actually, sir, after all these years I just sort of go along with it
Saw Half-Blood Prince for the third time last night (hey, I never got to go see it in costume on opening night; I had to give my HP fangirlishness some kind of outlet), so by now I figure a review's probably in order :D
Together with OotP (which I love for being JKR's light social commentary at its strongest, funniest, and most successfully depressing, not to mention The Noble and Most Ancient House of Black and Snape's Worst Memory and oh god Neville's parents D:), HBP is my favourite of the 7 books. I love the Half-Blood Prince plot, and what it says about Snape and Harry and how they relate to each other; I love the prominence of Dumbledore. Apart from the Harry/Ginny, which I just cannot like no matter how hard I try, I like the silliness of the adolescent romance, and how the more serious side of the "Love Is Dangerous" theme is developed. The Pensieve is my absolute favourite form of magic in the whole series, and I am always up for trips to the Department of Backstory, so that plot structure suited me down to the ground. It's got my favourite ending of all of them; the scene with Dumbledore and Harry in the cave, and the final battle and confrontation with Snape just about kill me. I think it's got a great balance between darkness and jolly-hockey-sticks-ness, and although I know a lot of people dislike it for being a stop-gap, I'm very fond of the way it doesn't so much build momentum as let you soak in a web of Things That May Become Important Later.
Given that pretty much all these things were very much underplayed in the film, and that in addition HBP has some of my favourite lines of the whole damn series ('there's no need to call me "Sir", Professor' - 'I am not worried, Harry. I am with you.' - 'I am good-looking enough for ze both of us, I think!') and they left ALL OF THEM OUT, I should probably be in a bad mood with this film. And yet, I'm very much not. Because if you move away from standards based on fidelity (and I am an obedient fledgling adaptation theorist and toe the party line in doing so), it's actually a pretty good adaptation.
Instead of asking, how faithful is it to the original, there's two main questions that current theory suggests you ask an adaptation. The first one treats adaptation as an act of interpretation, and essentially asks, does the adaptation get the original? Does it understand its themes, its characters, its genres, the ways it makes meaning, even if it changes around the plot and the dialogue and so on? It can be a standard for judging changes as much as for judging what and how an adaptation tried to follow the original - the random as fuck "let's set fire to the Burrow even though we kind of need it intact for the next film" scene inserted in the middle, for example, reads as unsatisfying because it doesn't really represent any kind of interpretation of the books. It's just action for the sake of action.
Anyway, I think film!HBP did get the book, more than it didn't. There's some things it got fairly disastrously, inexplicably wrong and weird, for me. It's been six films now, and I have not grown to like Emma Watson as Hermione - if anything, I've actually become more and more convinced with every film that either she doesn't get the character, or the screenwriter doesn't. As just one example, although tbh I found the scene with her and DanRad post-the Ron&Lavender kiss kind of touching, the way Emma Watson played it didn't fit book!Hermione's character at all - Hermione's angry, repressed, visibly distressed and in total denial about it reaction in the book makes perfect sense with what else we know about her character, whereas film!Hermione's fairly honest acknowledgement of her feelings doesn't. Which ties in to my general dislike of how the films play the Ron/Hermione relationship full stop, actually. I love that ship. I find it absolutely gorgeous, and when they finally got together in DH I was totally heartwarmed. But the best thing about it is that the attraction and romantic tension between them doesn't define their friendship; it's just part of it. Whereas film!HBP (being the first one that actually dealt with the ship to any great degree, clearly figuring they probably should do something about it before film!DH) foregrounded the awkward, pigtail-pulling side of their relationship to such a degree that the friendship kind of got lost :/
Speaking of romance, Ginny is another character that I think film!HBP just did. not. get. Now, I don't particularly like Ginny; I don't think JKR achieved what she wanted to with her, and I don't think the screenwriters exactly had much to work with. But fuck, I don't know what they were working from when they wrote film!Ginny! This girl, who's outspoken and assertive and kind of blindly loyal and often wrongheaded and with a bit of a mean streak to her, somehow becomes some kind of wispy, almost coquettish flirt? And I see what they were trying to do with her and Harry, I really do, and god bless them for trying when the book relationship is as thin as it is - but they missed the mark completely with the scenes between them, IMO. JKR has always said, even if not always successfully shown, that the appeal of Ginny for Harry is that she's someone who can challenge him as well as support him - all we got in the film seemed to be someone seemingly determined to turn into Harry's mother :/ (of course, none of this was helped by the fact that pretty much any two actors on screen at the same time had more chemistry than DanRad and Bonnie Wright - I lost count of the number of Harry ships and Ginny ships that struck me as more plausible over the course of the film).
BUT. Balancing out that...well, where to start? For one, SLUGHORN. I know galvani still disagrees with me on this, but I thought film!Slughorn was particularly well-scripted, and that Jim Broadbent did a truly staggering job with his lines, to bring out every bit of the sad, pathetic, weak and yet very understandable and well-meaning old man that Slughorn is.
