PoA impressions and Mauritius wrapping-up
Jun. 18th, 2004 11:20 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
selenakFirstly, I saw Prisoner of Azkaban. Definitely the best of the HP movies, and it's a pity Alfonso Cuaron won't stay around for the next, though in one interview I have seen he indicated he might return for OotP, since he likes the book (and Harry's anger in it) very much.
There were so many little touches to appreciate. The Whomping Willow wacking the Disney blue singing birds throughout. Hermione talking to Ginny in the background when Arthur Weasley delivers exposition to Harry. (I appreciate this because as later books show Hermione is more informed about Ginny's life than brother Ron, and vice versa.) Petunia getting visibly tenser when Marge starts to insult Lily. Whether that was Fiona Shaw or Cuaron's direction, it's an ice touch and again ties with the hint of more-dimensionality Petunia aquires in Order of the Phoenix. The weather being so very true to that island in the silver sea. (Wasn't there a debate about whether or not HP is British before I left?) John Williams coming through with a score fitting with the visual imagination of a new director.
The performances rocked. I don't have any strong feelings about Sirius or Remus (meaning I like both, but I don't seek out fanfic about them unless I'm fond of the author, and I don't reread passages in the books with them more avidly than the rest of the novels), and I didn't have any particular visual images of how they looked like in my own imagination. Still, David Thewliss and Gary Oldman managed to get me from neutral to loving for the course of the film. Thewliss had quiet strength, the emotional weariness of a survivor of wars, and gentle humour; Oldman was intense and admirably conveyed the whole gamut from near-madness due to that twelve years to vengeful hate re: Peter to spiteful hostility re: Snape to love and concern re: Harry and Remus. In fact, his last tender scene with Harrry was the first time I thought of Sirius' death in OotP with a gulp im my throat.
One of my minor quibbles with the film is that imo they overdid the make-up for Timothy Spall as Peter Pettigrew. I get that he's supposed to show the effect of having spent twelve years as a rat, but still, I'd have gone for a deceptively mild-mannered, gentle look.
And since we are talking of quibbles - the other one is with the left-out backstory. When they left out the first hint of same in Philospher's Stone (i.e. as opposed to the novel, Dumbledore doesn't say anything about Snape and James Potter in the movie version), I thought they were saving it for PoA, but no. I take it they'll use it in OotP, but I'm not sure it will be as effective if the cinema audience didn't get filled in before. However, once the story of the Prank and young!Snape's almost-death at Lupin's paws fell under the scissors, it made sense to take out good old Severus totally losing it at the end as well - one has to understand the history between him, Sirius and Remus and James for that. What we did get instead I liked - Snape going from bitching at Harry to instantly protecting the Trio from the werewolf once he notices it appealed to the Snape Redemptionista in me, and is consistent with his unique status as unpleasant guy fighting the good fight in the novels.
While Snape gets to be courageous, Draco gets to play cowardly diva. Which is quite entertaining. I find canon Draco dull (as I said before, even Dudley Dursley is more interesting to me) and Fanon!Draco annoying, with the exception of the one Star plays at![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
theatrical_muse, but this new version Cuaron and Tom Felton came up with, Camp!Draco, is fun.
As for the trio, thank god Rupert Grint has toned down the grimaces. Or rather, thank you, Senor Cuaron. I appreciate it. I don't know why Cosmo L. ranted about Dan Radcliff in the Sunday Times - I thought he was excellent, conveying Harry's sorrow and growing anger, and the emotional need for father figures (Remus, Sirius, dead James) very well, which makes me think he'll come through with the fury and the snark and the dissillusionment of OotP. Emma Watson as Hermione was great and got richly compensated for her relatively short part (due to plot reasons) in CoS. Yes, she's prettier than Hermione is supposed to be, but not too Hollywoodian so, and anyway, she has the iron will and intellectual superiority (which is not always manifested in a pleasant way - see Hermione's out of proportion reaction to Trelawney, for example) down pad.
