yesterday, peter and i(and the rest of his family) went to see the new harry potter film at the guo bing theater in hsimenting. guo bing is considered by many to be the best movie theater in taipei. i'd always avoided it as i'd heard the seats were very close together not leaving much leg room. i was pleasantly surprised to discover the seats have plenty of room.

as for harry potter and the prisoner of azkaban, i dug it quite a bit and feel as many do that it's an improvement on the first two films(i never cared much for chris columbus to begin with). however, the film felt a bit rushed and a lot was left out. the whole mystery of who sent harry his new broom is gone(it's sort of tacked on the end), as is draco and company walking out on the pitch as dementors, and who created the marauder's map isn't mentioned either, not to mention that neither cedric diggory nor cho chang are mentioned by name. i wish they'd made a three hour film instead of this two hour version. when the film was over peter turned to me and said "that's it?". i hope there'll be a director's cut dvd that has more footage, but the first two dvd releases seemed to be rather lacking in extras, so i've not got my hopes up.

since we saw the film on a sunday afternoon, there were lots of annoying kids there. after the film peter said he heard one mother making excuses for one of her kids "don't blame her, she's only three" or some such idiocy. why would someone bring a three year old to a film that is in a language that the child can't even understand? and if the kid can't behave to begin with, why bring them at all?