The Great Big Harry Potter Squee Bonanza

[sophieisgod]

This is it, my friends. The end is near. In a fortnight, it will all be over.

Basically, my Harry Potter Hysteria is reaching unchartable levels of nostalgia and squee, so I thought I would do the decent thing and encourage my fellow fanatics to engage in a wise and nuanced exchange of ideas (and SQUEE) about this monumentous literary occasion (I told you I was getting excited. This isn't healthy).

Basically... I want theories, I want memories, I want fic and video recs, I want favourite moments, favourite characters, thoughts on the films and any other jazz that might apply.

Please, guys. If I don't have an outlet for my excitement my head will explode and I'll die. Do you want that on your collective conscience, flisties? DO YOU?

Yours in pathetc desperation (and SQUEE),
Sophie

Comments

[agguss.livejournal.com]

Ooh, I'd never really thought about having one of the 'bad guys' for a favourite character, that's really interesting
Yeah, I'm not sure why, but I always tend to sympathise with the "bad" characters or the more ambiguous ones. Not only in Harry Potter but in general, in literature, in movies, in history. Like, Snape, Claude Frollo in Notre Dame de Paris by Victor Hugo, or the Marquis de Sade to name a historical figure.

...but I find him completely fascinating and a bit heartbreaking because he never really grows up
That's exactly why I don't like Sirius I think :D He's so childish in many occasions and at the same time I feel he's a little bit narrow minded. And I'll never forgive him for what he did to Snape lol

I'm also very very excited for Alan Rickman's importance in the coming movies. As I said before, I loved Snape in the books but with Alan playing him it's just ... guh! wonderful beyond words. And you can imagine how excited I was when I read HBP :D:D It was a very strange experience for me, because although I was crying a lot for Dumbledore's death I was also extremely happy because Snape was so central to the plot. It was as if inside the story I was sad for DD, but as a reader I was overly-excited with and for Snape heh.

Regarding GoF, I do like it less than the Columbus' ones, even if those are also really bad. But for some reason, although the acting is awful and the direction is far from marvelous, I think they are better than GoF because they actually tell a story and you see characters, not action. I got the feeling that GoF was an action scene after the other, with a poor feeling of cohesion throughout the movie and I simply didn't like it, I couldn't enjoy it. Besides, the Columbus movies had the positive thing that it was the first time we were seeing the books on the big screen.

I'm so excited about OotP!! I'm in the middle of my finals so I shouldn't be here commenting these things with you, and I shouldn't go to watch the movie when it opens this week but I simply can't resist :D:D It looks so elegant and well-focused, like a good approach of the story (unlike GoF heh) And all the new characters look so great. As you said, Helena Bohan Carter is looking awesome, the whole Death Eaters are looking great. Having Ralph Fiennes as Voldemort is also a little gem :)) And the sequences I've seen from Dumbledore's Army are excellent too.

Oh well, everything is looking great :)

[sophieisgod.livejournal.com]

Yeah, Snape's completely central to the plot in the sixth one, so they won't be able to get away with just wheeling him out for a bit of comic relief like they have with some of the others! They'll have to let him do proper acting with anger and frustration and I CANNOT WAIT!!! And all the reviews I've read so far mention him as being awesome (and Sirius, lol).

OotP has a new writer so hopefully the story will progress a bit more smoothly than it has in the past. It'll be interesting to see what they edit out; I'm rereading it now and I keep thinking "ooh, I hope they keep that bit!"

There was something magical about the Columbus ones, because it *was* the first time we got to see that whole world on screen, and I still enjoy them, they're just a bit clunkier. I didn't mind the action in GoF, I thought it was pretty well done, but I can understand why people might have preferred more dialogue and character stuff. I aso thought that having a British director like Mike Newell helped, because it just made the setting a little bit more authentically British, if you see what I mean.

Ooh, and Luna looks really good.

EXCITED NOW!

[agguss.livejournal.com]

(Haha, way to fuck up the coding in the last comment lol)

Yeah, I see what you mean with Mike Newell being British too. It might be a little bit hypocrite to ask for a all-British-cast and have, lets say, a Mexican director. However, I think they are more anti-Hollywood than pro-British, if you know what I mean. I love it though ^__^

[sophieisgod.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I'd agree with that. I definitely think the films are better when there's not a "Hollywood" director *coughChris Columbus*... He directed Home Alone, for crying out loud! And it's not that I think that everything not-British is evil, I love Alfonso Cuaron, and I think he was really right for PoA. I just think that Mike Newell really enhanced the 'British boarding school' vibe rather than being "OMG ITZ HOGWATRTZ!!!!"

And David Yates is definitely un-Hollywood, having only ever done TV. I think because there's such a sense of Britishness in the books, with the behaviour and the dialogue and stuff (Lupin's so 'stiff upper lip', bless him!) that a non-Brit writer or director might not pick up on. I'm not trying to suggest it's essential to the story, it's just something that I like.

So yes, I agree with you. Anti-Hollywood. :D