Bert Vandecasteele

Month: October 2009

  • Harry Potter (3) and the Prisoner of Azkaban (J.K. Rowling)

    Let me get right down to business: in my opinion, the Prisoner of Azkaban is the part of the Harry Potter series that defined the series and put it on solid ground, ensuring the critical acclaim of every book after it. It’s no coincidence that for the movie, the production team chucked out Chris Columbus and settled for Alfonso Cuarón. This book is just that good.

    I’ll start by stating the following: this is the first book in which one gets the impression that Harry and his friends have grown. They’ve entered puberty, two years have passed since the start of the series and it shows. Suddenly, you can understand what it means that this series will span seven years in the end: that Harry will be seventeen by the end of it, and hence, well, a lot older and bigger than he is now.

    The trend started in the Chamber of Secrets gets expanded on too: in part two, we found out that Tom Riddle was attending Hogwarts fifty years ago. For this part, we don’t have to dig that far back: his father and three friends shared a good deal of adventures back in their day a good twenty years ago. The series suddenly consists of two layers: Harry’s adventures and his father’s – which have their influence on the aforementioned.

    This second layer gets its life from one person: Sirius Black. Sirius Black causes important plot elements to be described, such as Azkaban. He also has another important function: he links Harry to the rise and fall of his parents. Up till this point, Harry had always existed in a vacuum: he had no one, was completely oblivious towards the world around him – and that worked. But as soon as Harry’s godfather entered the stage, there was no more doubt: Harry hadn’t been a normal boy the first eleven years of his existence. He’s always been a wizard.

    In All…

    I could go on and on about The Prisoner of Azkaban. Its clue is one of the best ones in the series. You just never would have guessed that something introduced in the first novel would actually still matter. But it does, and I love it. Once again, Rowling succeeded in leading me in the completely opposite direction and then dropped a bomb shell. Enjoy it, it’ll be the last time…

  • Harry Potter (2) and the Chamber of Secrets (J.K. Rowling)

    Completely unexpectedly, the first Harry Potter book became an overnight success. Even though, as I have expressed in my rant, it has one big problem: it’s very fragmented. It could do well with the prefix “The adventures of” stamped in front of the title. Because that’s what it feels like: a whole lot of good ideas stuffed into one good book.

    The second book takes the concept of the first, but ups the ante by actually creating a causal line. Everything flows from one thing into the next in a logical manner. Nothing ever comes out of the blue, and it all makes sense.

    The plot itself involved to go with that: whereas the first book had us believing we were reading children’s literature, which meant Snape had to be the vilain, the second book goes a step further: this time around, an innocent person is being controlled by the bad guy. Obviously, this storyline is brought back to Lord Voldemort, the big bad wolf of the series. A nice decision which makes perfect sense and I never saw it coming the first time around.

    In All…

    You can tell Rowling’s shaping up the wizarding world in the second book. A lot of important characters get faces (the Weasly family and the Minister of Magic, for instance) and we get our first real look at the young Tom Riddle. There’s a lot more excitement this time around, even if there is less adventure. And you get to see what happens if you kill a ghost. Everybody’s a winner!

  • UP

    UPEvery time a new Pixar movie hits the cinemas, my inner child starts poking my chest, trying to get out. I’ve struggled it at first, trying to resist the hype just for the sake of resisting the hype, but ever since Ratatouille I’ve given up and embraced the kid, letting him out and fully enjoying it. Because hey, you have to admit: Pixar movies are pretty rad. And in that regard, UP is certainly no exception.

    Married Life

    As a story, UP is all about letting go: Carl is an old man who’s lead a mostly happy life. An old man who feels rejected by society and mourns about the things he’s never done. One of these is going on an adventure, an adventure ending with living in Paradise Falls, a land lost in time. When one day he is threatened to be evicted from his home, he decides to turn his house into a giant balloon and fly off, searching for this fabled land. But he didn’t count on finding Russell, a young boy scout, on his porch.

    The premise of this story is simple – a lot simpler than Wall-E. Wall-E predominantly was a critique to society, and in doing so it was automatically pretty heavy. UP, while maintaining a firm message to its audience, is a lot lighter in its execution and really does make you feel good – no buts attached. UP also tends to get a bit silly, but it’s expectable right off the bat. That means that, as opposed to Wall-E, UP is a tad more coherent in its own story. Which doesn’t mean it’s better or worse – it’s just different.

    Small Mailman Returns

    As per usual with Pixar, UP is a stunningly beautiful movie. What I like is that the style is different from everything they’ve done before (as always). UP is also a lot more colourful than we’re used to: the balloons are bright, the jungle and its inhabitants are cheerful… Even if the premise of the movie (loving a lost one and letting go) is dramatic, the execution has laughs and cheers written all over it.

    I guess that’s a bit of the magic I like in Pixar movies (or anything I tend to like): it’s a not-so-new concept that was executed in a (for that concept) strange style. We’ve seen these kinds of stories before; just not in this kind of execution.

    In All…

    I always wonder what makes a Pixar film appeal to me the way they do. I mean: I like animation as a medium, but the older I get, the less I like. Pixar’s always been high on the list and I think that’s in part because they try to reinvent the wheel a tiny bit everyt time they bring something out. With Wall-E, I was amazed how un-Ratatouille it was. And now, with UP, the same thing struck me again: I still had Wall-E in my head, and withing ten minutes, they made me forget that movie completely. Obviously, I’ve been comparing to Wall-E in this review – but while I was watching, I never made the comparison.

    UP sucks you in from the first scene onwards. Of course, you might think that this stuff is for kids and not like it. Maybe you just won’t like it either way. But for me, this movie opened my eyes yet again, and showed me that this is the kind of stuff I want to do: I want to fill a theatre with adults, grown-ups with boring jobs, and make them all feel eight years old again.