The greatest surprise to me was Buckbeak the Hippogriff, mostly because I cared for it in a way I did not in the novel. (Where you feel sorry for Hagrid.) I've decided that clearly, after parting ways with Sirius, Buckbeak went to the Dreaming and applied for the doorkeeper job there - he's the replacement we meet in The Wake.
Secondly, here's the rest of my journey:
Mauritius we arrived on at five o'clock in the morning, and the multicultural heritage of the island surrounded us at once, as a Chinese, an Indian and a black taxi driver competed for us. No wonder, either, not because of our irresistible charm but because the hotel was more than an hour away. For the record, the Indian guy won.
On that occasion, it was still dark and we didn't see much of the island except the huge sugar canes on either side of the road. (A street! With tar! After Tanzania, it was a fun change.) By the time the sun rose, we were nearly there in Le Morne, but could see the cliffs of the mountain where according to legend the slaves fled to during an uprising in the pale dawn. Said legend has it that when a policeman climbed up, some of the slaves committed suicide by jumping down, which was doubly tragic as he only intended to say that slavery was finally over. It makes for a good story, though I doubt its authenticity.
(Slavery on Mauritius: when the French Revolution came, it was supposed to be abolished. Fat chance. The local sugar lords had no intention of giving it up. They didn't under Napoleon, either, and even the English took their own sweet time getting rid of it once they took over the island, and they had to pay huge financial compensations to the ex-owners. And introduce horse racing. Don't ask.)
The hotel was called Le Paradis and worthy of the name. A gorgeous white beach, Palm trees and crystal clear ocean water right of a cliché post card. You could see the sand, corals, occasional fish and assorted plants when you swam the entire time. This was the "relaxing" part of the vacation, after being on the road through the Serengeti etc. for the other part, and relax we did. I even tried to learn waterski, which is not the sport for me, much as I adore alpine skiing. My arms aren't strong enough, if you ask me. I did manage to get up a couple of times but fell in various ways much more often.
There were hawkers on the prowl at the beach, naturally. (Btw, India and Mauritius are the only places where I heard the words "hawkers" used for people-who-try-to-sell-you-stuff, so I hope it's correct in other places, too.) But not nearly as pesky as when we were travelling through Rajastan, and they mostly accepted it if one told them that one wasn't interested instead of insisting. However, one of them kept trying to hit on me in various ways. First he told me he speaks Italian. (With all respect to the beautiful Italian language, why this should be working as a pass is beyond me.) Then he told me my skin was too white. (I am very fair-skinned and take eons to tan, so when I am finally tanned somewhat, I tend to sulk when being informed I still look like an escapee of a ghost story.) Then he offered various nautical enterprises, all of which were available at the hotel as well. Then he said I should tell him about my problems, and on the final day, I got the "too white" line again. Men, I swear.
Of course, we made a trip around the island as well, which was very interesting. Aside from the sugar canes and the dramatic cliffy mountains covered with dark green grass and moss, it's mostly an intriguing mixture of Southern France and India. A lot of Hindu temples, but since the Indians are a rather recent arrival (i.e. 19th century), though outnumbering the Creoles 2 to 1 now, there is no patina to make the loud colours look picturesque instead of Bollywood. The houses, otoh, are mostly very Southern France. And French is still the main language, which meant I had to activate my school French quite a bit. It also meant great food, by the way. Vive la France et la cuisine francaise!
Port Louis, the capital, has this statue of Victoria which makes you wonder why long-lived female rulers like her or Catherine the Great are always depicted in their plump middle and old age whereas male rulers like, say, Augustus insisted on youthful portraits throughout. So much for female vanity. Anyway, there was Victoria, announced not as Queen of England but as Empress of India, "only" that title, looking her grim dowager worst at, as Kipling would put it, the natives.
There was also a mosque which boasted of a huge pool and a peaceful quiet aura in the very busy city centre, and some dusty attempts at Chinese-style buildings.
But I have to say, despite stiff competition from the sea, the most wonderful thing I saw on Mauritius was the nightly sky with all the stars. As with the Seychelles, you get the impression that the firmament on this side of the equator is somehow more clearly visible (perhaps due to the lack of air pollution), and the unknown constellations make for an impression of being on another planet. So bright, so beautiful, to quote Gollum. And so many of them. Each night, going to dinner and going back, I walked with my head raised and my eyes fixed on the stars, and collected some bruises on the way due to crashing into some things. But so worth it.
