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Underground > Film, TV & Theatre >

All this Harry Potter is p*ssing me off

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Jack The Bodiless

10:20 / 24.11.01

quote:Originally posted by Nick:
Next week on Thinking Too Hard... Guys. Go outside and save the world, okay?

Yeah, this is a bit silly. Didn't hear you taking this line when certain people started discussing the notion that lesbians weren't women. That one had several of my friends pissing themselves with baffled laughter. And a gay friend was quite offended, having spent a good portion of her life defending her right to the signifiers of 'woman' in our culture while being a lesbian... but that's not the point, I digress, 'scuse me...

Like the man said, the above analysis of LOTR is hardly an new or original one. I don't fully agree with it, and a lot of it is a wee bit facile... but the discussion is a valuable one.

10:30 / 24.11.01

Going back two posts, I read that par in the Grauniad, and the point about it being a sure fire success because of the marketing left me somewhat short of the mark.
I refer the honourable Barbechaps to the Phantom Menace. The point could of course depend on your definition of 'success'.
If you mean making tram-loads of cash, fair dos. If you mean making a good moving picture, then it's a different kettle of cod.
As for the Tolkien issue, isn't it pretty standard throughout the mass market genre? I mean, be fair, David Eddings? Feist? And that chappie who wrote Waylander?

The Natural Way

12:17 / 24.11.01

There's a lot more to the books than racism and the last gasp of the rural idyll - it seems reductive (not to mention boring) to keep harping on about it. Esp. when I'm not sure that it's not just a little bit...simplistic.

Little Miss Anthropy

12:54 / 24.11.01

Certainly it's simplistic. After all, no one could ever accuse Haus of overcomplicating a point. Or preening arrogance, come to that.

16:49 / 24.11.01

With reference to the Guardian article, I see the use of 'success' as indeed a subjective judgement, but one that can be gauged on criticism. Though this can be reversed with cases of that become redifined within the form. Video has an ability to undermine poor cinema ticket sales, a la Blade Runner.
What I feel that the article demonstrates is an ever increasing 'corporate' film-making process, that peaks and troughs continually. The article tries to define the process with the inclusion of a simplistic auter analogy. Visible 'auter' director, compared to 'corporate' director. With budgets and reasonings in film-making returning to a type not seen since the vertical integration of the Hollywoood system, I would suggest that this may indicate a rise in more avant garde or progressive film-making.
This I feel will be stiffle by the main cinema chains refusal to screen anything that has subtitles or arthouse content.
The Odeon chain in Britain is inclusive of this, with its refusal to show, Amelie and Brotherhood of the Wolf. A comment from the chain regarding the lack of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon from its theatres was 'we don't carry foreign niche films'. Obviously many awards nominations later, it appears on Odeon screens.
The independent and arthouse film industry is becoming more reliant at this time, on video and DVD hire/retail, but gone is the independent video hire company and in comes Blockbuster. They (Blockbuster) may well have many copies of the hits, but they can fall short on less obvious releases.
Maybe the arguement regarding the importance of the internet, can be the salvation of the moving image. Just hope that we get broadband in time.

08:38 / 26.11.01

hey william, i don't know if you noticed this thread:
Fixed link.

but i thought your post raised some good issues that fitted over there. thought you might like to know the discussion was going on

[ 26-11-2001: Message edited by: Rothkoid ]

The resistable rise of Reidcourchie

08:38 / 26.11.01

Originally posted by Flyboy

"And trying to do that without thinking will achieve precisely... what?"

But Flyboy we've only got 13 hours to save the world.

Sorry.

I've been thinking a lot about this recently and I was going to do a great long reply for the thread but I've changed my mind. Instead I'll tell you about a conversation I had with a friend of mine.

First of all when discussing Harry Potter she told me about one of the classes she teaches in a London school. The class is made up of highly divergent backgrounds and all of them bar one had read the Harry Potter books and according to her these kids never read. She believed that there was something in the books that had a universal appeal, regrdless of the skin colour of the main protagonists.

Then on to LOTR. LOTR is my friend's favorite book. Whilst she was telling me about how magical and wonderful she found it, I was explaining all the reasons it was racist. At the end of the conversation I came away with the feeling I'd in some way soured her pleasure in it and this made me feel quite guilty.

12:08 / 26.11.01

quote: Guys. Go outside and save the world, okay?

Hee hee! Nick believes in an "outside"! Nick thinks there is something outside the text!

Sorry, Nick. Ahem. We can talk about that later/elsewhere if you like, when I get round to starting a fight with you about the difference between reading and writing. (Um, I mean a totally non-confrontational, non-violent, collaborative sort of fight, of course. Struggle - that's the word I'm after.)