For another, DRACO. I know everyone and their mother have been raving about how good Tom Felton is in this, but adding another voice to the crowd because it's true. And what makes him so good, I think, is that he's really the only one of the kids (except maybe Rupert Grint, who I love more and more with every film) who can carry a scene without dialogue. He managed to show an incredible amount in those big scared eyes and twisted mouth of his, and stuff that was so very Draco Malfoy I was blown away - all the cowardice, all the fear, all the bravado and pride and arrogance, all the determination and anxiety and horror at what he's doing and becoming (absolute favourite adaptation decision: having Draco's trip to the bathroom for a cry be sparked off by seeing Katie Bell come back to the Great Hall, FUCK YES ABSOLUTELY SPOT ON).
Argh, tbh, there were almost too many things they got right character-wise for me to list. The friendship between Luna and Harry (and damn I shipped those two even harder in this than I did after film!OotP; unintended side-effect of giving Tonks's part on the train to Luna :D) makes me flail at how well they clearly understood it. I've heard a lot of people say that HBC plays Bellatrix as too mad, but if there is one character in the whole thing who is absolutely batfuck nuts and derangedly horrible, it is Bellatrix Lestrange, and though I normally dislike Helena Bonham-Carter I think the sheer lunacy she brings to the role is pretty much perfect. Alan Rickman will never be my Snape (to put it bluntly, he's just too damn old - Snape's pretty much defined for me by the fact that he's never managed to get a mature hold on a lot of his emotions, nor let go of his adolescence and teenage experiences), but with just tiny glances and eyebrow furrows and slight parts of his mouth he managed to get so much of the awful, awful inner conflict that Snape goes through in HBP across. The friendship between Harry and Ron was pitch-perfect (oh god, the scene where they fight over the potions books just MELTED me, <3). OH OH OH and MCCLAGGEN! :D :D :D Every BIT as vile as he is in the books; I loved him (and dissolved into giggles at the bit where he's sitting with his broom sticking out from between his legs).
The film reads theme very well, I think. In particular, it gave a wonderful reading of the weight of the invasion of Hogwarts, how it represents this shattering intrusion of the world of conflict and darkness and struggle into the world of these kids; I loved the attempts throughout the film to really emphasise the school-ness of the environment (Ron and Harry loitering in the corridors laughing at first years, the party in the Gryffindor common room, the pan down the Hogwarts Express at the start, the kids out after hours right at the end), and then the fact that when Bellatrix trails destruction through Hogwarts at the end, she chooses to trash and drain the light from the Great Hall (and that that really hits Draco hard, when he turns and looks at the dark, empty, broken Hall). In a similar vein, I thought the repeatedly staged contrasts between Draco on his lonely mission and the everyday life of the school and the teenagers within it were hugely effective.
Doesn't do as good a job with the exploration of love, though. It's kind of an inevitable result of cutting the Pensieve plot down so much (which also, I think, represents a flawed reading of the books, given the centrality of the idea of how strongly you need the past to understand the present within the series) - all the different representations of love in the books tie in with the two most obviously plot-relevant ones, Merope Gaunt's use of a love potion on Tom Riddle Sr., and Lily's love for Harry and the 'power Voldemort knows not' it confers on him, but without Merope's story the film's references to love potions and romance etc. seem a little bit random.
The other question, then, sees adaptation as a form of translation, and asks, how far does the adaptation 'get' the medium it's been adapted into? Does it have a good sense of why you even bothered adapting it in the first place, i.e., does it make the most of what a different medium offers in terms of the different ways it lets you tell the story? Most reviews I've seen seem to have said that this one works "as a film", where the others haven't so much - tbh, I'm a little more ambivalent about it than that, I think.
On the good side - one thing JKR has, despite her many flaws, is a great sense of place. She has a really strong sense of evocative locations and types of location in England (train stations, countryside villages, Barratt home cul-de-sacs like Privet Drive, old, old streets and old, old houses), and not inconsiderable skill at creating her own. Obviously, representing place is something that film's going to shine at, and film!HBP definitely did itself proud in that respect. Spinner's End in the pissing rain, Budleigh Babbington, Nocturne Alley, the cave, obviously Hogwarts, even the station that for some reason Harry is picking up girls in at the start - all awesomely shot, and great to see on screen. Most of the actors (Tom Felton and Alan Rickman especially, as I said), I say most because gdi DanRad and Emma Watson suck at the subtleties of acting without talking, made the most of how film lets you talk with your face, and there were some really brilliant moments of physicality - like Draco stepping slightly away from Greyback when Greyback arrives beside him on the Astronomy Tower, and Snape glancing at Harry when Dumbledore mentions Harry used a bezoar to save Ron. There was some great use of the composition of shots to articulate meaning, mostly involving Draco: the shot that shows him standing alone on the Astronomy Tower while you can see the Gryffindor party going on through the windows underneath him, and the one where he's tucked in an alcove at the side of the corridor decorated for Slughorn's party. And the thing that film maybe does best is the fact that it lets you replicate an act of perception in the viewer, which HBP used to great effect a couple of times - in the very opening scene, that replicates both Harry's dazedness in the wake of Sirius's death and in the face of the sudden media attention, and the starry-eyed, eager and feverish eyes of the journalists (DAMN I loved that scene, so well done!), and in the sloooow exploration of Slughorn's house.
