It FEELS like the book

Rating: 10/10 (10 June 2004)

A guy walked straight up to me at the end of the movie and asked what I thought, and I answered right away that it had the exact 'feeling' of the book. It totally felt like 'Prisoner of Azkaban'! Yes, loads (lol) were missing, but I felt none of it during the film... unlike the jarring missing parts of 'Philosopher's/Sorcerer's Stone', which I still adore none-the-less.
There's a part in this book called 'Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance' that I remember my dad reading to me. Something along the lines of that it's hard to write a 100 word paper on an entire building, but one could write a 1,000 word essay on one of it's bricks. I think Cuaron applied this simple, yet very effective lesson to 'Prisoner of Azkaban'. He's done away with trying to cram as much in as possible and fleshed out what otherwise would have withered into faded memory. Just look at what he's done to Daniel Radcliffe. Before, his character was almost forgettable and the fangirls glommed onto Tom Felton and Sean Biggerstaff. Now that Cuaron was able to focus in on Harry and get a stronger performance out of Dan you see thread after thread of girls on the messageboards going completely ga ga over him. It's not just because puberty is unfairly kind to him; he was pleasing to look at even back in 'David Copperfield'. It's because Harry is now a character you can FEEL for. There's something sexy about a tortured character, no matter what their age, and in 'Prisoner of Azkaban' Harry's tortured soul has been amplified threefold.