Good, but not good enough...

Rating: 6/10 (19 November 2005)

Knowing that it was Mike Newell who was going to direct the film i thought even before seeing it that i wouldn't like it. I was wrong. The film is very funny and remains , in that way, faithful to the book... The actors are brilliant, the kids keep getting better and better, Miranda Richardson ( Rita Skeeter ) is hilarious and Ralph Fiennes (Lord Voldemort) is perfect... the twins are extremely funny especially when Fred (or George, can't tell one from the other) asks Angelina to go with him at the ball... However, enormous mistakes are made. the beginning is very disappointing, the most important informations are not given (we don't know, for example, that the house is the house of Voldy's parents...). We only see Sirius once, no one seems to care about what happen to Barty Crouch ( the one with the mustache) after he is seen unconscious in the woods and after saying over and over that the weird sisters were played by Jarvis Cocker and two radiohead members you only get to see them once. fortunately, the songs they play are brilliant. Finally, the end sucks.... everyone is happy and doesn't seem to be troubled by what just happened at Hogwarts....Mike Newell saw the funny aspect of the book, the incredible humor of JK Rowling (which is already good) but he missed the darkness of the book. Columbus had made a massacre of the books because is only interest was to focus on the story.Alfonso Cuaron had seen the atmosphere and the poetry of the books and that is why his movie was closer to the Harry Potter spirit and remains to that day the best harry potter film... The only director who could have seen the real pain, the real darkness that is in the 4th potter book and that we find again in the 5th and 6th book, is Tim Burton. When I read the books, it was like reading Burton's universe, his dark humor, his characters. Only his visual genius could have made a perfect adaptation of Harry Potter. Harry Potter and the goblet of fire is not the story of a boy who feels like an outsider because he doesn't know how to ask girls to dance with him. He is a teenager who has to face death and the dark side that is in him. Lord Voldemort is not just some crazy psychopath, he is Harry's double (through all the books Rowling shows us the similarities between Harry and the dark lord). Just like catwoman is divided by her two personalities Burton had already expressed that duality, that's why it's a pity that no one offered him the chance to do it one more time.