Harry Potter & the Half-Bloo

My wife and I went to see the latest Harry Potter flick on Saturday. When purchasing our tickets at the theater, we opted to use the little kiosk machines in the foyer. You know the kind of machines I'm talking about, right? The ones where you can just touch the screen and it selects the thing you weren't trying to touch. Or it doesn't select anything at all. So you wait a few seconds, then try again, and still nothing. A few more seconds waiting, then you try again, and all of a sudden it selects that thing seventeen times. My zip code is apparently now 8411111111111111.

Anyway, it didn't have enough room to list the entire title of Harry Potter & the Half-Blood Prince. So it listed it as Harry Potter & the Half-Bloo. Which I should have realized was an omen as to how the movie would be. It half-blew.

For those of you who are not Harry Potter fans out there, I'll make it easy on you. I won't talk about Quidditch rules, the four Hogwarts Houses, dementors, or patronii. I will explain things in much simpler terms. The bad guys didn't do anything.

For example, here is some dialogue that's fairly close to the real thing in one of the scenes...

Harry Potter: I'm angry with you, bad person! I'm going to chase you! (he jumps through fire)
Audience: No, Harry, that's just what she wants! She's luring you away so you can be attacked!
Harry's girlfriend: Harry, wait up! (she jumps through fire)
Harry's adult friends: We just saw two kids jump through flames but we're too scared to follow! We'll stay back here for a bit!
Audience: You jerks! Go protect Harry!
Harry and his girlfriend: Oh no! We're all alone in the dark now! And we're surrounded by bad guys who are much more powerful than us! They could hurt us in like, 1000 different ways!
Bad guys: Let's just stand here looking menacing for a while. That ought to do the trick!
Harry's adult friends: We're coming now! We waited a few days for the fire to go out and finally proceeded after the last ember died down!
Bad guys: Oh no, more people are coming. It's probably best for us to leave in a puff of black smoke. Well, see you later, Harry.
Harry and his girlfriend: Bye, guys, it was nice meeting you! See you in a few scenes! Keep practicing those scary faces!

You can see how frustrating it would be to have a movie with virtually no conflict. Sure, there was a semi-intense sequence towards the end with some zombies trying to attack. But then Dumbledore flicked his wand and created fire to ward them off. Ironic, eh?

So here's what I think should happen. We need a BBC television series to depict the Harry Potter books. We'd be looking at roughly 20 hours of show instead of about two and a half. I think they could finally put everything from the books into it.

Speaking of books turning into movies, have you heard about "Where the Wild Things Are"? New feature-length film coming out soon. We're talking about making an entire movie based on a "book" that consists of ten sentences. That's right, ten sentences. To give you an idea of how little that is, this paragraph is already halfway there (even if one of the sentences technically lacks certain essential grammatical properties to form a sentence).

I don't think they got stuck trying to figure out what they were going to have to leave out of that movie. You can pretty much make sure you've got it all covered in the first five minutes.

No pictures today, folks, just wanted to do a short one...