01. I haven’t read the book, so I don’t know if the problems I have with this movie are unique to the adaptation or if they’re present in the book as well. Suffice it to say, though, this movie doesn’t make me have any interest in reading the book, although this is unsurprising since I don’t really love the fantasy genre to begin with.
02. This movie feels like it doesn’t know what kind of fantasy movie it wants to be. It’s like any fantasy movie that has been released in the past five years is sitting on a buffet table and the people who made this one were picking and choosing bits and pieces from all of them, hoping that if they put them all together on one plate, they’d have something as creatively successful as any of the other films. Instead, it feels like a really awful hodgepodge that can’t tell if it’s a serious film with a good sense of humour or if it’s meant to be completely freaking ridiculous with a self-aware irony driving it along. Turns out it’s just freaking ridiculous with a not-so-great sense of humour. Oops.
03. I’ve never been one for unravelling plot lines fairly quickly, mostly because I’d rather get lost in the movie than think about how story telling conventions are playing out and how this reveals exactly how the story ends. Except… this movie was so predictable that even I figured it out in the first five minutes, holy crap. It was all ham-fisted and obvious, where characters would reference one random thing that had nothing to do with what they were talking about in the scene and you were left thinking “Gee, I wonder if the long-missing daughter of the king is the same random princess Dunstan sleeps with?” Come on. Ugh.
04. Septimus was kind of amusing. I liked his #7 buttons. The seven brothers in general were pretty amusing.
05. The guy who played young Dunstan was kind of a cutie, which is of interest only because he’s playing Prince Caspian in the upcoming Narnia films and that would really one of the few incentives to see those movies.
06. Sometimes it’s nice for Robert De Niro to be a complete ham and chew the scenery a bit. He really was the best part.
07. Ian McKellan narrated, however since he sounded ridiculously like Peter O’Toole while doing so, when Peter O’Toole first entered the story, I really thought the narration was going to be like “The King of Stormhold… a.k.a. ME!” That is to say I didn’t find out until afterwards that it was Ian McKellan narrating.
08. I said Robert De Niro was the best part, but the best part was actually when the young man who was turned into a goat and was subsequently transfigured into a pretty young woman with his very own boobs to ogle said “My name is Bernard” in this incredibly deep voice. LMFAO. Partly because the deep voice did not at all match the voice of the young man whenever he spoke, but also because I just adore the way British people say “Bernard” (i.e. “BER-nerd” instead of “ber-NARD”).
09. Mr Weasley as a goat!human FTW.