BUT. At the same time, I thought there was quite a bit on the bad side. A lot of it, actually, comes from attempting to be TOO faithful to the books.
There's two main problems, I think, that HBP poses to film adaptation. The first is that of the later books, it's the book where the fact that JKR is at heart writing not just a fantasy, but a school story is most apparent and important. HBP is undeniably a school story (that's probably one of the reasons why I love it as much as I do; the school story is one of my all-time favourite genres of fiction), and it has certain structural features as a result of this - a very relaxed, meandering narrative structure; the couching of the plot in a lot of the everydayness of school life (important conversations taking place in the loo between classes, for example, rather than standing on a cliff overlooking the next obstacle, etc.); time and space for an awful lot of subplots and characters, among others. And none of these lend themselves well to the traditional structure of a 2hr+ film. Films tend to have either a much stronger narrative or a much narrower focus; where school stories do get filmed, you'll notice that they telescope the school experience down to (usually) some kind of central conflict or obstacle to be overcome like a board of governors threatening to shut the school down, or something. Film!HBP tries to replicate them, and for the most part it doesn't really work - in particular, it generates a) a lot of dialogue that feels kind of truncated or dislocated, dialogue that in the books would have been thoroughly settled in the verisimilitude of JKR's school setting, and which without that feels random and apropos of nothing (like Dumbledore's introduction of Slughorn, or Harry's attempts to talk about what Malfoy was doing in Borgin and Burke's, and so on), and b) a lot of tonal and registerial incongruities - mismatches between, say, the attempts to highlight important moments with an ~*epic*~ soundtrack, and the fact that the moments are taking place in a classroom or teacher's office.
The other problem, then, is related, and is the nature of HBP's plot structure. HBP doesn't have a strong narrative arc; what it has instead is ~500 pages of steadily accruing threads of information that may or may not be important or connected, and that you may not even notice you're picking up, and a conclusion that says, you are going to need everything you've just learned before too long. This does not film well. In the limited space you have, any hints you drop end up looking like anvils (the memory of Tom Riddle at the orphanage was a particularly egregious example of this), because the audience is aware that they must have been deliberately chosen. It's also pretty much impossible to get the volume of clues and details you can get into 500 pages of book into even a film as long as HBP, but then your plot revelations feel sort of floaty and a bit out of left-field. Film!HBP did its best to get around this - I mean, you can pick out three plot threads running through the book (the Pensieve and Horcrux plot, the question of what Draco and Snape are up to, the question of who is the Half-Blood Prince), and telescope the narrative down a bit like that, which HBP did do...but still, the arcs just feel thin without the pages and pages of (taking the Half-Blood Prince plot as an example, given that it was the one the film kind of fucked over) seeing how Harry relates to the Prince, how he projects onto the book his images of his father and Sirius, the ironies of how Harry feels he's learning so much from the Prince while claiming he learns nothing from Snape in DADA lessons, all the stuff, in other words, that makes them rich and full and makes them make sense.
And finally, I know most people have been raving about them, but the special effects and general visual flourishes, while gorgeous, mostly just annoyed me, primarily on the grounds of them seeming pretty gratuitous and like they'd only just learned what some of the buttons did on their editing software.
Generally, for me it's a pretty strong instalment. It suffers from all the niggling flaws that each of the films has so far - mostly canon-continuity and sense-making stuff, things like how film!McGonagall actually fucking mentions the requirement to be AT LEAST pretty good to be in the advanced Potions class, and then the film shows pretty much every single kid they bothered to cast in Harry's year in the classroom, or the fact that the Draught of Living Death is not a poison or actual death potion gdi, just all those tiny details that there's no reason to change or get wrong beyond not paying enough attention to the source material - and one fairly major one, which is Steve Kloves's pretty poor script. I do not like Kloves's dialogue (and I don't see why he rewrites so much of JKR's - if there's one thing the woman really can write, it's dialogue); I do not like the way he redistributes lines (I'm still bearing a grudge over him giving Hermione Dumbledore's important lines in CoS; ffs, I know she's the brightest witch of her age etc. etc., but there's no way she's plausibly got the level of insight and wisdom Dumbledore has), and I especially do not like the way he shafts Ron in every film he's done. I suspect one of the reasons OotP is my favourite of the films so far is that Steve Kloves didn't do the script :/ BUT, all that aside, I still had such a good time watching it; it made me flail with glee (the Love Potion scene! Harry on Felix Felicis! Snape escorting Draco out of Slughorn's party! ARTHUR WEASLEY!) far, far more often than it made me cringe (although the strength of the cringe induced by that fucking SHOELACE scene, ew ew ew EW NO GINNY DO NOT MAKE THE OEDIPAL THING ANY WORSE THAN IT ALREADY IS, definitely counts as more than one), and it made me excited for the next two.
