Harry Potter & The Prisoner of Azkaban
I think crash zooms onto things popping off of other things (in the case of this movie, buttons popping off of an expanding Aunt Marge) might be my favourite of cinema’s stock images.
This is an unexpectedly funny movie, all the more so because the humour is entirely visual. There is not a single spoken joke in the film, but Marge’s expansion (the buttons hitting Dudley in the face, Marge bobbing off in the distance as Harry flees the Dursleys’ house), the Knight Bus (Harry repeatedly slamming into the windshield), the spider-Boggart sprouting rollerskates, invisible-Harry taking down Malfoy and his gang (Crabbe’s boxers dropping suddenly), all elicited a chuckle from me.
The camera moving through the gears of the clock to follow Harry & Hermione out of and into Hogwarts on their time travel adventure is SWEET.
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Harry seeing his happy face reflected in the lake as he flies Buckbeak as a contrast to seeing his post-Dementor, ashen visage reflected in the window of the Hogwarts Express — wonderful.
The visualisation of the Dementors sucking happiness from Harry: invisible, tangible streams being pulled from about their victims’ heads. The camera image going blurry when Harry’s glasses are knocked from his head. The first moment of Lupin’s transformation, when his pupils double in size in a single, sudden beat. The grand God’s Eye shot of Hogwart’s moving staircases.
Cuaron’s wizarding world is a fantastic example of how you can enmesh magic within every strut and plank of actually-existing things, to create a fantastic space that nonetheless seems like it could exist. That is maybe how I love my magic best: not spun from nothing, but emergent out of reality, making familiar objects seelie, pregnant with alluring/forbidding otherness. I realised this looking at a wall in Trelawny’s classroom. You see it for a single shot — a few seconds at most — but the production design nevertheless spent effort to make even that most mundane sight a window onto something mystical. They cover that wall in symbols, and so continue to embed magic into the skin of this world.
Light and dark too. Oh man — lumos in dark corridors, Dementors and Patronuses — has anyone but Cuaron used computer generated light as wonderfully as this?
I have been avoiding discussing the story, because this is a film you watch for the images (and possibly the score — though I didn’t notice much of it, the introduction of a ticking-clock-beat to the score when Harry & Hermione are time-travelling is fucking GENIUS) and not for the story. It is interesting how clearly this film assumes its audience is familiar with the books. There is no time spent on context at all. I’m not sure how sensible a choice that was, because while it obviously saves time and annoyance for those who already know everything, it left the heavier emotional outbreaks (already weaker cos they largely depend on the performance of Radcliffe, who is not at his best yet) feeling isolated from the background emotional turmoil that spawns them. Also the film is rampantly episodic, largely because it is strait-jacketed into following the plot of a novel with a lot more time on its hands, and so much of the movie feels driven by the need to hit a plot beat rather than reach a certain stage of the characters’ relationships or another stage of the emotional arc. But none of this makes the film any less beautiful.
