Difficulties and Problems

For some unfathomable reason, I've been trying to get on Livejournal a lot today. Maybe it's that forbidden fruit thing, which is a poor analogy because I don't particularly like fruit, and there isn't some fucking snake telling me how fucking delicious Livejournal is or anything. Apparently the "datacenter" needs "power" to run, which I believe translates to "we got really moshed last night and woke up in the wrong state, excuse us but we need to find our pants and remember our names."

I am not, shall we say, a qualified translator of technical difficulties.

I have been trying to avoid the internet (read: HP7 spoilers), and so have not returned with enlightening or entertaining anecdotes. I've started the book, though. I'm enjoying it so far. Say nothing.

I meant to say something about the Order of the Phoenix movie, and it would've probably been something like this:

I liked the film, in that it kept a brisk pace and managed to make an overlong and sometimes tedious book into a taut and entertaining movie. The new casts all did a fine job, Umbridge (who wasn't exactly what I expected, but then I expected a complete cartoon and was happy with the alternative) and Luna in particular. I find there are a lot of unfortunate and unfounded complaints with the HP movies - they left this out, that person isn't right, they changed that. The movies do a very good job, I find, of matching the tone of the books, of coming close to the vision, and of hitting the right points of the story, and I believe we have to accept that it might never be exactly what was in your head.

I had a problem with the script, not in its deviation from the original story (a film is different from a book, and the story needs to change) but purely as a work of adaptation. I was in the process of rereading the fifth book when I went to see the film, and wasn't struck by the glaring inaccuracies or deviations from the story, but rather the peculiarly patchwork dialogue. Nearly every line in the film is a close variant or exact rip from characters' speech in the original book. The dialogue, as it stands, works fine on the page, where there's nearly eight-hundred pages to establish things like character and emotion and theme, but there's more of an onus on spoken language in a film. It's the responsibility of an adapter to create dialogue that illuminates the characters, and reinforces the themes, and usually this means creating and changing the text to suit the new medium. Mark Goldenberg, the writer of the fifth film, seemed content to cram Rowling's words into a hundred-and-thirty minutes, and then stand back.

The result was a strangely unbalanced film that seemed to be almost exclusively about Harry and Umbridge, and only occasionally about anyone else. And while I appreciate that those are the protagonist and antagonist, there's a rich ensemble who fall by the wayside because Goldenberg was too lazy to write them in.