Pottering Around

Well, I finished off the last Harry Potter book yesterday, and there weren't any major surprises, except that I for some reason was expecting a higher death toll. Shame on me. It was pretty engrossing, but it's hard to determine if that was due to the desire to race to the end to get it over with or genuine pleasure. I suppose it depends on where you fall on the Harry Potter like-spectrum.

I also saw "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix" last Thursday at a matinée showing in downtown Berkeley. A blissfully empty theater, but never sit against the wall where another action movie is showing because the sub-sonic rumbles from the Surround Sound were quite annoying.

I think that they did a disservice in cutting this movie. I've read that it's the shortest of the films, and that's alarming, considering how dense the last 3 books are. Surely, given the target market for these films, children, the child-like and me, they could've gone for a longer cut because it seems like it was the breathless Cliff Notes to the book (with a few inevitable minor changes), and I think anyone who hadn't read the book would be hardpressed to make sense of it all. Hasn't the Lord of the Rings films taught anyone that or is it going to be the inevitable DVD release with all the extra scenes or the director's cut to sop up some more of that marketing money? Alas.

It was disconcerting for a while until I realized that Robert Hardy, who plays Cornelius Fudge in the movie series, is also the voice for one of the main characters, Lord Malan, in my favorite new BBC radio comedy, His Master's Voice. He is quite spry for a gentleman of 81 years, for I would have never guessed his age.

One thing that they did absolutely right was the casting of the character Luna Lovegood, a 5th book character addition that adds a lot to the series. They picked the perfect unknown actress, Evanna Lynch: she has the perfect look, manner and voice. Kudos for that. She is apparently quite the Harry Potter fan with correspondence with J. K. Rowling predating her involvement in the franchise. The rest of the film was enjoyable, but marred by the necessary perfunctory treatment of most of the major characters. I await the DVD then.