Month: July 2009

Watch and discuss.

Peters suggested a discussion on the latest Harry Potter movie installment, so I thought I’d get that thread moving forward, now that I have seen it. I liked the movie a lot, as a summer popcorn adventure and also because the sixth book is one of the two best of the series (the best being the third book).

I did miss Voldemort as Voldemort (and Ralph Fiennes’ incarnation of him), and the movie is rushed (though not nearly so much as the last one), but overall it produced the eerie feeling I was hoping for, given the dark lake sequence where Harry must feed Dumbledore the weakening potion, the lake’s undead beings, and then the rush to the end and Dumbledore’s death. But it wasn’t so eerie or dark that you couldn’t enjoy the adventure of it, which was perhaps some of the problem with the movie of The Order of the Phoenix.

I thought the great addition was Jim Broadbent as Slughorn, and the memory sequences with the younger and teenaged Tom Riddle (I wish these could have been lingered on). I wanted more of the Order involved throughout, and I wanted more Snape in the movie, but I take those wantings more to be sign that I liked what was there.

The third movie remains clearly the best in the series, and given that I didn’t think the seventh book was as strong and Warner Bros.’ decision to make it into two installments, I am assuming that will remain the case. Still, I admit I enjoyed getting back into the Harry Potter world more than I thought I would.