The Beviad–musings, mutterings and myths

The first thing that struck me was how long Harry’s neck is. Yes, I hate to say this, but this must be part of the gawky aspect of a seventeen year old boy: he has a neck like a giraffe. And he isn’t dressed in a turtle neck anywhere in the film, either, to help ameliorate the problem. Instead, he wears t-shirts that seem to accentuate his neck. This gives him a very strange look, to me at least.

Next, and related to the first impression, was how tall and grown up he has become—unfortunately so, I think. He was so cute when he was younger. However, Ron is much worse. He seems to be all bags under the eyes and gawkiness, even more than Harry. In fact, only Hermione seems to be aging nicely, but even she seemed drawn and skinny. Ron’s twin brothers seem so old as to be out of place in the film. I wondered why they are still at Hogwarts; surely they must be old enough to have graduated by now and gone to university. I also think that the director—whoever he is—has filmed them all rather badly. Often, the camera seems to be filming from the ground up, which accentuates their height. 

Also, there are too many shadows in this film, especially blue shadows. It could have been filmed in blue and white colors only, and no one would have noticed the difference, really. This made everyone look much too gaunt and sickly. Weren’t some of the earlier films a bit brownish and cosy? I can’t recall. In any case, quaintness has gone from this film. It no longer has a kind of Dickensian quaintitude about it, but instead seems very cold and unpleasant. 

Of course, the plot deals with awful, serious and scary things. I wondered, from time to time, what the kids around me in the audience were thinking. The ones who are the age of Harry might accept it, but the kids under thirteen would be too scared, I think. And as these kids get older, they more and more are witches and wizards rather than apprentices. The scene where Harry and his friends mount brooms and soar over London was all too much like a witches’ Sabbat. I begin to see how the Christian Right’s objections to their being witches and therefore devil worshippers could come from: now that they are adults, they all too well resemble the witches and wizards we have heard negative things about for centuries. 

Not that they are devil worshippers, of course. There is never any devil—or god, for that matter— behind this world of wizards, which is odd. It is, in fact, a purely secular world, unless one counts Voldemort as the devil. Christmas is celebrated as a day of gifts, but that’s all. You’d think that if there could be all these weird creatures and demons, there might be angels, but no. 

Not that I want a Christian world, with all that  implies. I might not even go to see the films in that case. But this movie is so cold and dark, so scary (not to me, but potentially to kids watching it) that I found myself hankering for some force of goodness to cling to. Hagrid is there, of course, undeniably good, and the rest of the staff at Hogwarts, but even they are suspect, especially since Dumbledore deliberately is ignoring Harry this time round, and the tall, skinny teacher played by Alan Rickman seems even more evil than usual, although he’s supposed to be on the side of the good. But we don’t see enough of such teachers as the one -played by Maggie Smith–or rather, what we see of her is too dark and shadowy; we need some shots of her face looking kindly, if only to balance out Ralf Fiennes’ noseless face as Voldemort. Instead, the camera lingers on the face of the Imelda Staunton as the pink-clad villain of this piece, as she comes to rule Hogwarts, complete with her neverending grimace of a smile; she is pretty well the only non-blue thing in the film. 

Moments filled with the  kind of exuberance found in the earlier films are in short order here. The scenes in the woods, where Hagrid presents new and weird creatures of  myth, are usually filled with wonder, but  this time it’s all so dark that one can hardly see what the creature of the hour looks like for the dark shadows of the wood, and I couldn’t hear its name, either. The same goes for the giant we are presented with, who is also blue-grey with shadows and hard to see. 

As for the plot, it may be easier when you’ve already read the book and know it already, but to me it seemed odd. No one believes that Harry really saw Voldemort (in the last film). Why not? Has Harry done anything in the past to make them think he’d lie about such a thing? In this, the film is like the last, where everyone shunned him because they thought he had entered his own name to a contest for those older than himself. These aren’t stupid kids; why would they think this of him? It all seems a too-convenient  plot twist calculated to present him as lonely and isolated.

And when the showdown comes, how is it that Dumbledore is able to hold his own with Voldemort? Isn’t the whole point that Voldemort is the most terrible and excellent of all wizards? Yet he just vanishes to fight another day, presumably. Why? He could kill them all at that point and be done with them. It seems that Rowling is saving him for the last book, where he will face Harry in a final showdown in which one of them will die. (For that matter, I never understood why Voldemort didn’t kill Harry in the Goblet of Fire, at the same time that he kills Cedric.)

Sorry, but I don’t think this is a good film. I still like the first and second ones best. There was an air of wonder and joy in them, even apart from that which the audience felt in beholding new and amazing inventions from Rowling’s mind being presented in cinematic form. Fear was centered on a beast of some sort in each film,  and we believed that Harry could do almost anything at the same time that we could believe in the awfulness of whatever beast he was facing. Hogwarts seemed cosy and yet wondrous, like the most amazing of castles with the most amazing ghosts. (Not surprisingly, my granddaughter Devon, age 5, has said that she’d like to go to school there when she gets older. She’ll be disappointed, I fear, with actual school if she thinks it’s going to be anything like Hogwarts.) 

<P>Harry’s biggest foe in those days was Malfoy, who is almost absent from the current film. Voldemort was someone who had killed H’s parents and given him the scar on his forehead, but he wasn’t someone hanging over the film like a dreadful doom waiting to descend. The theme music for the Harry Potter movies seemed to fit in those days; it suggested something exciting and magical. In this most recent film, it seems out of place–too sparkly and magical in a lovely way, in contrast to the dark, doom-filled aura of the film. Something from “Gotterdammerung’ would be more appropriate for this one.

“Scientists have emplained mathematically why the famous ’silly walk’ of Monty Python’s John Cleese have neaver caught on in the long history of Homo sapiens. The giant, leg-twirling strides of silly walks may enable an individual to leap around swiftly, but too much metabolic energy must be expended compared to conventional locomotion, according to a paper published by Britain’s Royal Society.

“Manoj Srinavasan and Andy Ruina, researchaers in Applied Mechanics at New York’s Cornell  University, drew up a geometrical model of human walking and running. They found that, in essence, each leg is a ‘telescoping actuator’ that can change its length….They then factored in the metabolic cost of three drains on energy. . .the cost of keeping the body’s basic functions ticking over; the cost of swinging the legs; and the cost incurred when a leg is in contact with the ground.

Their equations showed emphatically that walking and running are the most energy-efficient gaits for our species, honed by millions of years of evolution. . . .”

Perhaps the mention of silly walks is the creation of the press, and the scientists never alluded to it. In any case, the study still seems very silly in itself. Surely if there was a better form of locomotion, humans would be doing it, right? In any case, one wonders if it really is so hard to find meaningful research topics that scientists have to research such meaningless ones as this.