Embarrassingly, this does not even come close to the volume of thoughts about this film that I have inflicted upon my nearest and dearest over the last few days. Which sort of brings me to the other thing I wanted to write about in this post.
With this film, all my Harry Potter fannishness has come flooding back. And that is quite a frightening prospect, because, well, HP is the fandom with which I have been involved the longest, the most thoroughly, and I think the most intensely. It's been a long time since I was active in it, but I've never stopped lurking - even these days, when Ace Attorney is my main fic inspiration and I'm starting to dabble in animanga and videogame fandoms, about 25% of the time I spend fannishly is spent with Harry Potter fic, meta, fanart. 90% of my experiences with fandom have been with the Harry Potter fandom - I was on yahoogroups (complete with an email account that got me into 18+ stuff), I had an account on Fiction Alley Park, I have written almost 150,000 words of fic. I have read the famous fics and the hidden gems, I have followed the BNFs and all the big fandom wanks, I have waited for OotP and HBP and DH with the fandom and read (and written) pages and pages of speculation about what they were going to contain, I have fought Snape's corner in forum debates and been a posturing Slytherfan. I have eagerly awaited updates of the Draco Trilogy, Underwater Light, Paradigm of Uncertainty, and saved them to my hard drive when I got them. I still have a folder somewhere filled with "intellislash", all the melodramatic aristotastic stuff people (including myself) used to write about Snape and Lucius and Riddle and the Death Eaters lounging around in hunting lodges and having sex on silk sheets. Sometimes, I still read it.
And I never get tired of it. Part of this is because the books pretty much define the fannish impulse for me. I read the first one when I was Harry's age, came out of it with a desperate crush on Professor Snape and an equally desperate desire to go to Hogwarts, and though I didn't discover fandom until after Goblet of Fire, the basic things that make something fandom-able for me were right there from the start. There are no characters - not even Ginny - that I wouldn't be interested in spending more time with, knowing more about. I never get tired of spending time with Harry, Ron and Hermione, with Sirius and Lupin and even James Potter, much as I loathe the bastard, with Snape and Dumbledore and McGonagall, with Arthur and Molly and Kingsley and Moody and Fleur and Draco and Lucius and Narcissa and I know I'm still forgetting some, and that's the amazing, wonderful thing! There are so many strong, complex, highly developed relationships between characters that I will give pretty much any ship a chance (notable exceptions: Snape/Hermione, Draco/Hermione, Harry/Ginny - but that might very well be the extent of it). It's an endlessly flexible and joyous world to play in, with so many cracks to explore. Which is another thing - I love the books as school stories + magic, I love the dialogue, I love the characters, I love her plots, but in many ways, JKR kind of fails. There's so much in her series that she doesn't do enough with, or doesn't do justice to, or does in a way that is profoundly unsatisfying, but for me that just makes them more fandom-able than something that's so good you don't want to touch it or take it apart or add to it. I just get so much fucking mileage from the books - I can talk about these characters and their motivations and their behaviours and their likely futures all day (I often do).
The other part of it is that, I know it's the poster child for the crazy fandom that no one who's not part of it will go near with a ten-foot pole (although good work, Twilight fandom, on deflecting the attention from us, I appreciate it), but even with all the wanks and the ~*Inner Circle*~ drama and the BNF infighting and the sheer volume of crap it somehow manages to produce, it is still the most satisfying fandom I have ever been in. No doubt because it's so terrifyingly large - even if you apply Sturgeon's Law to it, the 10% that is not crap is a vastly, vastly larger body of fic and art and meta than the 10% that is not crap in pretty much any other fandom. I love that I can spend about two minutes following links from a couple of journals or websites I'm familiar with and come up with a whole rec page of novel-length fics that I've never read before, or a new meta discussion, or an art gallery I've never come across before. The Ace Attorney fandom was and continues to be a huge shock to me in this respect; I still get frustrated at not having that volume of fic at my fingertips for it. I love, too, that the stuff in the HP fandom that's really good is really very very good - it doesn't shock me that people like sarahtales and ladyjaida have got professional publishing deals, because fics like If You've A Ready Mind and Quality of Mercy (tbh I actually enjoyed QoM more than I enjoyed DH ¬_¬) and Shoebox were just that good.
HBP made me realise, I suppose, what a huge part of my life these books have actually been, and how much I love them for it - because I do, even as I pick at them and laugh at them and WTF at them. I imagine I probably always will.
In other, less tl;dr news: at last, I got the 100% final, not going to take it away from you at the last minute, confirmation that as of October 1st, I am indeed going to have a full AHRC studentship. Fees paid, and then according to the rates on their website for the 2009/10 academic year, a maintenance grant that works out at about £1100 a month - until September 2011 at least, and possibly until September 2012. I have never had anything approaching this kind of money in my life. It's an actual salary, and not a bad one - and as I write this article for publication it's slowly dawning on me that I really am starting a career, I really am doing what I've wanted to for a long time now. It's a happy thought.
