CapitalistImperialistPig

OK, there are a few things I really hated about Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, part II, the movie. (1) 3-D (2) The fact that the film appeared to have been shot through a dirty beer bottle.  The lighting was so bad that I could hardly recognize most of the characters, much less see what they were doing. (3) The climactic showdown between Harry and Voldy.  The bang-bang nonsense sucked all the drama out of their confrontation. (4) The narrative compression required to make this the shortest HP movie.  I don't see how anyone not deeply initiated could figure out what was happpening. I also didn't care for the treatment of Snape's memories.  This is a lovely episode in the book - not so much in the movie. Yates made one good movie (VI) and four bad ones.

I apologize for ever implying that Ginny might not be a suitable life partner for HP and that Ron was dull. No doubt Jo Row knows better. ---------Uncle CIP

In retrospect, it was not such a hot idea for a few dozen Death Eaters and their wanna bees to get snockered on fire whisky and stage a major riot at the Quiddich World Cup. Right in the middle of several thousand heavily armed fellow wizards. Hit simultaneously with hundreds of stunning spells, a number were killed instantly, but enough survived to reveal the identities of the ring-leaders. It wasn't an auspicious start to the big V's comeback plans, but nonetheless his agent managed to penetrate the ludicrous security effort mounted by Hogwarts School's nearly senile headmaster. When the Goblet turned out to have been hexed, though, even Dumbledore's slow suspicions were awakened, and a casual seeming conversation with the Defense-against-the-dark-arts teacher revealed his rather imperfect memory of his many decades of interaction with the headmaster. Veratiserum and legilimency quickly got to the bottom of the plot and He who must not be named got a rather unpleasa...

OK, so I will buy this movie when it comes out. I will probably get a BluRay player so that I can see it in detail. I might even go see it in the theater again. But I'm not happy. Yes I know that DH is the darkest of the books and the darkest of the stories. It's nice that the kids grew up to be good looking and able to act. It's nice that Britain has lots of improbably good-looking and wild scenery. I just didn't expect the movie to be so damn flat. One of Rowling's strengths as a story teller is that she knows how to modulate the mood. Director David Yates - not so much. This was a one-tone symphony. The trouble with unrelieved gloom is that it starts to look just boring. As usual, most of the professional reviews that I've read take exactly the opposite view - they mostly love the movie, the cinematography, and the music. There was music? My family disagrees too. The professionals don't like the first two movies - my very favorites - so clearly my point ...

I haven't posted for a while. Blame Belette who introduced me to Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. At least he could have warned me that I would be left hanging (literally) in mid-air... A sample: The Professor turned and looked down at him, dismissive as usual. "Oh, come now, Harry. Really, magic? When you say that rationality is your favorite thing ever and read so much about it? I thought you'd know better than to take this seriously, son, even if you're only ten. Magic is just about the most unscientific thing there is!" Harry's mouth twisted bitterly. He was treated well, probably better than most genetic fathers treated their own children. Harry had been sent to the best elementary schools - and when that didn't work out, he was provided with tutors from the endless labor pool of starving students. Always Harry had been encouraged to study whatever caught his attention, bought all the books that caught his fancy, sponsored in whatever mat...

It seems that quiddich has become something of an intercollegiate sport , albeit in an attenuated form. ( Or on the fight fiercely side, Harvard ) Somehow, I don't think the sport is quite ready to get off the ground yet. At least not without some mechanical muggle help. What's needed is a way to add some levity to the proceedings. Perhaps you've seen a Dyson fan. This very cool device appears to be just a sort of metallic ring that produces a rather laminar wind flow with no visible fan blades. I envision a gigantic version mounted horizontally, encased by a transparent wall surrounding the quiddich pitch. A person sitting on a broom is not very stable aerodynamically, so I think some winglets above the player would be needed for stability and to get vertical speeds to some reasonable rate. What would that rate be? Non-magical flying requires that the flyer's weight be balanced by the transferring downward momentum to air at the rate, dp/dt = mg. At optimal an...

