Posts tagged harry potter

My Wand is Better Than Yours

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 (2011)
D: David Yates
S: Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, Emma Watson, Ralph Fiennes, Alan Rickman

There’s something not quite right in saying that Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, the fifth installment in the popular film series based on J. K. Rowling’s ridiculously successful collection of seven children’s books about a mostly hapless boy wizard, is the worst among all eight entries in the Warner Bros.-powered franchise. To say so is to assert that the film is, actually, bad. It is not. A more accurate manner of describing the film relative to its cinematic siblings is to say that it’s the least good of the bunch. If anything, this belief, held both by most viewers and by most critics, betokens the singular richness of the film series’ source material as well as the skill with which the filmmakers, within the span of a decade, adapted it—all six and two halves of it. 

Order of the Phoenix was the series directorial debut of the then virtually unknown David Yates. The film was a modest success (which is still saying something, considering that what is being spoken of is a goddamn Harry Potter film), fraught as it was from the start with the hazards of condensing the longest and arguably least good (not worst) Harry Potter book into two hours, more or less, of celluloid. The result was at best pleasant, a corrugated affair having many a montage sequence, more than what a typical inspirational sports movie holds. Nevertheless, it was indicative of Yates’s nascent flair for character- and plot-driven fantasy, away from his usual forays into social realism. Yates went on to direct the remaining installments, thereby displaying his developing authorial confidence: from his mind’s eye emerged the deliciously somber Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, the affectingly wistful Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1, and, finally, the frantically fleet-footed Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2. But montage sequences are, three films and four years since the release of Order of the Phoenix, still among the things up Yates’s sleeve. To his credit, though, in Deathly Hallows: Part 2 their use is more compulsory than convenient. 

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The Tales of Beedle the Bard — J. K. Rowling

Muggles—the vaguely derogatory term for “non-magical people”—are well-informed about the spirited acts of princes, princesses, and proletarian polliwogs who populate the fantasies of storytellers of yore such as Charles Perrault, Hans Christian Andersen, and brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, whether through the original scrolls, through meliorative retellings like those in Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber, through modern-day or futuristic adaptations like Joe Wright’s Hanna and Steven Spielberg’s AI, or through the popular and endearing Disney bowdlerizations. People of magical means in the world of Harry Potter, on the other hand, are supposedly familiar with the inherently supernatural stories of fifteenth-century author Beedle the Bard. His stories have long been available in the wizarding world in a single volume titled The Tales of Beedle the Bard, and presumably it’s a perennial presence in the Daily Prophet bestsellers list.

J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter’s billionaire biographer, was gracious enough to release an annotated, albeit abridged, version of the collection for Muggle public consumption in 2008, a year after the publication of the last installment in her series of books about the life and times of Harry Potter. The public edition of The Tales of Beedle the Bard authorized by Rowling is notable for having two of the most important figures from the Second Wizarding War (1995-1998) involved in its development. Hermione Granger, a distinguished Muggle-born alumna of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry and a confidante of Harry Potter’s, translated the tales from their original runes, while Professor Albus Dumbledore, a former Hogwarts headmaster and Harry Potter’s eccentric mentor, provided a delightful and insightful commentary on each of the tales included in this slim collection, with clarificatory, intertextual, and metacritical footnotes appended by Rowling.

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Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 — David Yates

Harry, A History

D: David Yates
S: Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, Emma Watson, Ralph Fiennes

Ten minutes into the 2001 film Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, the then soon-to-be-eleven title character is scolded by his unsympathetic uncle for continuously and inexplicably—as though by magic—receiving letters by owl from an unmapped boarding school, letters which his uncle for some reason makes an effort of withholding from him. Feeling deprived of what is rightfully his, he comforts himself by playing with his toy soldiers in his tiny cupboard of a bedroom. A good six years later in the fictional world created by author J. K. Rowling and tapped for blockbuster cinema by Warner Bros., which equates to nearly a decade in the real world cohabited by moviegoing escapists and film marketing strategists, Harry Potter, now prominently stubbled and just shy of seventeen, revisits his old, dusty quarters ten minutes into Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1, and looks with sentimental longing at his erstwhile playthings. Old and dusty themselves, they are a sad reminder to Harry that playtime has long been over, that comfort has become a rarity, that the lights over his present and immediate future, and certainly over the rest of the world’s as well, have gone deathly dim.

Harry Potter is a wizard, embattled and trapped in “these […] dark times, there is no denying,” as declared by an upright political leader in his impassioned speech at the beginning of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 (hereafter HP7.1), setting a distinctly ominous tone for the film. As it is, HP7.1 is the seventh and penultimate chapter in the most successful film franchise in history, which chronicles the adventures of the eponymous wand-wielding young hero. But as in the last remaining episodes of a popular television series, a sort of recap sequence would have been welcome here—boon to a good many moviegoers who haven’t read the Harry Potter novels, not even a page from one (for such sorry creatures do exist), as well as to viewers who have forgotten who killed who at the end of the previous film. This hypothetical prelude would show a number of scenes and significant bits of dialogue culled from past installments… Uncle Vernon: “There’s no such thing as magic!” Cut to Hagrid, half-giant and groundskeeper at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry: “Yer a wizard, Harry.” Harry: “I’m a what?” Hagrid: “Yer the boy who lived. That’s why yer famous, Harry. That’s why everybody knows yer name.” Harry, pointing to the lightning bolt-shaped scar on his forehead: “He killed my parents, didn’t he? The one who gave me this?” Hagrid: “His name was Voldemort. Well, some say he died. Nope, I reckon he’s still out there…” These lines are from the first film alone, mind, and between Hagrid’s sensible reckoning of the villain’s apparent immortality and the start of HP7.1 Harry learns to use and control his magical powers and meets a motley of characters, including his best friends, Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger, and Voldemort himself, who is alive (in a way) and more powerful than ever throughout HP7.1.

