for Svenska, JL & other HPotterites

[Marsipanne]

Two of the characters in the film is a werewolf and a man who can transform himself into a big, black dog.

Oh right! I get it now. It's so sad that Snuffles dies.. it makes me really sad when in the chapter after he dies Harry's looking at the Quidditch stadium and he remembers Sirius going there to see Harry play Quidditch.. really sad. Mope.

 

[gothgodess]

How well do you know the "Harry Potter" series? See if your memory is magical by testing it on our trivia quiz. Get a perfect score, and you'll win bragging rights and the ability to call yourself a true J.K. Rowling fan. (Offer not valid in Santa Fe, New Mexico.) Note: While the questions don't spoil any of the plot points in the "Potter" series, the answers definitely do. But if you know the answers, you already know the secrets anyway, right?

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5068210/

11. What kind of drink is most commonly served at the Honeydukes pub in Hogsmeade village?


Butterbeer

Near beer

Rutabaga beer

Budweiser

Cool Quiz Thanks I only got 1 wrong how sad is that.

 

[Guest]

I think this is an excellent essay, but then I'm not a Potterite. - Perdita
-------

Casting spells is a snap in the new Harry Potter film -- it's the growing up that's tough - Neva Chonin, SF Chronicle, June 10, 2004

For teenagers, there is never enough time. That's why teenagers have to make time for what is important, even if it means defying authority.

At the beginning of "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban," the darkest film yet in author J.K. Rowling's franchise, the famous wizard, now 13, huddles under his bed covers, stealing time to do something he shouldn't: play with his wand, make sparks fly and create some forbidden underage magic. His uncle repeatedly tries to catch him in the act, but Harry (Daniel Radcliffe) is too quick, and his nascent forays into adulthood continue.

Change a few details, and it's a scenario familiar to every boy crossing the sloppy line from childhood to puberty. It's moments like these, cloaked in fantasy, that keep young readers returning to the Potter series long after they've outgrown the children's book genre. Harry Potter's story is an allegory for the journey from innocence to knowledge, an authentic coming-of- age tale told through the increasingly perplexed eyes of one teenage wizard.

By the end of "Azkaban," Harry has learned to use his wand like an adult. His little sparks have become a rush of pulsing light that cuts through a darkness as reflective of his internal confusion and hormonal chaos as it is the menacing night around him. The light coalesces into a "patronus" -- a protective symbol -- that takes the distinctly masculine shape of a stag. And beyond that, Harry sees his future self.

Capturing the inner life of adolescence on film is a messy business, but Alfonso Cuaron directs "Azkaban" with the same intuition that he brought to his earlier coming-of-age film, 2001's "Y Tu Mama Tambien." Where the first two Harry Potter movies emphasized childish wonder (and were criticized for interpreting the Potter books too literally), Cuaron's magical landscape is a wilder and more dangerous geography, filled with stormy skies and damp, sensual terrain. Trains run in circles and stall in precarious places. Windows are voyeuristic peepholes into, and mirrors of, the characters' psyches.

Adolescent themes merely touched upon in Rowling's "Azkaban" book are embellished and made explicit in Cuaron's cinematic interpretation. The opening wand scene, a thinly veiled allusion to masturbation, is a new addition. So are several scenes hinting at sexual tension between Harry's best friends, Ron (Rupert Grint) and Hermione (Emma Watson), who can't keep their hands off each other -- and can't figure out why.

Rowling graduated Harry from external enemies and internal demons but retained a child's-eye view of the world. Cuaron goes further: We now see the magical universe through the more complex gaze of puberty. In the "Azkaban" film more than the "Azkaban" text, Harry's essential optimism is fraught with anger and moral confusion. He's all teenager, plagued by doubts and restlessness and filled with smirks and heavy sighs. He and his friends have stumbled on the eternal teenage conundrum: Even as they grow older, they grow more confused. Even as they learn more about the world, the world unravels around them. Friends are enemies, enemies are allies and something wicked lies at the heart of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.

There is much Harry needs to figure out, but time is against him. From the ticking sound that accompanies a climactic time-turner sequence -- in which Harry and Hermione literally turn back the clock -- to the way the camera swirls around the looming clock tower at the heart of Hogwarts, Cuaron's "Azkaban" is consumed by time and driven by it as Harry and his friends are pushed, reluctantly, from their kids' life into forbidding adulthood.

