Speaking of Harry Potter

Watching Goblet of Fire right now, and boy, it is a bad movie. I tried watching it a week or two ago and turned it off in irritation, because it was just too different from the book. As is the case with most adaptations, it's understandable that plot elements would be cut; what's unacceptable is the changing of motivations and intentions and the addition or extension of scenes which were not written. I mean, if you're already strapped for time fitting in plot lines and characters (Ludo Bagman has been cut entirely, as has Dobby and the whole house elf sub-plot), why are you wasting time adding in shit that wasn't originally written and isn't as good?

There's deeper limitation, however, and it's the first time I'd noticed it in these movies - the casting is simply too weak. Now that the kids have to actually demonstrate some sort of depth to their characters, their lack of ability/training is really starting to show. Even the adults cast as the teachers seem to be getting a bit tired, squeaking out moments here and there, but otherwise slogging their way through another paycheck.

I wonder, as I watch this, how many of the actors have actually read the books. This might sound like an odd thing to think about; one might assume that the first thing any actor in an adaption would do is read the source material, but actors and directors frequently go into productions without having done so, whether out of indifference or a desire to approach the material without bias.

Speaking of reading books:

1. The Complete Poems, Anne Sexton
2. On the Road, Jack Kerouac
3. High Fidelity, Nick Hornby
4. Kafka on the Shore, Haruki Murakami
5. Sideways, Rex Pickett
6. The Shipping News, Annie Proulx
7. Le Morte D'Arthur, Sir Thomas Malory
8. Trainspotting, Irvine Welsh
9. The Sonnets, William Shakespeare
10. To The Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf
11. The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
12. A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, Yiyun Li
13. interpreter of maladies, Jhumpa Lahiri
14. The Neverending Story, Michael Ende
15. Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf
16. Norwegian Wood, Haruki Murakami
17. Blink, Malcolm Gladwell
18. The Lexus and the Olive Tree, Thomas Friedman
19. The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell
20. the namesake, Jhumpa Lahiri
21. Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro
22. seven types of ambiguity, Eliot Perlman
23. Unhooked Generation, Jillian Straus
24. Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, John Perkins
25. The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand
26. This Book Will Save Your Life, A. M. Homes
27. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce
28. Youth in Revolt, C.D. Payne
29. jPod, Douglas Coupland
30. The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, Rainer Maria Rilke
31. History of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides
32. Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller
33. Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life, John Lee Anderson
34. No Acting Please, Eric Morris
35. In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, Marcel Proust
36. Kate: The Woman Who Was Hepburn, William J. Mann
37. The 9/11 Commission Report, Various
38. The Aeneid, Virgil
39. Istanbul: Memories of a City, Orhan Pamuk
40. No Logo, Naomi Klein
41. Jimmy Stewart, Marc Eliot
42. An Illustrated Short History of Progress, Ronald Wright
43. Peter Pan, J.M. Barrie

The way Mr. Darling won her was this: the many gentlemen who had been boys when she was a girl discovered simultaneously that they loved her, and they all ran to her house to propose to her except Mr. Darling, who took a cab and nipped in first, and so he got her. He got all of her, except the innermost box and the kiss. He never knew about the box, and in time he gave up trying for the kiss.

Is it just me, or is that a pretty darn accurate description of marriage?