We saw Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince tonight! It was EXCELLENT!!!! Sad, but excellent!
Best parts:
1. Extremely dark, gothic cinematography. Even the scenes in color were muted... creeeeepy!
2. The trio's sense of humor notably matured and some really funny scenes in this one
3. Lavender Brown's goo-goo mushy kissy face bit with Ron - HA!
4. The Quidditch scenes involved no noticable computer graphics characters - much more realistic
5. The Room of Requirement - I wanted about a week or two just to rummage around in there and see what all that cool stuff was!
6. The true friendship between Harry and Hermione really ran an important thread through the whole movie and held everything together in a much stronger way than I had thought before.
7. The horcrux cave was done super-imaginatively, spectacularly, and the scene on the wave-smashed rocks outside was dizzying!
8. We got to see parts of the Hogwarts castle we'd never seen before... which is always a thrill!
9. Slughorn's potions classroom ROCKS.
10. Ron playing Quidditch when he thinks he's had a shot of Felix Felicis
11. Luna Lovegood. She's just the coolest wacko ever.
Worst parts:
1. Ginny and Harry's kiss. That was so completely lame, I have no words. It was one of the major build-up points of the plot, and.... phsssssssssst. Complete fizzle.
2. Dumbledore's death. For emotional reasons, not a criticism of the movie-making. The scene was done excellently. Bring a couple of boxes of tissues, is all I'm saying.
3. I didn't like the "muggle scenes" in the beginning. Too far out of the wizarding world for my taste, especially since they didn't show the Minister of Magic meeting with the muggle prime minister.
4. The asshats sitting in front of us who brought their very young child to the movie. Said asshats, who have obviously never cracked the cover on a Harry Potter book in their lives, decided that every other scene in the movie was too disturbing for their toddler, prompting them to dive across the lap of their older child, who was inexplicably seated between them, in order to cover the child's eyes. Not only was this very distracting to those of us who actually wanted to watch the movie, I'm sure it very effectively instilled an even deeper fear of seeing people die in the psyche of the child they were supposedly trying to protect. Parents who truly want to protect their children from things they are not old enough to handle leave the theater when they realize they've made a bad choice for their toddler. The even smarter ones read the book first. The really, really smart ones get a babysitter, because four-year-olds don't give a shit about anything that lasts more than two and half minutes anyway.
Now, all I want to do is watch it again. And again. And again! I'm sure, as always, there are a million nuances that I missed first time around. I can't wait to get it on DVD... and find out when they're releasing the first movie for the last book (it's gonna be TWO MOVIES - WOOOOT!).
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Re: The birdfeeder(s) countdown... still no finches sighted, still no hummingbirds sighted. The watch continues. Updates to follow.
4 comments:
I haven't gone to see it because I am going through all of the books on audio book. I'm on the third book now and I'm just loving it. Stephen Fry is the best reader. I'm going to try to get a large enough memory stick to put all these audio files on for you, so you have Stephen's version as well.
Dude - that would be way cool!
I agree about the audio books, he's the narrator from Pushing Daisies and he's awesome.
I have to say this is the first one that I was disappointed re: the differences from the book to the movie. Every other one I have been able to just enjoy the movie as a separate entity but this one... they just added too much stuff that didn't belong and took out too much that IMO was more important. (I won't say here so as not to spoil anything for those that haven't seen it.) I will still see it again and will still own it but yeah.
Sounds great. We still haven't let our kids watch past the second movie and I think even that one was a bit too much for our imaginative son. He's read all the books now he's eleven but somehow the movies seem scarier.
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