The Ghosts of Hogwarts

The ghosts of Hogwarts pay a price for electing to continue a diaphanous and immaterial existence in this world rather than letting themselves be swept on to the next. That price is an existence without touch, taste, or flavor. The price of translation of Jo Rowling's books onto the screen is starting to look similar. I saw Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix last night and was rather disappointed.

To be sure, non-reader fans with me seemed to disagree. They found the movie more fast paced and interesting than most of the others. Director David Yates stripped away anything remotely superfluous in a long book, and that resulted in considerable violence to the story it told. Nuance, sublety and wit were among the victims. So was much of the flavor.

I thought the scenes in the book where the dreaming Harry sees through Voldemort's eyes were among the most vivid and memorable. For me, somehow, Daniel Radcliffe writhing in bed and grunting doesn't quite capture it. The movie also makes a total hash of the most arresting scene in the book - the one where Harry dips into the Pensieve and encounters Snape's memories of Harry's parents and Sirius. Unfortunately, the memories he encounters are of a conceited snot who grossly abuses Snape. The movie version makes no sense.

It's easy to find other targets for abuse in the movie. Rowling keeps the much ballyhooed kiss between Harry and Cho offscreen, but Yates brings it front and center. The result is oddly grating: a kiss lacking either erotic passion or adolescent angst - it was more like a clinical experiment with face-sucking robots.

The books are often described as progressively darker. Yates has interpreted that in the most literal way imaginable, by failing to light most of the scenes adequately. It doesn't look good for book six - it appears most of the scenes will be shot through a totally opaque lens.

Dolores Umbridge is suitably demonic and Luna Lovegood delightfully daffy, but neither quite measures up to the characters Rowling implanted in my imagination.

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