Smith-Ready Winners and HP6

The Winners of the Jeri Smith-Ready Giveaway are: B.E. Sanderson and Rhiannon! Please email me about your prizes. The way this will work is, the first winner to email me gets their choice of either Wicked Game or Bad to the Bone (include your choice in your email). The second winner to email me gets whatever is left.

Last night, SB and I went to see Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. Now, I’m not very familiar with HBP (Or Deathly Hallows, to be perfectly honest). I listened to HBP on audio twice, and read DH once. Compare that to multiple readings of the the first five, including dozens (probably) of 3&4. So I may just not be remembering things correctly. I’m not as familiar with the book, so I’m not always aware of when a script makes changes for the better, or are able to bypass things that might work in books and tell it differently for the sake of the visual medium (something that the Lord of the Rings movies, for example, did brilliantly). Also, I felt that HP6 was a tad problematic on a fundamental level (Harry spends half the book on a mission from Dumbledore to discover a secret that, eventually, it seems that Dumbledore already knows — not to mention that the whole Half-Blood Prince’s anticlimactic reveal). I do, however, feel that the film didn’t necessarily solve these problems (it really could have been an easy fix) and introduced others that were entirely unnecessary. I’m not super familiar with Yates’s work (I saw OOP and liked it, but pretty much any opinion of mine would have been a step up from the book), so maybe it’s just that his story sensibilities are UTTERLY different than mine. But. Yeah. His story sensibilities are utterly different than mine.

For instance, was there any particular reason that we needed to spend about as much time on Hermione’s charmed birds when she’s crying in the courtyard as we do on, oh, I don’t know. Dumbledore’s death scene? Throughout the movie, there seemed to be this odd focus on story elements and scenes that didn’t, in the end, seem to have much bearing on the entirety. There were a LOT of shots of the overacting Lavendar Brown going all mooney-eyed over Ron. A. Lot. It was funny the first few times. Then it got old. Also, was it me or was Ron shunted almost completely to the side in this film? It would have been easier to buy Hermione’s vast unspoken love for him if he were actually included in some of the serious scenes. His character has entirely been reduced to a comic relief. (Compare to Sokka of Avatar, who manages to be both goofy and a contributing member of the team.) He just sits there, staring dumbly into the distance, out of earshot of their very important plot conversation at the big end sequence where Hermione promises to be there for Harry when he says he’s going to drop out of Hogwarts.

And let us not speak of the mishandling of the entire Half Blood Prince plotline. It’s awkward in the original, but it COULD have been integrated so much better. The true horror of Sectum Sempra is not simply that Harry doesn’t realize what a horrible spell it is (after all, this is after Malfoy breaks his nose with his boot), but also that it reminds Harry of the torture that he himself underwent at the hands of the evil headmaster in book 5. Thou shalt not cut with invisible objects. (And thou shalt not cast spells thou dost not understand, either, but whatever.) And then, Ginny Weasely recommends hiding the book? Ginny Weasley, who knows from evil books by mysterious authors? Guys, we already saw you burning newspapers in the first scene. I think that’s a gun on the wall.

Speaking of the Weasely house — what was up with that whole Christmas thing? Does Ginny Weasely really go around tying boys’ shoes in the book? There was a lengthy sequence I could have done without. And the Death Eaters came to… do what exactly? Make sure everyone was well out of the house before they burned it to the ground? Speaking of what the Death Eaters come to do — and again, this might be betraying my bad memory of the book — but don’t they have a huge battle at Hogwarts? They come in and start attacking people? The werewolf guy bites all kinds of folks, including one of the adult Weasely’s who came to help in an OOP capacity? These Death Eaters in the movie — I’m not sure why they were there. To back up Draco? I mean, what was the whole point of the yearlong, laboriously detailed and repeated struggle with the Vanishing Cabinet? So Bellatrix could come in and break some windows? Srsly?

In passing, moviemakers, one of the benefits of being able to cut away to the villain doing villainous things throughout the entire film is that at the end you don’t need that scene you often have in books where the heroes and the villain talk about what the villain had been doing the entire film. Also, the idea that Harry just sits around while the Death Eaters kill his mentor is a lot harder to swallow when Harry is, in fact, just sitting around, and not immobilized, invisible, and wandless as he is in the book.

So that was the bad. It is a testament, perhaps, to the mythic/epic qualities and my love of hte series that despite these drawbacks, I did enjoy the film. I am moved by the story. I guess it’s a question of whether I want to watch these movies as movies in their own right or whether I just think of them kind of like fan art — I watch them to be reminded of how much I liked hte books and to be reminded of my favorite things about the books. A few of my favorite parts:

• Jim Broadbent. In general, I love everything this actor does, but I thought he was a particularly good choice for Slughorn, who is one of the juiciest parts in the entirety of the series, if you ask me. Bellatrix may be sexier and more fun to play, but it’s difficult to pull off what Slughorn must — as the only “good” Slytherin in the entire series, he’s got a big burden, and he’s an incredibly complex, flawed character. Broadbent nailed it. Soooooo good. Every scene he was in was positively riveting.
• I do like the new Dumbledore. He was so good here.
• I like how they KINDA made an argument for the whole “go be friends with Slughorn” thing, making it about Dumbledore trying to figure out how MANY horcruxes Tom had made. Though they probably could have hit that plot point harder. (Though, honestly, wherefore the new Damienesque Tom? He looked so off. Was Christian Coulson not available again?)
• The expanded Draco scenes. That actor is also shaping up rather nicely. They give a lot of credit to the main three, but some of the other kids are great. (More Neville, if you please!)
• Luna Lovegood is my hero.
• The Katie Bell sequence was fantastic and terrifying. It was terrifying in the book and just as terrifying in the film. Kinda had a Japanese horror-film quality to it, don’t you think? Like something you might see in The Ring?

What did you all think?