Rickman in HP and Hugo Weaving as Elrond in LOTR sound like really weird casting choices when you read about them in the books, but their presence in the films are so legendary I can’t imagine the films with anyone else.

Oh shit, IIRC Rickman in particular was active in keeping in touch with the kids or at least giving them space to be kids. That man was taken entirely too early

Maybe this is me projecting what “life on the set” is like and also projecting about wanting Alan Rickman to be my dad and Maggie Smith to be my mom, but it makes you wonder if there was efforts made by the established actors working with these kids through their entire childhood to guide them through the insanity.

And if nothing else, I think Watson has turned out to be a really cool person.

But a lot of the casting is weak

Considering Radcliffe chased the Harry Potter movies with doing Equus for a long time, it’s safe to say he knows he’s made enough money and can just do whatever he wants.

I think this is the key thing a lot of the discourse around this film tends to forget — it’s a kid’s film. Of course I, a cynical twenty-something who wasn’t that into Harry Potter to begin with, wasn’t particularly engaged with the film and can see all the flaws and joins and Chris Columbusness of it all. I’m not in…

Fun-fact, around the time of the third or fourth film, my wife attended a party, which she knew would include Rickman. The kids begged her for autographs, so she took along a couple of photos of him as Snape, and shyly presented them to him.

Sorry but I LOVE it. It contains my favourite Chris Colombus traits: he is tied by the Rowling pressure but he gets the child’s view as few others. The most important part of the movie are the kids getting introduced to an elite world that is full of surprises and difficult to grasp, and HP1 also has strong ties to…

I enjoyed Radcliffe’s performance in A Young Doctor’s Notebook. He and John Hamm played well off each other.

I’m a sucker for movies where a large group of friends work together for a common goal. Unlike most heist movies, there is no rotten apple in Ocean’s crew. There’s some bickering but nobody isn’t completely onboard.

It’s odd to say Emma Watson is the “one of the three who became both a great actor and a movie star” when she hasn’t had a breakout role outside of Harry Potter yet either. She and Radcliffe have both been in good movies but I’d say their careers are about even at the moment, probably by choice. They’re also both…

The entire LotR trilogy is, entirely without exaggeration, far and away my favorite movies ever made.

Outside the Harry Potter films I think Swiss Army Man might be Radcliffe’s best movie. I was tickled when it showed up on several best-of-the-decade lists.

It’s weird to think that Fellowship’s twentieth anniversary is coming up, because that movie came out when I was in high school and I became utterly obsessed with…

There are some great points here about how much pressure Columbus et al was under to make as literal of an adaptation as possible. Yet it made for such an interesting contrast to Fellowship of the Ring, which came out only a month later. The Sorcerer’s Stone reeked of a studio trying desperately to make money off a…

She’s not a regular.  She has “Special Guest Star” credit when she appears, meaning she’s not part of the regular cast.

Given how we saw Osira feed her own nephew to a transworm just for failing her, it seems completely in character that when cutting off Ryn’s antennae she would also cauterize the wound to prevent them from ever growing back.  Like if she ever burned the crops of Book’s planet, she would also salt the earth to prevent…

I feel like you need to be careful, or else we’ll get another needless “Northern Andorians grow antennae like this, and Southern Andorians grow antennae like that” alien race continuity patch.

So what is the deal with Book’s species. Are they all empaths or just him and his brother? Because it seems really weird that no one on his planet would think “Hey, what if we work together to ask the locusts to leave?” Yes, Discovery boosted their powers but no one in all the time the locusts have been a problem has…

One weird thing is that Ryn keeps talking about his antennae like they’re gone forever, but it’s been established since at least Enterprise that they grow back in a few months. Sure, his could have been cauterized or whatever to prevent that, but it sure hasn’t been made clear.