{"id":315,"date":"2002-11-19T18:05:30","date_gmt":"2002-11-19T23:05:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/2002\/11\/19\/\/"},"modified":"2005-10-20T22:30:21","modified_gmt":"2005-10-21T02:30:21","slug":"chamber-of-secrets-lacking","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/2002\/11\/19\/chamber-of-secrets-lacking\/","title":{"rendered":"Chamber of Secrets Lacking"},"content":{"rendered":"<div style=\"clear:both;\"><\/div>\n<p>Mmm. So we saw CoS on Friday night.  There were parts I liked very much, parts I missed, and parts that made me fear greatly for poor PoA.  (There was also a very strange Coke commercial prior to the showing, which was discussed in some of the comments below.)<\/p>\n<p>The method of adaptation for these movies continues to trouble me.  It troubles me more that critics keep claiming that the movies are so very close to the books.  They&#8217;re not.  They&#8217;re not at all.  For all that it made pretty large omissions and alterations to the story, I would consider Fellowship a far more faithful adaptation of the text.  (The first version even; the extended is obviously so.)  When I watched FotR, I felt like the spirit of the book was there.  When I watched SS and CoS I felt like they had decided to illustrate random scenes that were loosely strung together.  Once again with CoS they have become bogged down in the frantic struggle to include as many incidents as possible and lost sight of the fact that character motivation and a coherent plotline are far and away more important.  I swear I could hear them in my head: Dessert scene &#8211; check! Escape scene &#8211; check! Flying car scene &#8211; check!.  I can forgive them for paring down the characters &#8212; secondary characters are secondary, after all.  But to drop a central issue of the book &#8212; namely, Harry&#8217;s issues with his celebrity, which come back to haunt him in both book 3 and 4 &#8212; was a mistake.   I also have to wonder at the Knockturn Alley sequence.  If Harry wasn&#8217;t going to see Lucius and Draco down there, why bother to include it at all?  Just to give Hermione an excuse to try and get arrested for underage magic?  They never played up on the fact that Hagrid was down there, nor did any of the Weasleys appear to care.  Overall, the movie was horribly disjointed.  What was there was done well, but what was missing&#8230;<\/p>\n<div style=\"clear:both; padding-bottom: 0.25em;\"><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Mmm. So we saw CoS on Friday night. There were parts I liked very much, parts I missed, and parts that made me fear greatly for poor PoA. (There was also a very strange Coke commercial prior to the showing, which was discussed in some of the comments below.) The method of adaptation for these [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3,5],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/315"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=315"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/315\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=315"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=315"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=315"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}