Redcap said:

quote: Then on to LOTR. LOTR is my friend's favorite book. Whilst she was telling me about how magical and wonderful she found it, I was explaining all the reasons it was racist. At the end of the conversation I came away with the feeling I'd in some way soured her pleasure in it and this made me feel quite guilty.

I want to draw a dodgy analogy here, because I think it might be interesting. Would you have felt guilty if your friend was telling you how tasty a Big Mac was and you soured her pleasure in it by pointing out the economic and ecological exploitation that MacDonald's relied on in order to produce a Big Mac? (see also Starbucks coffee, Nike trainers, etc etc ad infinitum)

I know it's not quite on to pretend that economic relations and ideological relations have the same dynamics and effects: but the Lord of the Rings *does* rely on a particular ideology of race, which is 'put to work' in the book, and on which your friend's pleasure relies. Now, I'm assuming that "no actual black people were harmed in the making of this book" - which differentiates it in kind from the violence to 'real bodies' done by capitalist manufacturing techniques - but it is important, I think, to be aware of the sorts of ideological violence that are done in writing, rather than subscribe to some sort of depoliticized theory of 'pleasure' that shouldn't have to account for itself.

Thoughts, anyone? Should I just start a new thread on this? And if I do, Redcap, can I use this quote from you to kick it off?

Regrettable Juvenilia

12:12 / 26.11.01

Start a new thread, definitely - and maybe start it in the Head Shop, because then it could be extended to cover not just books, but music, film, tv, comics, whatever? I've been thinking about this a lot recently where music is concerned in particular...

The resistable rise of Reidcourchie

12:15 / 26.11.01

I concur, by all means use mean my quote.

14:03 / 26.11.01

The diversion onto the racial analogies found within the Lord of the Rings should be grounded with the use of Norse Mythology that Tolkein employed. His work is seen to have encapsulated the northern Tradition and brought an interest to the Poetic Edda.
This bias to racial stereotyping 'may' have been incited by the key texts used to create the 'races' of Middle Earth.

14:42 / 26.11.01

Surely it is acceptable that some races just are inherently evil. There's cats for a start - many admirable qualities, but nonetheless evil little buggers.

Having read HP, it's very obvious that the none-white characters are there because someone thought they should be. Add to that, they are at the periphery and clumsily written. Accusing Rowling of clumsy writing has been done many times before, so I shan't bother.

Although putting Rowling and Tolkein in the same paragraph is like mentioning pot noodle and real food (not that there aren't times when only a pot noodle will do - normally friday night, pissed and unable to function) it might be fair to look at the books as products of developing times.
*Tolkein probably didn't even realise there was a potential issue
*Rowling is well meaning, but cack-handed
If these aren't parallels of the times they wrote in, I don't know the nose on my face (and in which case, what's holding my specs up).
Maybe in a better future, someone will write a better book.
Nah.

18:39 / 27.11.01

SPOILERS:

Did have a weird thought while watching Harry Potter: the end of the film, especially, dealt with a coalition of characters (including a professor previously believeed evil) working to defeat a possessed fellow in a turban.

I mean, I know the book was written years before the Afghan War, but still... the synchronicity was a bit unsettling.

We're The Great Old Ones Now

19:27 / 27.11.01

Oh, no...

I just saw the film. I thought it was ... pedestrian. More a film iteration than a film adaptation.

Not that it wasn't rich, etc., but...

Hm.

17:16 / 28.11.01

I went to see Harry Potter and had fun. It’s a faithful reproduction of the book, which should please the author’s fans. I thought it was strongest where it could spin visual pageantry around less developed sections of Rowlings' book, such as the goblins of Gringotts.

I have to gripe about the music, though. The music was just awful: soupy and uninspired. John Williams seemed to just recycle a half dozen themes from other movies with very little connection to the movie’s action and emotional tone. Somebody throw salt at him before he composes again.

07:55 / 29.11.01

i totally agree with you about the music.

i've heard the audiobooks (well, actually, only the first one) which are read by jim dale, and he's brilliant. for some reason, in the uk we can only get the stephen fry ones, and really i don't think they're nearly as good. pity.

Tuna Ghost: Pratt knot hero

18:16 / 29.11.01

I'll admit that I haven't read the majority of this thread, but I'll tell you all the biggest shove I had to read the books: because the Southern Baptists said they were unholy and should be kept out of the hands of children.

Fuck those bastards. Right in the ear.

07:36 / 30.11.01

ooh, you're such a flirt.

15:26 / 03.12.01

Check this out.

Seriously, it's beautiful.
http://www.livejournal.com/talkpost.bml?itemid=16498571

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