Together with OotP (which I love for being JKR's light social commentary at its strongest, funniest, and most successfully depressing, not to mention The Noble and Most Ancient House of Black and Snape's Worst Memory and oh god Neville's parents D:), HBP is my favourite of the 7 books. I love the Half-Blood Prince plot, and what it says about Snape and Harry and how they relate to each other; I love the prominence of Dumbledore. Apart from the Harry/Ginny, which I just cannot like no matter how hard I try, I like the silliness of the adolescent romance, and how the more serious side of the "Love Is Dangerous" theme is developed. The Pensieve is my absolute favourite form of magic in the whole series, and I am always up for trips to the Department of Backstory, so that plot structure suited me down to the ground. It's got my favourite ending of all of them; the scene with Dumbledore and Harry in the cave, and the final battle and confrontation with Snape just about kill me. I think it's got a great balance between darkness and jolly-hockey-sticks-ness, and although I know a lot of people dislike it for being a stop-gap, I'm very fond of the way it doesn't so much build momentum as let you soak in a web of Things That May Become Important Later.
Given that pretty much all these things were very much underplayed in the film, and that in addition HBP has some of my favourite lines of the whole damn series ('there's no need to call me "Sir", Professor' - 'I am not worried, Harry. I am with you.' - 'I am good-looking enough for ze both of us, I think!') and they left ALL OF THEM OUT, I should probably be in a bad mood with this film. And yet, I'm very much not. Because if you move away from standards based on fidelity (and I am an obedient fledgling adaptation theorist and toe the party line in doing so), it's actually a pretty good adaptation.
Instead of asking, how faithful is it to the original, there's two main questions that current theory suggests you ask an adaptation. The first one treats adaptation as an act of interpretation, and essentially asks, does the adaptation get the original? Does it understand its themes, its characters, its genres, the ways it makes meaning, even if it changes around the plot and the dialogue and so on? It can be a standard for judging changes as much as for judging what and how an adaptation tried to follow the original - the random as fuck "let's set fire to the Burrow even though we kind of need it intact for the next film" scene inserted in the middle, for example, reads as unsatisfying because it doesn't really represent any kind of interpretation of the books. It's just action for the sake of action.
Anyway, I think film!HBP did get the book, more than it didn't. There's some things it got fairly disastrously, inexplicably wrong and weird, for me. It's been six films now, and I have not grown to like Emma Watson as Hermione - if anything, I've actually become more and more convinced with every film that either she doesn't get the character, or the screenwriter doesn't. As just one example, although tbh I found the scene with her and DanRad post-the Ron&Lavender kiss kind of touching, the way Emma Watson played it didn't fit book!Hermione's character at all - Hermione's angry, repressed, visibly distressed and in total denial about it reaction in the book makes perfect sense with what else we know about her character, whereas film!Hermione's fairly honest acknowledgement of her feelings doesn't. Which ties in to my general dislike of how the films play the Ron/Hermione relationship full stop, actually. I love that ship. I find it absolutely gorgeous, and when they finally got together in DH I was totally heartwarmed. But the best thing about it is that the attraction and romantic tension between them doesn't define their friendship; it's just part of it. Whereas film!HBP (being the first one that actually dealt with the ship to any great degree, clearly figuring they probably should do something about it before film!DH) foregrounded the awkward, pigtail-pulling side of their relationship to such a degree that the friendship kind of got lost :/
Speaking of romance, Ginny is another character that I think film!HBP just did. not. get. Now, I don't particularly like Ginny; I don't think JKR achieved what she wanted to with her, and I don't think the screenwriters exactly had much to work with. But fuck, I don't know what they were working from when they wrote film!Ginny! This girl, who's outspoken and assertive and kind of blindly loyal and often wrongheaded and with a bit of a mean streak to her, somehow becomes some kind of wispy, almost coquettish flirt? And I see what they were trying to do with her and Harry, I really do, and god bless them for trying when the book relationship is as thin as it is - but they missed the mark completely with the scenes between them, IMO. JKR has always said, even if not always successfully shown, that the appeal of Ginny for Harry is that she's someone who can challenge him as well as support him - all we got in the film seemed to be someone seemingly determined to turn into Harry's mother :/ (of course, none of this was helped by the fact that pretty much any two actors on screen at the same time had more chemistry than DanRad and Bonnie Wright - I lost count of the number of Harry ships and Ginny ships that struck me as more plausible over the course of the film).
BUT. Balancing out that...well, where to start? For one, SLUGHORN. I know galvani still disagrees with me on this, but I thought film!Slughorn was particularly well-scripted, and that Jim Broadbent did a truly staggering job with his lines, to bring out every bit of the sad, pathetic, weak and yet very understandable and well-meaning old man that Slughorn is.
