The Killer Baguette of DOOOOOOOOOOOMMMM!!!!

I saw Harry Potter et le prisonnier d'Azkaban last night--dubbed in French. I enjoyed myself immensely, but I have to say Snape (they call him Professeur Rogue here!) simply does not work without the voice of Alan Rickman; without That Voice, you're just a guy in a bad wig. But I love the new director, the Spanish guy what's-his-name. His cinematography gives a real sense of space, shooting through and around things all the time. The Dementors were perfect. And Neville lost all his babyfat! Awwww! ('scuse me while I try and restrain the latent maternal instinct that my beloved Neville always inspires). Lupin was perfect too, as was Sirius Black. And they sang the "Double, double, toil and trouble" bit in French! Didn't understand any of it, but it was still cool. But I missed having the trio in their robes! And I was starting to devise a pretty fun drinking game towards the end there: a shot for every time a scene fades in from black with Harry in a dead faint and Hermione asking him if he's okay (" 'air-ee? Ca va?"). Did he faint that much in the book? Because I think he spent half the movie unconcious.
Anyway, the fact that it was dubbed means I spent most of the movie giggling madly at inappropriate moments. The French word for wand is baguette, I kid you not, and I'm in the midst of a torrid love affair with French bread right now, so every time someone's in mortal danger I keep seeing them taking on dementors with their magical baguette, brandishing supernatural bread in the face of unspeakable evil! That should be the title of book six, Harry Potter and the Killer Baguette of Doom.

Anyway, in further bookish news, I got a copy of Pride and Prejudice in French, despite my reservations about reading Austen, Woolf, and Shakespeare in translation. They combine the Famous First Sentence ("It is a truth universally acknowledged...") with the second one in the French translation, which is just WRONG, WRONG, WRONG. Anyway, tune in next time to hear about my search for Charles Perrault and the fairy tales of the 17th century salons...