There were so many little touches to appreciate. The Whomping Willow wacking the Disney blue singing birds throughout. Hermione talking to Ginny in the background when Arthur Weasley delivers exposition to Harry. (I appreciate this because as later books show Hermione is more informed about Ginny's life than brother Ron, and vice versa.) Petunia getting visibly tenser when Marge starts to insult Lily. Whether that was Fiona Shaw or Cuaron's direction, it's an ice touch and again ties with the hint of more-dimensionality Petunia aquires in Order of the Phoenix. The weather being so very true to that island in the silver sea. (Wasn't there a debate about whether or not HP is British before I left?) John Williams coming through with a score fitting with the visual imagination of a new director.
The performances rocked. I don't have any strong feelings about Sirius or Remus (meaning I like both, but I don't seek out fanfic about them unless I'm fond of the author, and I don't reread passages in the books with them more avidly than the rest of the novels), and I didn't have any particular visual images of how they looked like in my own imagination. Still, David Thewliss and Gary Oldman managed to get me from neutral to loving for the course of the film. Thewliss had quiet strength, the emotional weariness of a survivor of wars, and gentle humour; Oldman was intense and admirably conveyed the whole gamut from near-madness due to that twelve years to vengeful hate re: Peter to spiteful hostility re: Snape to love and concern re: Harry and Remus. In fact, his last tender scene with Harrry was the first time I thought of Sirius' death in OotP with a gulp im my throat.
One of my minor quibbles with the film is that imo they overdid the make-up for Timothy Spall as Peter Pettigrew. I get that he's supposed to show the effect of having spent twelve years as a rat, but still, I'd have gone for a deceptively mild-mannered, gentle look.
And since we are talking of quibbles - the other one is with the left-out backstory. When they left out the first hint of same in Philospher's Stone (i.e. as opposed to the novel, Dumbledore doesn't say anything about Snape and James Potter in the movie version), I thought they were saving it for PoA, but no. I take it they'll use it in OotP, but I'm not sure it will be as effective if the cinema audience didn't get filled in before. However, once the story of the Prank and young!Snape's almost-death at Lupin's paws fell under the scissors, it made sense to take out good old Severus totally losing it at the end as well - one has to understand the history between him, Sirius and Remus and James for that. What we did get instead I liked - Snape going from bitching at Harry to instantly protecting the Trio from the werewolf once he notices it appealed to the Snape Redemptionista in me, and is consistent with his unique status as unpleasant guy fighting the good fight in the novels.
While Snape gets to be courageous, Draco gets to play cowardly diva. Which is quite entertaining. I find canon Draco dull (as I said before, even Dudley Dursley is more interesting to me) and Fanon!Draco annoying, with the exception of the one Star plays at
theatrical_muse, but this new version Cuaron and Tom Felton came up with, Camp!Draco, is fun. As for the trio, thank god Rupert Grint has toned down the grimaces. Or rather, thank you, Senor Cuaron. I appreciate it. I don't know why Cosmo L. ranted about Dan Radcliff in the Sunday Times - I thought he was excellent, conveying Harry's sorrow and growing anger, and the emotional need for father figures (Remus, Sirius, dead James) very well, which makes me think he'll come through with the fury and the snark and the dissillusionment of OotP. Emma Watson as Hermione was great and got richly compensated for her relatively short part (due to plot reasons) in CoS. Yes, she's prettier than Hermione is supposed to be, but not too Hollywoodian so, and anyway, she has the iron will and intellectual superiority (which is not always manifested in a pleasant way - see Hermione's out of proportion reaction to Trelawney, for example) down pad.
The greatest surprise to me was Buckbeak the Hippogriff, mostly because I cared for it in a way I did not in the novel. (Where you feel sorry for Hagrid.) I've decided that clearly, after parting ways with Sirius, Buckbeak went to the Dreaming and applied for the doorkeeper job there - he's the replacement we meet in The Wake.