For another, DRACO. I know everyone and their mother have been raving about how good Tom Felton is in this, but adding another voice to the crowd because it's true. And what makes him so good, I think, is that he's really the only one of the kids (except maybe Rupert Grint, who I love more and more with every film) who can carry a scene without dialogue. He managed to show an incredible amount in those big scared eyes and twisted mouth of his, and stuff that was so very Draco Malfoy I was blown away - all the cowardice, all the fear, all the bravado and pride and arrogance, all the determination and anxiety and horror at what he's doing and becoming (absolute favourite adaptation decision: having Draco's trip to the bathroom for a cry be sparked off by seeing Katie Bell come back to the Great Hall, FUCK YES ABSOLUTELY SPOT ON).
Argh, tbh, there were almost too many things they got right character-wise for me to list. The friendship between Luna and Harry (and damn I shipped those two even harder in this than I did after film!OotP; unintended side-effect of giving Tonks's part on the train to Luna :D) makes me flail at how well they clearly understood it. I've heard a lot of people say that HBC plays Bellatrix as too mad, but if there is one character in the whole thing who is absolutely batfuck nuts and derangedly horrible, it is Bellatrix Lestrange, and though I normally dislike Helena Bonham-Carter I think the sheer lunacy she brings to the role is pretty much perfect. Alan Rickman will never be my Snape (to put it bluntly, he's just too damn old - Snape's pretty much defined for me by the fact that he's never managed to get a mature hold on a lot of his emotions, nor let go of his adolescence and teenage experiences), but with just tiny glances and eyebrow furrows and slight parts of his mouth he managed to get so much of the awful, awful inner conflict that Snape goes through in HBP across. The friendship between Harry and Ron was pitch-perfect (oh god, the scene where they fight over the potions books just MELTED me, <3). OH OH OH and MCCLAGGEN! :D :D :D Every BIT as vile as he is in the books; I loved him (and dissolved into giggles at the bit where he's sitting with his broom sticking out from between his legs).
The film reads theme very well, I think. In particular, it gave a wonderful reading of the weight of the invasion of Hogwarts, how it represents this shattering intrusion of the world of conflict and darkness and struggle into the world of these kids; I loved the attempts throughout the film to really emphasise the school-ness of the environment (Ron and Harry loitering in the corridors laughing at first years, the party in the Gryffindor common room, the pan down the Hogwarts Express at the start, the kids out after hours right at the end), and then the fact that when Bellatrix trails destruction through Hogwarts at the end, she chooses to trash and drain the light from the Great Hall (and that that really hits Draco hard, when he turns and looks at the dark, empty, broken Hall). In a similar vein, I thought the repeatedly staged contrasts between Draco on his lonely mission and the everyday life of the school and the teenagers within it were hugely effective.
Doesn't do as good a job with the exploration of love, though. It's kind of an inevitable result of cutting the Pensieve plot down so much (which also, I think, represents a flawed reading of the books, given the centrality of the idea of how strongly you need the past to understand the present within the series) - all the different representations of love in the books tie in with the two most obviously plot-relevant ones, Merope Gaunt's use of a love potion on Tom Riddle Sr., and Lily's love for Harry and the 'power Voldemort knows not' it confers on him, but without Merope's story the film's references to love potions and romance etc. seem a little bit random.
The other question, then, sees adaptation as a form of translation, and asks, how far does the adaptation 'get' the medium it's been adapted into? Does it have a good sense of why you even bothered adapting it in the first place, i.e., does it make the most of what a different medium offers in terms of the different ways it lets you tell the story? Most reviews I've seen seem to have said that this one works "as a film", where the others haven't so much - tbh, I'm a little more ambivalent about it than that, I think.
On the good side - one thing JKR has, despite her many flaws, is a great sense of place. She has a really strong sense of evocative locations and types of location in England (train stations, countryside villages, Barratt home cul-de-sacs like Privet Drive, old, old streets and old, old houses), and not inconsiderable skill at creating her own. Obviously, representing place is something that film's going to shine at, and film!HBP definitely did itself proud in that respect. Spinner's End in the pissing rain, Budleigh Babbington, Nocturne Alley, the cave, obviously Hogwarts, even the station that for some reason Harry is picking up girls in at the start - all awesomely shot, and great to see on screen. Most of the actors (Tom Felton and Alan Rickman especially, as I said), I say most because gdi DanRad and Emma Watson suck at the subtleties of acting without talking, made the most of how film lets you talk with your face, and there were some really brilliant moments of physicality - like Draco stepping slightly away from Greyback when Greyback arrives beside him on the Astronomy Tower, and Snape glancing at Harry when Dumbledore mentions Harry used a bezoar to save Ron. There was some great use of the composition of shots to articulate meaning, mostly involving Draco: the shot that shows him standing alone on the Astronomy Tower while you can see the Gryffindor party going on through the windows underneath him, and the one where he's tucked in an alcove at the side of the corridor decorated for Slughorn's party. And the thing that film maybe does best is the fact that it lets you replicate an act of perception in the viewer, which HBP used to great effect a couple of times - in the very opening scene, that replicates both Harry's dazedness in the wake of Sirius's death and in the face of the sudden media attention, and the starry-eyed, eager and feverish eyes of the journalists (DAMN I loved that scene, so well done!), and in the sloooow exploration of Slughorn's house.
