I weep that Ian McKellan is involved in The DaVinci Code.
Really? I figure that anything featuring Hanks, Tautou, and McKellan all in the same movie has to be good, no matter how bad the script. Indeed, it's probably a law of nature that the script has to be bad, because no movie can be that perfect.
And it makes my purist heart sad that you have only seen the HP movies rather than reading the books, but since my personal rule is I'll watch movies of stories I'm not willing to commit the time&energy to a book of, I definitely validate your choice.
I'm not a purist when it comes to adaptations; I recognize that the difference in media between book and movie will at times create drastic differences, and I want the story told in the best way whatever form with which I'm coming in contact can give me.
When I read Book 1, it actually reminded me a lot of the DaVinci Code (or was it vice versa): both books are mildly amusing, they're not bad, but neither are they the best of their genre.
I think the conflict isn't so much between JKR writing the books as mysteries and in some other way (say, character-driven) as in our reading them that way. When we play "How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth?"--which of course is the game upon which fandom is founded in a certain sense--there's a sense in which we're setting ourselves up as positivistic detectives, looking for some clear meaning in a text seeped in ambiguity. And when we do, we often miss the purloined letter which is hidden in clear sight.
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Really? I figure that anything featuring Hanks, Tautou, and McKellan all in the same movie has to be good, no matter how bad the script. Indeed, it's probably a law of nature that the script has to be bad, because no movie can be that perfect.
And it makes my purist heart sad that you have only seen the HP movies rather than reading the books, but since my personal rule is I'll watch movies of stories I'm not willing to commit the time&energy to a book of, I definitely validate your choice.
I'm not a purist when it comes to adaptations; I recognize that the difference in media between book and movie will at times create drastic differences, and I want the story told in the best way whatever form with which I'm coming in contact can give me.
When I read Book 1, it actually reminded me a lot of the DaVinci Code (or was it vice versa): both books are mildly amusing, they're not bad, but neither are they the best of their genre.
I think the conflict isn't so much between JKR writing the books as mysteries and in some other way (say, character-driven) as in our reading them that way. When we play "How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth?"--which of course is the game upon which fandom is founded in a certain sense--there's a sense in which we're setting ourselves up as positivistic detectives, looking for some clear meaning in a text seeped in ambiguity. And when we do, we often miss the purloined letter which is hidden in clear sight.