Secondly, here's the rest of my journey:
Mauritius we arrived on at five o'clock in the morning, and the multicultural heritage of the island surrounded us at once, as a Chinese, an Indian and a black taxi driver competed for us. No wonder, either, not because of our irresistible charm but because the hotel was more than an hour away. For the record, the Indian guy won.
On that occasion, it was still dark and we didn't see much of the island except the huge sugar canes on either side of the road. (A street! With tar! After Tanzania, it was a fun change.) By the time the sun rose, we were nearly there in Le Morne, but could see the cliffs of the mountain where according to legend the slaves fled to during an uprising in the pale dawn. Said legend has it that when a policeman climbed up, some of the slaves committed suicide by jumping down, which was doubly tragic as he only intended to say that slavery was finally over. It makes for a good story, though I doubt its authenticity.
(Slavery on Mauritius: when the French Revolution came, it was supposed to be abolished. Fat chance. The local sugar lords had no intention of giving it up. They didn't under Napoleon, either, and even the English took their own sweet time getting rid of it once they took over the island, and they had to pay huge financial compensations to the ex-owners. And introduce horse racing. Don't ask.)
The hotel was called Le Paradis and worthy of the name. A gorgeous white beach, Palm trees and crystal clear ocean water right of a cliché post card. You could see the sand, corals, occasional fish and assorted plants when you swam the entire time. This was the "relaxing" part of the vacation, after being on the road through the Serengeti etc. for the other part, and relax we did. I even tried to learn waterski, which is not the sport for me, much as I adore alpine skiing. My arms aren't strong enough, if you ask me. I did manage to get up a couple of times but fell in various ways much more often.
There were hawkers on the prowl at the beach, naturally. (Btw, India and Mauritius are the only places where I heard the words "hawkers" used for people-who-try-to-sell-you-stuff, so I hope it's correct in other places, too.) But not nearly as pesky as when we were travelling through Rajastan, and they mostly accepted it if one told them that one wasn't interested instead of insisting. However, one of them kept trying to hit on me in various ways. First he told me he speaks Italian. (With all respect to the beautiful Italian language, why this should be working as a pass is beyond me.) Then he told me my skin was too white. (I am very fair-skinned and take eons to tan, so when I am finally tanned somewhat, I tend to sulk when being informed I still look like an escapee of a ghost story.) Then he offered various nautical enterprises, all of which were available at the hotel as well. Then he said I should tell him about my problems, and on the final day, I got the "too white" line again. Men, I swear.
Of course, we made a trip around the island as well, which was very interesting. Aside from the sugar canes and the dramatic cliffy mountains covered with dark green grass and moss, it's mostly an intriguing mixture of Southern France and India. A lot of Hindu temples, but since the Indians are a rather recent arrival (i.e. 19th century), though outnumbering the Creoles 2 to 1 now, there is no patina to make the loud colours look picturesque instead of Bollywood. The houses, otoh, are mostly very Southern France. And French is still the main language, which meant I had to activate my school French quite a bit. It also meant great food, by the way. Vive la France et la cuisine francaise!
Port Louis, the capital, has this statue of Victoria which makes you wonder why long-lived female rulers like her or Catherine the Great are always depicted in their plump middle and old age whereas male rulers like, say, Augustus insisted on youthful portraits throughout. So much for female vanity. Anyway, there was Victoria, announced not as Queen of England but as Empress of India, "only" that title, looking her grim dowager worst at, as Kipling would put it, the natives.
There was also a mosque which boasted of a huge pool and a peaceful quiet aura in the very busy city centre, and some dusty attempts at Chinese-style buildings.
But I have to say, despite stiff competition from the sea, the most wonderful thing I saw on Mauritius was the nightly sky with all the stars. As with the Seychelles, you get the impression that the firmament on this side of the equator is somehow more clearly visible (perhaps due to the lack of air pollution), and the unknown constellations make for an impression of being on another planet. So bright, so beautiful, to quote Gollum. And so many of them. Each night, going to dinner and going back, I walked with my head raised and my eyes fixed on the stars, and collected some bruises on the way due to crashing into some things. But so worth it.