BUT. At the same time, I thought there was quite a bit on the bad side. A lot of it, actually, comes from attempting to be TOO faithful to the books.
There's two main problems, I think, that HBP poses to film adaptation. The first is that of the later books, it's the book where the fact that JKR is at heart writing not just a fantasy, but a school story is most apparent and important. HBP is undeniably a school story (that's probably one of the reasons why I love it as much as I do; the school story is one of my all-time favourite genres of fiction), and it has certain structural features as a result of this - a very relaxed, meandering narrative structure; the couching of the plot in a lot of the everydayness of school life (important conversations taking place in the loo between classes, for example, rather than standing on a cliff overlooking the next obstacle, etc.); time and space for an awful lot of subplots and characters, among others. And none of these lend themselves well to the traditional structure of a 2hr+ film. Films tend to have either a much stronger narrative or a much narrower focus; where school stories do get filmed, you'll notice that they telescope the school experience down to (usually) some kind of central conflict or obstacle to be overcome like a board of governors threatening to shut the school down, or something. Film!HBP tries to replicate them, and for the most part it doesn't really work - in particular, it generates a) a lot of dialogue that feels kind of truncated or dislocated, dialogue that in the books would have been thoroughly settled in the verisimilitude of JKR's school setting, and which without that feels random and apropos of nothing (like Dumbledore's introduction of Slughorn, or Harry's attempts to talk about what Malfoy was doing in Borgin and Burke's, and so on), and b) a lot of tonal and registerial incongruities - mismatches between, say, the attempts to highlight important moments with an ~*epic*~ soundtrack, and the fact that the moments are taking place in a classroom or teacher's office.
The other problem, then, is related, and is the nature of HBP's plot structure. HBP doesn't have a strong narrative arc; what it has instead is ~500 pages of steadily accruing threads of information that may or may not be important or connected, and that you may not even notice you're picking up, and a conclusion that says, you are going to need everything you've just learned before too long. This does not film well. In the limited space you have, any hints you drop end up looking like anvils (the memory of Tom Riddle at the orphanage was a particularly egregious example of this), because the audience is aware that they must have been deliberately chosen. It's also pretty much impossible to get the volume of clues and details you can get into 500 pages of book into even a film as long as HBP, but then your plot revelations feel sort of floaty and a bit out of left-field. Film!HBP did its best to get around this - I mean, you can pick out three plot threads running through the book (the Pensieve and Horcrux plot, the question of what Draco and Snape are up to, the question of who is the Half-Blood Prince), and telescope the narrative down a bit like that, which HBP did do...but still, the arcs just feel thin without the pages and pages of (taking the Half-Blood Prince plot as an example, given that it was the one the film kind of fucked over) seeing how Harry relates to the Prince, how he projects onto the book his images of his father and Sirius, the ironies of how Harry feels he's learning so much from the Prince while claiming he learns nothing from Snape in DADA lessons, all the stuff, in other words, that makes them rich and full and makes them make sense.
And finally, I know most people have been raving about them, but the special effects and general visual flourishes, while gorgeous, mostly just annoyed me, primarily on the grounds of them seeming pretty gratuitous and like they'd only just learned what some of the buttons did on their editing software.
Generally, for me it's a pretty strong instalment. It suffers from all the niggling flaws that each of the films has so far - mostly canon-continuity and sense-making stuff, things like how film!McGonagall actually fucking mentions the requirement to be AT LEAST pretty good to be in the advanced Potions class, and then the film shows pretty much every single kid they bothered to cast in Harry's year in the classroom, or the fact that the Draught of Living Death is not a poison or actual death potion gdi, just all those tiny details that there's no reason to change or get wrong beyond not paying enough attention to the source material - and one fairly major one, which is Steve Kloves's pretty poor script. I do not like Kloves's dialogue (and I don't see why he rewrites so much of JKR's - if there's one thing the woman really can write, it's dialogue); I do not like the way he redistributes lines (I'm still bearing a grudge over him giving Hermione Dumbledore's important lines in CoS; ffs, I know she's the brightest witch of her age etc. etc., but there's no way she's plausibly got the level of insight and wisdom Dumbledore has), and I especially do not like the way he shafts Ron in every film he's done. I suspect one of the reasons OotP is my favourite of the films so far is that Steve Kloves didn't do the script :/ BUT, all that aside, I still had such a good time watching it; it made me flail with glee (the Love Potion scene! Harry on Felix Felicis! Snape escorting Draco out of Slughorn's party! ARTHUR WEASLEY!) far, far more often than it made me cringe (although the strength of the cringe induced by that fucking SHOELACE scene, ew ew ew EW NO GINNY DO NOT MAKE THE OEDIPAL THING ANY WORSE THAN IT ALREADY IS, definitely counts as more than one), and it made me excited for the next two.
