A Couple other Notes About the Goblet of Fire Movie

Dominic and I just got back from a second viewing of the movie, just to soak it in an solidify more of the points/issues in my mind, so thought I would toss them up here quickly: 1. Another place where some of the details in the books are combined or amalgamated into one character (like I noted Ludo Bagman being lumped in Fudge as announcer at the world Quidditch cup) is that when Karakarof is before the Wizengamot Bella Lestrange's torture of Frank Longbottom and his wife is assigned either to Berty Jr or another character he names. 2. I think things are at the point where Steve Kloves and Mike Newell can assume that anybody seeing the movie knows at least one person who has read the books and can fill in details for them, and so they can operate on a sort of short-hand and emphasize the most important points. Everybody knows somebody who can fill them in on what Dumbledore is talking about when he mentions Priori Incantatem towards the end of the movie and the film makers are free to focus on the point that magic is not going to bring Harry's parents back from the dead, just like ghost-hood will not bring Sirius back into Harry's realm of contact in book 5. 3. I liked the fact that at the end, when Dumbledore gives a sort of eulogy for Cedric Digory, you can see that the ceiling is not enchanted, you can see the bare timbers ... there are some things like death you must face head on. 4. I liked how they added in (I checked the book and did not find it) an echo that goes all the way back to the beginning of the story, with the first chapter of Sorcerer's Stone when Voldy calls Harry "the boy who lived." It is especially pointed here considering that immortality is what Voldy craves and that life and death are a huge theme in the books, and neat to see in a movie that hangs together so much as an internally consistent piece something that is a tip of the hat to the way Rowling has weaved elements and prefigurings together over the span of multiple books. 5. I realized when again seeing the Durmstrang ship delve into the lake and the chariot fly through the air leaving, that there had to be 4 champions and they had to be from where they were from because of the 4 elements symbolism. Durmstrang (like Slytherin, their closest counter-part at yogurt's) comes from the water, Madame Maxime's crew flies in on the wind, like Ravenclaw, Cedric is from Hufflepuff (earth) and Harry is of course Gryffindor's fire. I'm sure Granger has mentioned this in his books and I simply forgot it. 5. I liked the melding of the image of Voldy as taken from the book with that of Gibson's satan in The Passion of the Christ (I'm not sure if it was an intentional similarity or just flowed from the natural rendering of the books description onto film but the resemblance is stroking) PS - I also went to see a matinee of "Walk The Line" today - very different type of movie/story but an excellently done film. Very emotionally draining though.