Star Wars, Harry Potter
Nov. 10th, 2001 01:11 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
robotech_masterWell, today was the Big Day, when owners of the Star Wars Episode One DVD would have the special super secret trailer movie thing unlocked for viewing. Owners with Windows computers, anyway, since the DVD uses that damnably crash-prone Interactual Player software to access such special features and verify that the DVD is actually in the drive.
All very well in theory. But in actual practice, it didn't work out that well--as the movie trailer would reliably crash Interactual Player, and, for that matter, Internet Explorer itself, when it reached a certain point in the movie. (For me and for some others, at least--including the folks at The Digital Bits.) Not to mention the Mac users, for whom there is no Interactual equivalent. Ironic, given that the movie itself is presented in Quicktime in the first place.
(Well, (Inter)actually, there is an option for Mac users; Lucasfilms put it up just today. If you have a Mac, the DVD, and the desire to see the trailer, go here.)
Anyway, given that the movie just wasn't playing for me, and I wanted to see the whole thing, I finally just went to alt.binaries.starwars and uudecoded someone's posting of it in mpeg form. Upon watching the whole thing...well, it's quite nice. I bet it's going to be dissected frame by frame for the next week or so--at least until another one appears in front of Harry Potter. (Or will it be the same one?)
Harry Potter...another one I'm looking forward to. I just finished listening to my MP3s of the audiobook of Stephen Frye reading Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, in preparation for seeing the movie, a week from now. I hadn't ever listened to that one all the way, just having heard the Jim Dale version. They're both really quite good, and in particular it was interesting to hear the English slang terms come out in this reading--like "Hoovering" for "vacuuming" and so forth. Again, I couldn't help but be struck by the incredible amount of detail and foreplotting that Miss Rowling snuck into these books...when you go back and reread them, after having read all of them, you really do get so much more out of them.
As for the movie...well, it's going to be all of two and a half hours long, an utterly unheard-of length for a kids' movie these days. I gained a lot of respect back for Chris Columbus, the director, when I heard he'd said something to the effect of, "If kids can read a 700 page book, then they can sit through a two and a half hour movie." I like that attitude.
Even so, some things did have to be cut; some characters may not appear in the movie. One of which could be Peeves, the Poultergeist. Which is a little sad, given that he's an interesting character and becomes a bit more important in future volumes. But at least the cut scenes will undoubtedly appear on the DVD.
Some fans will be disappointed, though. There seems to be a rumor circulating on the Harry Potter newsgroup that there's going to be a four-hour cut of the film, sparked by an Ananova article back in September. There was a big discussion thread in the newsgroup about the DVD, and whether they'd do one or two discs to fit all the movie stuff on there...the problem is, according to a later interview with the film's director, there never was a four hour version. This is how rumors get started...and ironically, they never seem to die as easily. Just as happened with Lynch's Dune movie, I bet years from now there will still be people trying to find copies of the "four hour director's cut" that they heard existed but doesn't really.
Two and a half hours...wow. Still...the Harry Potter books only get longer with each volume, until the fourth is literally two inches thick. How are they going to put Goblet of Fire into the theater without losing stuff? Make it four hours with an intermission in the middle, like Branaugh's Hamlet? One can only hope.
All very well in theory. But in actual practice, it didn't work out that well--as the movie trailer would reliably crash Interactual Player, and, for that matter, Internet Explorer itself, when it reached a certain point in the movie. (For me and for some others, at least--including the folks at The Digital Bits.) Not to mention the Mac users, for whom there is no Interactual equivalent. Ironic, given that the movie itself is presented in Quicktime in the first place.
(Well, (Inter)actually, there is an option for Mac users; Lucasfilms put it up just today. If you have a Mac, the DVD, and the desire to see the trailer, go here.)
Anyway, given that the movie just wasn't playing for me, and I wanted to see the whole thing, I finally just went to alt.binaries.starwars and uudecoded someone's posting of it in mpeg form. Upon watching the whole thing...well, it's quite nice. I bet it's going to be dissected frame by frame for the next week or so--at least until another one appears in front of Harry Potter. (Or will it be the same one?)
Harry Potter...another one I'm looking forward to. I just finished listening to my MP3s of the audiobook of Stephen Frye reading Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, in preparation for seeing the movie, a week from now. I hadn't ever listened to that one all the way, just having heard the Jim Dale version. They're both really quite good, and in particular it was interesting to hear the English slang terms come out in this reading--like "Hoovering" for "vacuuming" and so forth. Again, I couldn't help but be struck by the incredible amount of detail and foreplotting that Miss Rowling snuck into these books...when you go back and reread them, after having read all of them, you really do get so much more out of them.
As for the movie...well, it's going to be all of two and a half hours long, an utterly unheard-of length for a kids' movie these days. I gained a lot of respect back for Chris Columbus, the director, when I heard he'd said something to the effect of, "If kids can read a 700 page book, then they can sit through a two and a half hour movie." I like that attitude.
Even so, some things did have to be cut; some characters may not appear in the movie. One of which could be Peeves, the Poultergeist. Which is a little sad, given that he's an interesting character and becomes a bit more important in future volumes. But at least the cut scenes will undoubtedly appear on the DVD.
Some fans will be disappointed, though. There seems to be a rumor circulating on the Harry Potter newsgroup that there's going to be a four-hour cut of the film, sparked by an Ananova article back in September. There was a big discussion thread in the newsgroup about the DVD, and whether they'd do one or two discs to fit all the movie stuff on there...the problem is, according to a later interview with the film's director, there never was a four hour version. This is how rumors get started...and ironically, they never seem to die as easily. Just as happened with Lynch's Dune movie, I bet years from now there will still be people trying to find copies of the "four hour director's cut" that they heard existed but doesn't really.
Two and a half hours...wow. Still...the Harry Potter books only get longer with each volume, until the fourth is literally two inches thick. How are they going to put Goblet of Fire into the theater without losing stuff? Make it four hours with an intermission in the middle, like Branaugh's Hamlet? One can only hope.
