Somthing wicked this way comes!

[Bobtheduck]

Um... Let's just talk about the movie instead of the HP controversy...

I finally saw it... It is not as bad as I thought it was going to be, and it isn't nearly as good as I hoped it would be.

I found it to be rushed, probably because this was the first book I had "read" in the series, so I was very familiar with the pacing of the books... The first half hour of the movie really made me mad... All the little additions that the director made were really starting to grate me... Harry using magic at home in the title, the little head things (and how slapstick that scene was...) The rest of the movie, I had quite the opposite problem... Some of the lines that read well in your head sound really... stupid when you have them in actual spoken dialgue... It is quite obvious that the director's first language was NOT english... The first scene with Cornelius Fudge just about made me throw up... It was just so bad... I don't know...

The scene that I like the most, which was taken pretty faithfully from the book, was the scene in the shrieking shack... I was so giddy to see that scene come to life until the Peter Pettigrew... In the book, that worked... I mean, I imagined someone realistically looking like a rat... It just looked so... exaggerated in this... I know that's the way it was described in the books, but it just didn't look quite as good when they actualy did it... I don't WANT to know what they're going to do to Umbridge in Order of the Phoenix I may cry to myself if they make her look as cheeseball as Peter... Given the description in the book, I can imagine some really horrible things...

It was hit or miss... I really liked some of the additions, like all those quirky little shots of the whomping willow... Call me sadistic, but seeing the willow smack the birds never failed to make me laugh. As for Ron an Hermione, they are either going to have a plot hole or really going to have to figure SOMETHING out to not go totally out of the plotline for their relationthip... It develops MUCH more slowly in the books, and they are practically married by the end of the 3rd movie... Considering that neither one of them even as much as admit to it at that point, they are going to have to do something major to allow for the movies to not just develop a separate story in that regard...

Back to what bugged me, there are so many tips of the hat to fans of the books that will make no sense to casual viewers... To truly understand what is going on, you HAD to have read the book... So, I'm not absolutely sure this stands on its own as a movie...

Hmm... Dumbledore... I didn't like the new one... The old one WAS dumbledore... There is no escaping that... It's not their fault... I mean, they can't stop death, but they sorta changed his personality in this too... PoA's (movie) dumbledore is too... goofy... He doesn't have that wise old man presence that the old one did...

Anyhow, it was a decent experience overall... I hope the new director does a better Job than Cuaron...

EDIT: reading over the shrieking shack scene again, I realize some major things were actually left out of that scene... They never did explain where the marauder's map came from, who Moony, Wormtail, Padfoot, and Prongs were, or that [spoiler]Sirius was in azkaban for a MASS murder charge, not just for betraying the potters. Peter killed a bunch of muggles when he faked his death so Sirius would get blamed for it. Connected to that, Sirius showed up on muggle news as well, which is where Harry saw him first[/spoiler] Grr... I had forgotten that all that stuff was explained in that scene... Lupin talks for a LONG time...