xtcian

moaning myrtle

6/7/04

Iowa City, IA to Toledo, OH

My buddy Oliver wrote to me, saying he'd listened to the "His Dark Materials" novels (as Tessa and I are doing right now) and wanted to hear the verdict on Cuaron's "Harry Potter" movie. It's funny how the two book series seem to flirt with each other – both contain witches, a certain level of magic, and a young "chosen one" protagonist – but they are also coming at it from vastly different latitudes.

"His Dark Materials" owes more to "The Odyssey" and various journey-based books like the "Chronicles of Narnia," while the Potter novels draw more from the British canon of school dramas and the orphanism of "The Secret Garden." Comparing the two is apples and oranges, but as audio books, they are both A+ experiences.

I owe an incredible debt of gratitude to J.K. Rowling: it was her first three novels that got me through the initial PTSD I suffered after September 11, and the last two books accompanied Tessa and me through both the Iraq war and our honeymoon. Her incidental characters are the stuff of genius, and the names alone – dementors, the pensive, patronus, even Lucius Malfoy – are totally brilliant. Her novels also got me into the op-ed pages of the New York Times (an edited version can be read here without paying the archive fee).

The first two movies were okay by me, mostly because they existed. I loved seeing the crane shot of Diagon Alley, and the feast at Hogwarts, even if the rest of the movie was wooden and hokey. Cuaron, however, gets it in the most basic way, by showing the 3rd book to be not so much dark, as darkly comic. I'm a huge sucker for time travel anyway, and the scenes with Hermione's time-turner were EXACTLY as I'd imagined them in my head.

There was a lot this movie left out, obviously. No love interest for Harry, no Snape making the potion for Lupin, no real tension behind Sirius Black's quest for Harry. But I think this is more a flaw with the material rather than the director – it could be that the Potter books are getting too large, complicated, bizarre and subtle to make good movies. My feeling is this will be the best movie of them all, both past and future, because it was an almost-perfect meeting of a long book with a great director. The other films will have to edit out so much that it will cease to be anything approximating the original.

Cuaron had fun, and that's all I wanted. Chris Columbus' movies felt too focus-group-tested, and reminded me of the Hardy Boys with Nancy Drew as Hermione. When the Whomping Willow kept eating the bluebirds in "Azkaban," I knew we finally had a director that was as secretly sadistic as J.K. Rowling herself, and that, my friends, was more than worth the price of admission.