Borrowed the 3rd Harry Potter film on DVD from my sister. Really really loved it. Must admit I don’t remember the 2nd one very well. The 1st one was on TV recently, so I do remember that. Anyway, I found The Prisoner of Azkaban to be full of great ideas right from the start when Harry blows up Aunt Marge like a balloon. Then there was the purple Knight Bus, very cool as well. I liked the shrunken head, which was not in the book, I think. Also liked the way the Book of Monsters turned out on the screen. It was like an animal or some weird creature, biting and spitting out bits of paper and hiding under the bed. The dementors looked good, i.e. very scary. Very much like the Nazgul or Ringwraiths in The Lord of the Rings, though, but I won’t go into the similarities between the 2 series or I’ll never stop. Buckbeak turned out very well, too, I think. The only thing I didn’t really like was the way the werewolf looked that Lupin turned into. Very un-wolf-like, IMO. That’s all I can think of now.
There’s also a disc 2 in the set my sister has, and it contains lots of good extra features. Couldn’t figure out the interactive games, though, but the interviews and behind-the-scenes clips – such as a look at the animal trainers, at creating Buckbeak etc. – were very good. I didn’t watch all the interviews, but I really liked “the kids” as they seem to be referred to, i.e. Dan (surprised me they call him that instead of Daniel, which really isn't such a long name), Emma and Rupert. All 3 seemed to get along really well and appeared to be down-to-earth and still not used to their success and fame. Gary Oldman’s and David Thewlis’s interview together was great, too.
Um, yes, as always, I’m rambling on and on. Wanted to write a paragraph about the Batman Begins DVD, but I’ll save that for later cos I’ve only just started watching it anyway. Let me just say that there’s at least one little snippet of an interview with Christian Bale on disc 2. I think I’ll never get used to him speaking with an American accent. It always seems unnatural to me, no matter how good he is at it. In this interview bit he talks about the time before filming started and he quotes an English crew member who said something like “Are we shooting Fatman or Batman?” because CB had gone too far in putting weight back on after losing way too much (IMO) for The Machinist. Anyway, CB quotes this crew member and the English accent he uses when doing that is so funny!
Oh, and: Yay, normal HTML tags work, too! Writing < b > is so much shorter than < strong > (without the spaces, of course). (And yes, I'm still using Opera to browse the web and it doesn't show the formatting buttons.)