Embarrassingly, this does not even come close to the volume of thoughts about this film that I have inflicted upon my nearest and dearest over the last few days. Which sort of brings me to the other thing I wanted to write about in this post.
With this film, all my Harry Potter fannishness has come flooding back. And that is quite a frightening prospect, because, well, HP is the fandom with which I have been involved the longest, the most thoroughly, and I think the most intensely. It's been a long time since I was active in it, but I've never stopped lurking - even these days, when Ace Attorney is my main fic inspiration and I'm starting to dabble in animanga and videogame fandoms, about 25% of the time I spend fannishly is spent with Harry Potter fic, meta, fanart. 90% of my experiences with fandom have been with the Harry Potter fandom - I was on yahoogroups (complete with an email account that got me into 18+ stuff), I had an account on Fiction Alley Park, I have written almost 150,000 words of fic. I have read the famous fics and the hidden gems, I have followed the BNFs and all the big fandom wanks, I have waited for OotP and HBP and DH with the fandom and read (and written) pages and pages of speculation about what they were going to contain, I have fought Snape's corner in forum debates and been a posturing Slytherfan. I have eagerly awaited updates of the Draco Trilogy, Underwater Light, Paradigm of Uncertainty, and saved them to my hard drive when I got them. I still have a folder somewhere filled with "intellislash", all the melodramatic aristotastic stuff people (including myself) used to write about Snape and Lucius and Riddle and the Death Eaters lounging around in hunting lodges and having sex on silk sheets. Sometimes, I still read it.
And I never get tired of it. Part of this is because the books pretty much define the fannish impulse for me. I read the first one when I was Harry's age, came out of it with a desperate crush on Professor Snape and an equally desperate desire to go to Hogwarts, and though I didn't discover fandom until after Goblet of Fire, the basic things that make something fandom-able for me were right there from the start. There are no characters - not even Ginny - that I wouldn't be interested in spending more time with, knowing more about. I never get tired of spending time with Harry, Ron and Hermione, with Sirius and Lupin and even James Potter, much as I loathe the bastard, with Snape and Dumbledore and McGonagall, with Arthur and Molly and Kingsley and Moody and Fleur and Draco and Lucius and Narcissa and I know I'm still forgetting some, and that's the amazing, wonderful thing! There are so many strong, complex, highly developed relationships between characters that I will give pretty much any ship a chance (notable exceptions: Snape/Hermione, Draco/Hermione, Harry/Ginny - but that might very well be the extent of it). It's an endlessly flexible and joyous world to play in, with so many cracks to explore. Which is another thing - I love the books as school stories + magic, I love the dialogue, I love the characters, I love her plots, but in many ways, JKR kind of fails. There's so much in her series that she doesn't do enough with, or doesn't do justice to, or does in a way that is profoundly unsatisfying, but for me that just makes them more fandom-able than something that's so good you don't want to touch it or take it apart or add to it. I just get so much fucking mileage from the books - I can talk about these characters and their motivations and their behaviours and their likely futures all day (I often do).
The other part of it is that, I know it's the poster child for the crazy fandom that no one who's not part of it will go near with a ten-foot pole (although good work, Twilight fandom, on deflecting the attention from us, I appreciate it), but even with all the wanks and the ~*Inner Circle*~ drama and the BNF infighting and the sheer volume of crap it somehow manages to produce, it is still the most satisfying fandom I have ever been in. No doubt because it's so terrifyingly large - even if you apply Sturgeon's Law to it, the 10% that is not crap is a vastly, vastly larger body of fic and art and meta than the 10% that is not crap in pretty much any other fandom. I love that I can spend about two minutes following links from a couple of journals or websites I'm familiar with and come up with a whole rec page of novel-length fics that I've never read before, or a new meta discussion, or an art gallery I've never come across before. The Ace Attorney fandom was and continues to be a huge shock to me in this respect; I still get frustrated at not having that volume of fic at my fingertips for it. I love, too, that the stuff in the HP fandom that's really good is really very very good - it doesn't shock me that people like sarahtales and ladyjaida have got professional publishing deals, because fics like If You've A Ready Mind and Quality of Mercy (tbh I actually enjoyed QoM more than I enjoyed DH ¬_¬) and Shoebox were just that good.
HBP made me realise, I suppose, what a huge part of my life these books have actually been, and how much I love them for it - because I do, even as I pick at them and laugh at them and WTF at them. I imagine I probably always will.
In other, less tl;dr news: at last, I got the 100% final, not going to take it away from you at the last minute, confirmation that as of October 1st, I am indeed going to have a full AHRC studentship. Fees paid, and then according to the rates on their website for the 2009/10 academic year, a maintenance grant that works out at about £1100 a month - until September 2011 at least, and possibly until September 2012. I have never had anything approaching this kind of money in my life. It's an actual salary, and not a bad one - and as I write this article for publication it's slowly dawning on me that I really am starting a career, I really am doing what I've wanted to for a long time now. It's a happy thought.