Mokka mit Schlag » 2007 » July

Eastern Carpenter Bee, Xylocopa virginica
Ridgewood Reservoir, 2007-07-14
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Common Tern, Sterna hirundo
2007-07-06

I was reading Digital Photography: The Missing Manual this morning, and it kept talking about all these cool photo retouching features I’d never noticed. I opened up Phtooshop Elements to try them out, and they weren’t there! Then it occurred to me that perhaps it was time to upgrade my ten year old copy of Photoshop Elements 2 for Mac OS 9.
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Black Swallowtail, Papilio polyxenes
Ridgewood Reservoir, 2007-07-14

Reddish-brown Stag Beetle, a.k.a. Pinching Bug, a.k.a. Common Stag Beetle, Lucanus capreolus, formerly Pseudolucanus capreolus
Prospect Park, 2007-07-10
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Some books just don’t fit into two hour movies. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix may well be one of them. Beth and I went to see it yesterday, and all the relevant plot points were there, but it had to skim over them so quickly that there really was very little heart to the movie. The characters just jumped from scene to scene.

The first two Harry Potter movies were good, mostly because they faithfully translated much shorter books onto the screen. The fourth movie was good mostly because it didn’t. By radically chopping or even eliminating various subplots, it actually produced a much tighter, more coherent story than Rowling provided in the fourth book.

The third movie, I’m not sure what happened. Despite having a reasonably sized book to adapt, it just didn’t live up to the first two movies. There was no real sense of time passing through the school year. In fact, the whole plot just sort of died. The only bit I can remember from the movie (and not the book) is Buckbeak, and not much of that. Perhaps just a bad script or directing?

The fifth movie, though, it’s obvious what happened. There was simply too much material in the 870 page novel to squeeze into a two hour movie. Unlike The Goblet of Fire, there were no extraneous sideplots that could be trimmed or cut to save time. Consequently we got a couple of minutes of Harry’s private lessons with Snape, a couple of minutes of Bellatrix LeStrange, a couple of minutes in the order’s headquarters, a couple of minutes with Hagrid’s brother, and so on. All were vastly too compressed to do justice to the scenes.
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