Eugene Novikov of Cinematical.com has written an article on how the third HP book, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, was adapted from the book to the movie screen, and on why he thinks it is the best Potter movie so far. For the film adaptation, he credits mostly POA director Alfonso Cuarón, who has brought more depth not only to the movie but to the characters as well, and paying attention to small things. Here is an excerpt of his article:
So what went right? How did my least favorite Harry Potter novel become the crowning achievement of the franchise, book or film? It wasn’t really the screenplay by Steve Kloves (the screenwriter of every movie in the series except Order of the Phoenix), which is solid and does most of the right things, but is also basically par for the course. Instead, Azkaban is elevated by a set of brilliant and inspired moves on the part of Alfonso Cuarón, proving that all the hand-wringing over who directs Harry Potter has been justified, after all.
Most crucially, Cuarón lets the characters – especially Harry, Ron and Hermione – spread their wings and function outside the confines of Rowling’s plot. The pleasure is in the details, the little stuff: the way Ron grabs Harry’s shoulder and turns him around when Draco Malfoy and the Slytherins start their taunts; the way Harry instinctively shields Hermione with his body when the dementors start circling in the film’s frightening climax. The scene where Harry goes for a ride on the hippogriff moved me to tears, because it’s not just a frivolous CGI frolic – it’s Harry’s momentary, joyful solace from the harsh reality that awaits him below. In Cuarón’s hands, the characters behave like people, like teenagers, and like friends. Rowling is often able to accomplish this in her novels via the omniscient narrator, but that’s hard to replicate on the screen if all you’re doing is transplanting the book’s storyline. Cuarón took the time to translate the characters’ humanity into the language of cinema.
Cuarón’s second most impressive accomplishment is making Hogwarts feel like an actual physical place, with a determinate geography. He accomplishes this partly through his penchant for lush, beautiful long takes, a technique that lets screen spaces retain their geographic integrity much better than a barrage of cuts, and partly through simple paying attention. Chris Columbus‘ versions of Sorcerer’s Stone and Chamber of Secrets made Hogwarts very picturesque and impressive, but it was not until Azkaban that I felt like I had a feel for Hogwarts as an entity (at least beyond the image I had from reading the books).
To read the whole article, click on the link provided above.
***thanks to cinematical.com***
jediyoda