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[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

790 plays

Double Trouble
John Williams
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

Eye of newt and toe of frog,
Wool of bat and tongue of dog,
Adder's fork and blind-worm's sting,
Lizard's leg and howlet's wing.

Double, double, toil and trouble
Fire burn and cauldron bubble
Double, double, toil and trouble
Something wicked this way comes.

Along with Alfonso Cuarón’s clever direction and Stuart Craig’s arresting production design, part of what made the third Harry Potter film not just a good Harry Potter film but a good film, period, was John Williams’s refreshingly mischievous score, a soundtrack that was quite removed from his previous efforts in the franchise. Double Trouble, a reworking of a famous spell cast by the Weird Sisters in William Shakespeare’s Macbeth, instantly became one of my favorite tracks in the entire Harry Potter film series of scores. The playful music coupled with the children’s choral singing was unexpectedly unforgettable. No wonder it ended up being the leitmotif for the soundtrack and hence one of the great composer’s most brilliant, if unfamiliar, accomplishments.

BoxClock If there’s one thing I really like playing with, that is, besides my navel, it’s time. I’m a sucker for stuff that deal with time, or rather, the amazing ways by which it is manipulated and by which its tremendous power is utilized for whatever reason. This is in part why a number of my favorite things happen to each have time at its core. My favorite movie? Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, with its time-turning deus ex machina. My favorite television show? Lost, with its time-traveling penultimate season. My favorite book? The Hours, with its time-skipping storyline. My favorite song? Time After Time, obviously. Kidding. I love playing with time. That’s the bottomline. And I particularly love playing with time on this little iPhone app called BoxClock. Nice segue, huh? And a long, fairly time-consuming one at that. BoxClock was developed by David Wicks originally as a Web toy. Taking advantage of the iPhone platform’s multitouch and accelerometer features, he later succeeded in porting the Web app into a working iPhone app, available in the iTunes App Store for less than a dollar. BoxClock is so named for the obvious reason that it displays boxes and for the not-so-obvious reason that it is, in fact, a clock. To read the time on this peculiar timepiece, you must correctly count the shaded bars in the background and the boxes currently displayed. The number of bars is the present hour while the number of boxes is equal to the minutes past the hour. Try the screenshot above. You should get 8:24. Got it? Awesome. However, I doubt you’ll turn to this thing to confirm if you’re indeed running late for an important date or if it’s almost time to watch another episode of Glee on JackTV. I myself don’t find it particularly useful as a clock. But as an iPhone app per se, I find it to be quite well done. The color scheme of the boxes and the background can be set on the app’s settings page. There you can adjust a set of sliders to come up with your color preferences. You can go plain black and white or you can just go crazy. The boxes can also be swiped and flicked around the screen. This is where the iPhone’s touch and tilt capabilities really come into play, and the resulting movements show just how meticulous the consideration of physics that went into the development of BoxClock was. No, with all due respect to David, BoxClock is far from being my favorite iPhone app. It is, however, my current favorite weapon in killing time, with its time-telling gradient bars and gravitating boxes.

BoxClock

If there’s one thing I really like playing with, that is, besides my navel, it’s time.

I’m a sucker for stuff that deal with time, or rather, the amazing ways by which it is manipulated and by which its tremendous power is utilized for whatever reason. This is in part why a number of my favorite things happen to each have time at its core. My favorite movie? Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, with its time-turning deus ex machina. My favorite television show? Lost, with its time-traveling penultimate season. My favorite book? The Hours, with its time-skipping storyline. My favorite song? Time After Time, obviously. Kidding.

I love playing with time. That’s the bottomline. And I particularly love playing with time on this little iPhone app called BoxClock. Nice segue, huh? And a long, fairly time-consuming one at that.

BoxClock was developed by David Wicks originally as a Web toy. Taking advantage of the iPhone platform’s multitouch and accelerometer features, he later succeeded in porting the Web app into a working iPhone app, available in the iTunes App Store for less than a dollar.

BoxClock is so named for the obvious reason that it displays boxes and for the not-so-obvious reason that it is, in fact, a clock. To read the time on this peculiar timepiece, you must correctly count the shaded bars in the background and the boxes currently displayed. The number of bars is the present hour while the number of boxes is equal to the minutes past the hour. Try the screenshot above. You should get 8:24. Got it? Awesome.

However, I doubt you’ll turn to this thing to confirm if you’re indeed running late for an important date or if it’s almost time to watch another episode of Glee on JackTV. I myself don’t find it particularly useful as a clock. But as an iPhone app per se, I find it to be quite well done.

The color scheme of the boxes and the background can be set on the app’s settings page. There you can adjust a set of sliders to come up with your color preferences. You can go plain black and white or you can just go crazy. The boxes can also be swiped and flicked around the screen. This is where the iPhone’s touch and tilt capabilities really come into play, and the resulting movements show just how meticulous the consideration of physics that went into the development of BoxClock was.

No, with all due respect to David, BoxClock is far from being my favorite iPhone app. It is, however, my current favorite weapon in killing time, with its time-telling gradient bars and gravitating boxes.