Very, very lazy weekend, much of which was spent playing with the shiny new iPod. Well, fixing up the ID3 metadata tags in my mp3 collection so that the iPod would display them in a reasonable manner. Well, that and playing GTA3, now that I’ve completed GTA:Vice City and am waiting for GTA:San Andreas to be released.
Saw Prisoner on Monday, which was fun and a welcome departure from the expositionary excesses of Chris Columbus. Very little squeeing of the drooling fangirls in the audience during the film itself, unlike the trailers. Yes, we had the Troy trailer, so there was the predictable “OMG LEGOLAS!!!” reaction.
Rather good Brit-filled cast, with notable performances from Gary Oldman and (especially) David Thewlis. The kids are growing up nicely, and Cuaron has got them to start acting like the schoolkids that they’re supposed to be. More importantly, he has also got Felton to slow down when speaking, drawl more and lose the ghastly (native, one assumes) South London accent. The screenplay was a good adaptation, being faithful to the spirit, not to the word, and the addition of some (gratuitously CGI) transition sequences seems to have banished the jarring season changes/passage-of-time cuts that the previous two films suffered from (e.g. we’re playing quidditch, and then it’s suddenly winter). Making Lupin a jazz fan was a lovely touch that, while not in the book canon, adds to the character immensely.
My only niggle of the entire film was that Buckbeak made clop-clop-clop noises when cantering before taking flight, whereas as any fule kno, an animal with the back legs of a horse and a bird’s legs up front should go click-clop-clop on cobblestones…