Somewhere in this one, the chat automatically banned me. I'm enjoying going over the parts I remember of this night, in two-hour chunks week by week.

Something I noticed during this rewatch: MAN does Cuaron love his sexual motifs. It's all over Gravity, and it's all over this. Really fits with the puberty themes. The joke about the opening scene is "LOL Harry's playing with his wand!" But actually, though. He's hiding under his sheets late at night, making sure that his guardians don't find out. It's 100% deliberate, and a direct masurbation metaphor. So, yeah, he's practicing spells outside of school.* But it's worth it because of what Cuaron is trying to do.

What's brilliant about this film, as compared to the first two, is how it takes the first steps into the world of the adults. For the first time (except for one scene near the end of Chamber) we see the professors removed from the context of their jobs. That's what's great about the scene with Harry under the Invisibility Cloak, secretly listening to authority figures talking about him, and about things he knows nothing about. He's sneaking into the realm of adulthood, but he doesn't really belong there yet. There's also the scene where he eavesdrops on Snape and Dumbledore talking about him, when they think he's sleeping. It's the same thing. When you're 13, you want to be an adult, but you're not actually mature enough to be considered one. That stuff is in the books, but Cuaron was the only Potter director who brought that out. If there's a problem with the non-Azkaban films, it's that they're so heavy on plot, where Cuaron's focus was on theme. I guess Yates did do a few interesting things regarding the media in Order of the Phoenix, but not on the same level.

*Here's my reasoning for why it's okay for Harry to practice spells, at least in the movie continuity. It's established in the books that Harry has homework over the summer, so it makes a kind of sense that spells would be part of that. I mean, it's wizard school. You've gotta keep up on your spellwork. So, in movie 5, Harry gets in trouble for using a Patronus in Little Whinging. But the letter specifies that he used a Patronus. My retcon is that (in the movies, at least) students are allowed to use certain spells at home, for the purposes of education, but not others. Lumos Maxima would have been on the "approved" list, and Expecto Patronum wouldn't have been. The books just say that the "Trace" goes off whenever you use ANY magic, and I can't remember if they can tell the specific spell being used.

Last edited by Doctor Submarine (2013-12-24 04:23:36)

Eventually I figured out that I could make new YouTube channels under the same account, and switch between them. So I just kept making new channels.

A full-grown stag - pretty much like anything else with hooves and horns - is a scary beast that you don't want mad atcha. They kill wolves and stuff.   

Doe & Stag = Cow & Bull.  Cows aren't scary either but bulls, on the other hand... yikes.