Irish Asians don’t understand mumbling.
I just returned from the “grand” opening of Harry Potter 4: The Goblet of Fire (the movie) and I’m not quite sure how to feel about it. Let me explain:
Very like Star Wars, people waited at the theater all day for this premiere. I didn’t ask what time the earliest arrived, but one of the people in my movie-watching group sat down at 10:00am and was not at the front of the line. Unlike Star Wars, very few people dressed up and there were no “magical duels”.
When the movie started everyone clapped at the Warner Bros logo. What? Why? I half expected The Empirical Theme to blare, but instead we heard creepy graveyard stuffs. I won’t give away any spoilers (Dumbledore doesn’t die), but I will say this—
The fourth Harry Potter book is 734 pages, more than half the length of the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy, so it was unsurprising that the film started at 12:30am and I didn’t get out until a bit past three. After all, they turned the LotR films into 6 hours and 51 minutes of extended-edition madness (as one of my roommates once said to the proposition that he watch all of the full-lengths sequentially: “I’d have to have a lot of drugs”). I was disappointed with the amount of literary matter lost in transition, but that’s why it’s better to see the film before reading the book.
If you’ve read the fourth edition in the series recently, you’ll miss out on some of your favorite parts but you’ll get over it and have a damned good time. And if you haven’t read the book, get your ass to the theater and then have a seat by the fire. Cozy up with this one; it’s a goodie.
Tags: books, Harry Potter, LotR, movies, reviews, Star Wars