cryinghyena

So there Chris Columbus.

I think the Potter films are an entirely different experience for the people who have read the books and those who haven't. I've read them and was somewhat dissappointed by the first two films, and I'll tell you why. I think the movies were great in all the areas where Hollywood is traditionally really good, particularly visually. The movies looked great and it was obvious that a lot of people spent a lot of time creating every little detail that went on film. Where they suffered was the story, in the same way book to film translations always tend to suffer: they try to pack too much story into them... and be "too" faithful. In doing so they lose the "feel" of the original book. The first two Potter films really lacked the (for lack of a better word) magic that the books exuded from every page. Every scene seemed rushed to me because they had to keep the story moving at all times... and I never felt like the movies had a good pace to them, they just sprinted to get all the story across in the two hours they had to tell it.

J.K. Rowling has a writing style that is clever and stylish and fits the world she has created perfectly... and on film that style just doesn't come through at all. To me that writing style is just as important to the story as any of the characters themselves.

So that's why I was expecting more of the same for Potter # 3, but I was actually pleasantly surprised. While I don't think the movie necessarily captures Rowling's style, it at least has it's own style... I got a definite sense of pacing and something else that may sound strange... a sense of geography. By that I mean that I felt like in any given scene I knew where the characters were in relation to previous scenes... like Hogwarts was actually a physical place and not simply a bunch of unrelated sets. ( Can't say the same for # 1 or # 2) They really did a good job of keeping the crux of what I know was a long story (each successive book gets longer) together, and although many of the characters are still relatively one dimensional, for some reason it didn't bother me as much as in the previous films.

I've heard some people say that this was the "darkest" of the Potter movies, but I didn't feel that way at all... I bet if you watched all three back to back they'd be pretty similar. Visually I really think this film is superior to the previous two... from the art direction all the way down to the creature design. There were MANY shots where I really took note of how beautiful a shot they had arranged... and I have to say that John Williams' score complimented it well.

The film didn't strike me as too scary or intense for children, certainly no more or less than the previous films. (I think the next films are going to be very interesting, since the books become more and more adult in nature as they go along... I'm curious to see how they'll handle that.)

Unlike the previous two films where I caught myself checking my watch and massaging my sore butt... I got into this film and found myself laughing a few times at some of the clever gags which, while not absent from the first two films, were simply done better in this film.

So... overall, my longwinded rambling review gives # 3 an 8 out of 10. Kudos to the new Potter director, hopefully you'll keep Columbus strictly as a producer from here on out.

This film got it's press from the "inflammatory" title, but the ad campaign was aimed to put your butt in the movie seat, and it worked for this micro-budget movie... it ended up with a profit in Los Angeles alone. This was quite clever because the film got a much larger audience than it would have received otherwise, regardless of anyone's personal feelings. The ads were done so that any reasonably intelligent person could see the tongue-in-cheek manner in which the ad campaign was carried out, and those who couldn't, well... they'd probably go see the movie just so they could be even more angry.

So I went to see the movie, not so much because of the controversy, but to see how good a film had been put together. I was really disappointed. For as clever a campaign had been crafted to get people to see their movie, the filmmakers failed miserably at keeping them interested.

The storyline is not too terribly involving, and the "morality tale" message is really beat into your head with a hammer from the first minute all the way to the end. The acting is amateurish... it had a very distinct high school film project look and feel to it, and although I'm no stranger to low budget films... this one really looked bad. The film quality was so terribly grainy that it was distracting, and the attempts at "visual effects" even moreso. I would have been more impressed and they would have saved a few bucks if they'd left them out.

The coup d'etat... I fell asleep. And I had really wanted to like this movie... I went in having a really good feeling about it.

The film would probably have made a great half hour after school special or educational video, with all of the boring and tedious plot left out and all of the interesting factoids about the Mexican contribution to American culture left in. I know many of my Mexican friends who saw it got a kick out of some of the cultural in-jokes in the movie, but almost across the board they agree with me that the movie wasn't very good.

So there you go. If you have a burning desire to learn some fairly obvious facts about Mexican culture in California, jump right in. My feeling is that people who are ignorant to the information put forward in the film are probably not inclined to care or want to know anyway... but there's never any harm in trying to get the word out. All minorities in the U.S. have historically been mistreated and maligned, and if one were really inclined to learn some perspective about American treatment of Mexicans, Indians, Blacks, Asians... I would suggest a read of 'A People's History of the United States' by Howard Zinn. NOW THAT'S AN EYE OPENER.

Utterly unwatchable, totally mediocre and just insultingly bad. I wish a career of carwashing and tablewaiting on every person involved in the making of this "film"... an hour and a half of my life STOLEN from me.

If you want a bad horror movie filled with gore and camp laughs... go with Peter Jackson's schlocky bloodfest 'Dead Alive'... eminently more entertaining than this drek.

Pancakes? Pancakes!!!?? To be honest, I'd been warned about this movie and someone described the "pancakes" scene beforehand... but their description absolutely defied logic so I had to see it myself to make sure my pal hadn't been on an acid trip at the time. Much to my chagrin, he wasn't.

Eli Roth, while this movie may amuse you and your friends, you are a terrible filmmaker. I don't say this to be mean spirited, rather I consider it constructive criticism to someone who obviously hadn't been given any of that by anyone else. How did this crap slip through a major motion picture studio?!!!

Plot holes you could drive a Hummer through, annoyingly overwrought and stereotypical characters, just bad, bad, BAD! Movies like this make me angry because somewhere out there is a deserving filmmaker who can't get his worthwhile project off the ground while "Cabin Fever" gets greenlit.

The only advice I ever plan to give my children when they grow up is this: 1. Don't do drugs. and 2. Steer clear of 'Cabin Fever'.