HARRY POTTER AND THE GOBLET OF FIRE

This is, as you all know, the fourth Harry Potter movie. The book was the biggest Harry Potter book at the time, by several hundred pages. "The Goblet of Fire" is the absolute turning point of the series, both literary and cinematic. As you're all tired of hearing, it's much darker and more serious than the previous ones.

We saw the film on the Saturday night after it opened. Needless to say, the theater was PACKED. We picked a seat too close to the front and settled in. There was a trailer for a horrible looking film called HAPPY FEET and another for a horrible looking film called THE SHAGGY DOG, during both of which, the audience howled with laughter. A dog knocked over an old lady! BWAAA HA HA HAAA! A penguin was break dancing! WAAA HAAAAAA!!!!! Ugh. I felt so out of place. This was a 7:30pm show of a PG-13 movie and the audience was mostly adults, laughing likee hyenas at the stupidest crap imaginable. Then we realized the number of little kids in the audience. Like, LITTLE kids. Like, 3 year olds. I've always maintained that the appropriate age of Harry Potter books and movies was roughly Harry's age in the books. That is to say, 11 years old or so is appropriate for the first book. And this movie, the fourth, is PG-13, and therefore appropriate for roughly 13-14 year olds. All the movies have their share of scariness and adult themes, but this one is almost completely devoid of whimsy and chock full of horribleness, including two deaths. Not to mention, of course, the fact that kids under 7 tend to talk in movies. A LOT. So yeah, the kids yammered on throughout most of the movie and we somwhat discretely decried the bad parenting involved.

So how was the movie? Well, it was good. It wasn't amazing, but it was damn good. Why not perfect? Because it assumed you read the book already. See, the book was over 700 pages long and crammed a LOT of stuff into it. For the 2 and a half hour movie, a lot was cut out. The problem was not with what was cut, but with how the remaining pieces stuck together. It seemed like a 4-hour movie was made and then 90 minutes was quickly cut out. If you didn't read the book, I imagine it was very confusing. It seemed like a bunch of scenes strung together with no real flow.

That said, the visuals were pretty amazing, as usual. The actors were all excellent. The movie was pretty emotional and dark, but the humor that DID come through was appropriate and effective. Not like in Lord of the Rings. I hated how Gimli, in LOTR, was reduced to a comic relief that felt very stuck in. The "jokes" in HP4 felt very natural.

So, in a nutshell, this was a very good visualization of the book, but I think it could have been better by being 30 minutes longer and explaining a bit more and creating more of a narrative flow.

Oh yeah, there was a trailer for THE LADY IN THE WATER that was a hell of a good teaser. It definitely made me interested in the film, even though it's by M. Night "I had one good movie in me" Shyamalan.