining the characters to be the movie rather than the book. This can be seen in some of the ship-churn on HP. The problem seems to be that the movie characters look better/worse than their canon counterparts, so people refocus their efforts according to their source of bias - book v. movie.

Another example of trending bias sources I could have observed came from "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead". I very much enjoyed the play as a piece of writing, found the movie quite entertaining and well-cast, and thought it would be hard to ruin in any form. Then a local theatre at a Uni I was near to put on a production of it, and they made a conscious decision to super-emphasize R&G to be homosexual lovers. The actual material of the play was subverted to become a vehicle for a message about as subtle as punching someone in the face with brass knuckles. It reminded me sharply of Starship Troopers, in that the names were the same, but the content was tossed out the window.

Anyway, watching movie versions of films is kind of like -- to me -- reading bad fanfic. If you know you won't like it, why are you stepping up to the plate for more? Unlike fanfic, though, watching that movie costs you money.