Via the comments at Sean Carroll's site, I found this . It induced a seriously threatening case of uncontrollable ... well, you'll see. The operating principle: consistently change just one letter in one word in the Harry Potter novels. A sample: "Yes, yes. I thought I'd be seeing you soon. Harry Potter." It wasn't a question. "You have your mother's eyes. It seems only yesterday she was in here herself, buying her first wang. Ten and a quarter inches long, swishy, made of willow. Nice wang for charm work." "Your father, on the other hand, favored a mahogany wang. Eleven inches. "

Jo Rowling is sueing the author of an unauthorized Harry Potter encylopedia. She apparently claims that his book is a threat to her next billion bucks. I'm no lawyer, but it sounds to me like she has no case - the proposed encyclopedia is almost certainly a critical work of the type protected by fair use laws. On the other hand, she, unlike the author, has the money and lawyers to summon up plenty of practitioners of the dark arts to crush him. I suspect she would do more for her future earnings and the artistic integrity of her work if she would do something about the increasingly stinko movie versions of the books - each one seemingly worse than the last. Of course it's pretty clear that she has lost touch with her story - that stupid bit about Dumbledore being gay, for example. How she could confuse a minor homoerotic element of a relationship with sexual orientation is really a mystery to me. Of course, she made the obverse mistake with Ginny. Pretty much everybody ...

A short stint in the plutocracy has evidently been enough to convince Jo Rowling that her interests lie with the Deatheaters. From Mediabistro : So there's this Harry Potter Lexicon website that basically collates all the information from the seven-volume series—people, places, spells, rules for quidditch—written by fans and edited by a librarian named Steve Vander Ark. And J.K. Rowling liked the site, she really did. She even gave it an "award" a few years back. But when Vander Ark and RDR Books decided to put out a print edition of the lexicon, Rowling stopped feeling the love, and the AP's David B. Caruso reports that she and Warner Bros., which also has a substantial stake in Potter intellectual property, are getting all Avada Kedavra on everybody's ass, a term of art meaning they're planning to throw money at lawyers who will drag the little guys through one proceeding after another until they give in. This suit is properly viewed as part of the long sta...

Potter bashers have historically been a rather scarce commodity, which gave them a certain market value. Antonia S. Byatt, who evidently is a writer of some reputation (not quite sufficient to come to my attention, however) is probably the second most prominent such death eater. She reviewed HP 5 in the New York Times Harry Potter And The Childish Adult in 2003. Like other infidels, she can't quite figure out what the fuss is about: What is the secret of the explosive and worldwide success of the Harry Potter books? Why do they satisfy children and — a much harder question — why do so many adults read them? I think part of the answer to the first question is that they are written from inside a child's-eye view, with a sure instinct for childish psychology. But then how do we answer the second question? Surely one precludes the other. Her title announces both her diagnosis and her critical strategy. The last sentence is another clue. It's a thought that would never occu...

... is the title of a book by Harold Bloom. By most accounts, it is a good book. I might even read it sometime, perhaps after I get through reading How to have Sex and Why . By which I mean that I've never had any doubts about why, and have acquired enough understanding of how that I feel no particular need for coaching from a 70 year old (his age when he wrote it) Yale professor of literature. So what do I care about this self-styled "master critic" and his opinions? About seven years ago, on his seventieth birthday, the Wall Street Journal published his pompous and dismissive review of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone entitled Can 35 Million Book Buyers Be Wrong? Yes. Popular literature that they don't get is common target for aging critics. Edmund Wilson set off against J R R Tolkien in similar fashion forty or so years earlier. Of course, I shouldn't dismiss his critique out of hand. So what does he have to say? He opens with: Taking arms ag...

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...

There is a lot of fear and loathing in HP fandom about Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows , the seventh and last volume in Jo Rowling's series. Loathing, because we (readers, publishers, bookstores) hate to see the end of the series, and fear, because we know she will kill off some of our heroes, possibly including Harry. Fear too, because we love her now but fear that she may just be the kind of sadist who might do that murder most foul, thereby earning our undying bitterness - or so we fear. Of course there is also the fear that, whatever happens, the seventh book won't be as good as the others. Sequels are never supposed to be as good as the originals, but of course she has now written five of them without a clinker. Yet. For some books, the author is part of the story, and Jo's is one of the more dramatic. We love Harry and we loved the story of the single mother writing her books in longhand in Cafes. Thus, it was a bit of downer to learn that HP 7 was finished...

Since Stoat has already reported on Harry Potter 7 ( Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows ) reviews at Amazon UK , I too wanted to get my review in the queue before the book is actually published, and hereby post it. HP&TDP is truly a fitting conclusion to Jo Rowling's epic fantasy. Some critics have been less than kind, and the book banners have been out in force, but I say fie on the naysayers. I suppose that it's not entirely surprising that the Vatican took exception to the depiction of the archvillian of the series as Pope Voldo I, or that the more fastidious moralists were upset by the explicit depictions of elf sex (snogging and other British diversions). I confess that even I was a bit non-plussed by the 183 page chapter devoted to a goblin - nevermind. More upsetting to hard core fans, no doubt, was the gruesome execution of Harry and the entire Weasley family (except for Ginny's (and Harry's) young daughter, Marry, who improbably survived Goyle's A...