For the movie's children and grown-ups alike, time and its keeper, memory, are both adversaries and a means of salvation. The titular Azkaban prisoner, Sirius Black (Gary Oldman), gambles everything to rectify the past; Harry's mentor, the enigmatic Professor Remus Lupin (David Thewlis), is a prisoner of time's cycles and his own lost history. Both men, who were friends while students at Hogwarts, are unabashedly nostalgic for their shared youth.

As the clocks tick off the last moments of Harry's childhood, he passes through a panoply of growing pains. Gloom and sexual confusion arrive in the form of dementors, sinister prison guards who siphon Harry's joy and evoke buried memories so painful they make him swoon -- an effeminate embarrassment that makes him a target for school bullies. As with most teenage boys, Harry is plagued by the fear that he is not living up to masculine codes.

The pain that comes with breaking accepted codes also haunts Harry's closest adult friend, Lupin.

In the film, Lupin's close friendship with Black harbors a subtext made explicit by a vindictive (and somewhat queeny) Professor Severus Snape (Alan Rickman), who accuses the two men of being "like an old married couple" (a line not found in Rowling's text). Adding to Lupin's woes is his physical infirmity: Once a month, as regular as menses, he turns into a werewolf. As such, he is a pitiable creature -- outcast, neither wolf nor man, as unlovable as the most misfit teenager. Cuaron emphasizes this by rendering the werewolf as a hairless monstrosity that can't decide whether to walk on two legs or four.

The movie's penultimate scene finds Lupin hurriedly leaving Hogwarts. Harry wants to know why. Here, again, Cuaron pushes the envelope. In Rowling's "Azkaban," Lupin simply explains that Snape has outed him as a werewolf; in Cuaron's version, Harry's mentor replies ambiguously. "Someone let slip to the staff and students the nature of my condition," he says. "By tomorrow morning the owls will be arriving from parents who don't want ... well, someone like me teaching their children."

The confession opens up a hundred metaphors of scapegoated otherness, but within the context of the film, the first that springs to mind is queerness: Lupin has violated the wizarding world's social norms with a "condition" that dare not speak its name.

Thus the man who taught Harry how to use his wand effectively, and to find a happy memory -- one Harry isn't sure really happened -- to conjure his adult patronus, leaves him with a final, pivotal lesson on growing up: The world is capricious and unfair; deal with it, and follow your heart wherever it leads you.

"Azkaban" opens with one metaphorically sexualized scenario and ends with another. Along the way, Harry has discovered truths that every adolescent craves and dreads.

He realizes that life is not scripted, but a dance of accidents; that to keep the dementors away, it is not enough to simply breathe; one has to feel the joy of self-knowledge, even if that knowledge is an intangible half-memory.

Most important, by the closing credits, Harry is not hiding under the covers any longer. He's a young man ready to take on the world and face its forbidden secrets -- as well as his own. And he knows that no matter what time brings, it's the living, not the surviving, that counts.

 

[Svenskaflicka]

Blimey, I missed the masturbation symbolism totally!

I was disappointed at the way they had written the lines for the Lupin-leaves-Hogwarts scene. It's OOC, Out Of Character, for Lupin to keep referring to himself and his lycantrophy as "someone like me" and "what I am" - in the books, he openly states: "I won't deny that I am a werewolf." A very, very strong and intense sentence in that book, and one that fans quote often.

I was disappointed to see it left out.

 

[sweetnpetite]

I'm working on my Potterfan name.

So far, I'm most likely going to go with Roweena Watson.


...not that anyone really cares

 

[Svenskaflicka]

I'm proud to be Polly Juice.

 

[sweetnpetite]

I'm still wondering why you hate Ron.

 

[Match Made In Heaven]

bump

I was really enjoying this thread. Why is it dead?

 

[rosco rathbone]

I never see UK LeGuin's mighty Earthsea series namechecked in discussion of Harry Potter, though it clearly provided the model for the school of wizardry.

Other fantasy as literature: Gene Wolfe's amazing Urth series.

 

[Just-Legal]

Sigh, the curse of fantasy and sci-fi. It'll never get respect. Well, you're right on a few points. Harry Potter and LOTR are not the best books ever written, but they are enchanting, interesting, and fun and they are the books that open all adolescents into reading bigger and more complex books in the future.

I like Harry Potter. I thought Neil Gaiman in Books of Magic and Diane Duane in So you want to be a Wizard? did the overall story a little bit better, but Harry Potter is still fun and I enjoy reading it as an adult.

Yes, Rowling is no Douglas Adams, Terry Pratchett, Neil Gaiman, or Ray Bradbury, but she doesn't have to be if she can get that many kids to turn away from the idiot box long enough to tap into the holiness of books.

*wears her Sci-Fi Fantasy Geek Badge with pride8