So one of the previews before Harry Potter was for a movie by M. Night Shyamalan called “Lady in the Water.” Paul Giamatti is a superintendent of an apartment building who lives in a cottage by the pool. He works hard for no gratitude and goes home to write a book. One night he noticed something splashing in the pool. So, that’s the essence of the trailer.

Here’s my take on the movie: Paul Giamatti is actually King Arthur (who doesn’t know that he is), and the Lady in the Lake had to go to the pool (because he never goes to the lake anymore) and now she’s gotta prepare him for the truth all circumspect-like before she throws him Excalibur and he goes out and kicks major ass, making the world a better place.

I’m probably wrong.

(And, yes, there are spoilers, you’ve been warned).

The first thing you notice about Harry Potter & The Goblet of Fire is how the filmakers managed to compress the first 250 pages to fifteen minutes. The Dursleys are out, Mrs. Weasley and the elder out-of-Hogwarts Weasley offspring are as well. The Quidditch World Cup sequence through the massive hovering Death’s Head is edited fairly, um, extremely.

The second thing you notice is that every female in the audience makes a deep sighing noise every time Ron, Harry, or Neville (yes, Neville) is on screen. Particularly when Harry is, uh, not clad entirely. There’s some sexual suggestivity in his scene with Myrtle in the Prefect’s Bathroom, plus a tracking shot of the Beauxbatons hotties tends to focus on their asses (not that I’m complaining).

As the plot goes, in addition to the cuttings made above, none of the house-elves related plot points make it into the movie. Doby isn’t around, and Hermoine isn’t crusading for a labor union for Hogwart’s House Elves. Winky never “accidently” gave Barty Crouch Jr. a wand, and for that matter, the circumstances surrounding his escape from Azkaban are never explained. The producers rely on the audiences’ understanding of the book to compensate for missed plot points — sloppy, but perhaps a trade-off worth making if it keeps the story moving.

As a movie, it’s far superior to Prisoner of Azkaban. That said, many key characters are given the cold shoulder — Snape, Hagrid, and McGonagall could almost be extras for as much screen time as they get. Forget about Draco, he’s pretty much only in one scene and he’s a ferret for half of it. The death of Cedric Diggory has considerably less emotional impact than it did in the book — which is very dissapointing since Dumbledore’s speech about why the death of Diggory should illustrate to everyone at Hogwarts the importance of opposing Voldemort is such an emotional climax to the book, and in the movie just rings hollow (I think they changed the speech — it’s much better in the book).

I don’t think there’s really any way to do a book justice when bringing it to the screen, particularly books of these lengths with the amount of audience involvement in the characters and plot. The movie can be painful to watch since the absence of many things – notably in my mind the Dursely sequence, a staple of the books and of the films, too, (should be anyway) – seems to illustrate that the filmakers need to think “outside the box” in translating the books to film or lose the ‘magic’ that made them so popular in the first place.

***

As a side note, Jeff Bridges starred in a 1976 remake of King Kong. In your face!