HPIII: The Prisoner of Azkaban

Last night I got to go to a free screening of the new Harry Potter movie, courtesy of Queue. As he noted, it was a surprisingly not-packed theater, though it was a large one. It was great to run into Volta and MissDimple as well :-).

I hadn't reread the third book in a while, but that didn't matter. I very much enjoyed the movie anyway. Of course, lots of stuff had to be condensed or elided to make a movie out of that long a book, and some of the choices didn't work unless someone had read the book. And it seemed that some things were put in merely for entertainment value, when more plot-driven scenes could've been put in their place.

The new Dumbledore worked reasonably well, if a little more stern than the previous one. Minister Fudge kept on being rather Sigfried Farnon-ish (All Creatures Great and Small) in my head, but that was a small distraction. Overall, a visually stunning movie, yet again, and the plot was reasonably well done, too. Some of the other new characters didn't fit my mental image of them, but that's to be expected, I suppose.

Oh, and the credits were very nicely done, well worth staying for in and of themselves, not just to let the crush of people go out.

I just remembered: my first post was about the first Harry Potter movie. Heh.

Kid's eye view...

This morning I spent time in a couple of middle school classrooms, watching math classes. One class was making patterns for rectangular prisms (nets), then folding and taping them up to be 3D. One girl made a 1 x 1 x 3 prism, while a boy made a 2 x 2 x 5 prism. He looked at the two of them, and called his a "Cartman box"!

Short takes

The MA House has approved a bill to ban smoking in bars and restaurants statewide as of July 5. Now it goes on to the Senate, and Romney has already said he'd sign if it gets to his desk. I find it interesting that the state is so quickly following Boston (and Cambridge, but they were after Boston).

There was an ad in this month's Hadassah magazine offering discounts on certain prescription drugs shipped to you directly from... Israel. Interesting.

I hear the term "revolving president" and keep thinking that he'd be perfect in a museum-go-round. Or is that what his presidential library would be like?

There's an annual Booker prize, which can only go to the author of a novel written in English by a citizen of a current or former Commonwealth country. Now the same group (the UK National Book League) is starting a prize for international fiction, for any book written in or widely translated into English. Interesting.

There's a new mural on the movie theater on Church St. in Harvard Square. It has a number of movie characters, including some non-human ones, and to me doesn't quite fit in with the others that are already there, but some of that is just getting used to the new, I think.