Alan Rickman’s Answering Machine

OK, not the life-altering year-end post I was envisioning … that’ll come later. Ray and I watched Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince last night, and I noticed a couple of things. First off, the cinematography is gorgeous. Maybe it was because we’d seen Avatar earlier in the day that I noticed it –the latter is lush and green and tropical, and Half Blood Prince is in muted tones of stone, brown, gray and yellow. It works. I was quite surprised to see that the films are growing up along with their characters–it’s not a kid’s movie anymore.

Oh, and, yes, Avatar is stunning although it’s about 20 minutes too long, and I realized at some point that it is a heavy-handed film with a strong anti-imperialist/anti-colonialist message–you’ve seen that before, but it’s done particularly well (although there was a cluster of “oh, come on” moments right toward the end).

However, the one thing I noticed most of all was that … is it just me, or is Alan Rickman starting to sound more and more like a caricature of himself? There were points in Half Blood Prince where all I could thing of is this scene from Family Guy:

It’s like Rickman saw this and decided to one-up Seth MacFarlane … and you should never try to one-up Seth MacFarlane. Because so far, the only person who has managed to do it successfully is Marlee Matlin (if you’re easily offended, you should probably just skip ahead to the 2.42 mark).