Maggie noodle review - Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

The Harry Potter movies have begun to take liberties with JK Rowling's stories, not so much in the big happenings, but in the content. Fans of the book who have imagined in their minds fantastic sequences are bound to be disappointed when they see this one. In order to cram a book into a 150-minute movie (without songs, mind you!) requires comprehensive revision of events and sequences. Gone therefore are the many "memory" trips taken by Dumbledore and Harry. Instead the first and last one are kept intact and the rest not even referred to. The movie ends without a climactic battle at Hogwarts, which it does in the book.

Having said all that, this is the best Harry Potter movie so far. It was refreshing to see that the movie-makers did not deem it necessary to end the movie with a series of bangs and explosions. After all, the 7th book also ends with the Battle of Hogwarts and it would have seemed repetitive if they had already covered it in Movie 6.

The actors have been at it so long they slip effortlessly into their roles. My favorite is Alan Rickman, who makes everything he says sound ominous and full of portent. I'd love to be able to hear him place a lunch order one day just to see if the waiter trembles in his boots while taking it down.

While Ginny's "hard, blazing look" was eschewed in favor of a newly-written scene in the Room of Requirement, considering how much material needed to be covered, it was probably as nice way of doing it as a screenplay writer could think of.

I can hardly wait for the next two HP movies to come out now (yes, two movies).

Muggle time

A few weeks ago I discussed the Tales of Beedle the Bard, JK Rowling's latest book from the world of Harry Potter (sort of).

I loved the stories in the book, as I did the Harry Potter books. Each of the five tales have the classic JKR touch - simple enough that kids can get it, but complicated enough that adults can enjoy them, too. This is a tough thing to do, but she seems to have a finger on the pulse of her readers and this book does not disappoint, either.

I do not want to discuss the tales themselves as I do not want to ruin it if you have not read them. But I will say that she does not pretend that children cannot take adult concepts seriously. By not condescending to the children, whom the tales are directed towards, she does us all a favor by making the stories fun to read. This book is basically a children's book directed towards an adult audience.

Everyone will have their favorite story. Two stories stand out for me - The Warlock's Hairy Heart and The Fountain of Fair Fortune.

Buy the book and read it!

Needling the thread

JK Rowling has taken a major plot point of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows to fashion a children's book out of it. Tales of Beedle the Bard is a book in Book 7 that is bequeathed to Hermione Granger.

Using the ruse that Hermione translated the tales from ancient runes, JKR produces 5 innovative children's tales. Each one is different, most of them having macabre elements that get resolved by the end of the story in such a way that the gory bits do not seem that gory at all.

The stories still carry JKR's punch and inventiveness and are fun to read. There are just 5 tales in the book and it is a quick read. Which is why JKR has an additional section after every story under the guise of them being "notes by Albus Dumbledore". While these provide more details and extend the book, they are a deterrent to the story. The Dumbledore comments are longer than the stories and don't really add anything to the HP lore. Those that are not familiar with it will not understand the text anyway, so the purpose of these additions is perplexing. Moreover, the notes try to explain the meaning of the story which is a tad condescending to the reader since the stories are so well written the "moral" of the tale comes through pretty easily. By dumbing it down, she has actually made it worse to read.

I suspect that the publisher's insisted she have additional text in order to make it a bigger book so they could charge more for it. If that was the case, then it only served to weaken the impact of the stories. If it was just JKR's doing, then the finger that she had on a child's pulse has slipped just a little bit.

(I have intentionally not reviewed any of the tales as I'd like you to discover the stories for yourself).

Parallel vision

One of the best features of JK Rowling's writing is her ability to describe places and people in a few, short sentences. The reader's mind then fills in the rest of the details.

For example, here is how she describes Severus Snape:

His eyes were black like Hagrid's, but they had none of Hagrid's warmth. They were cold and empty and made you think of dark tunnels.

When the movies came out, the vision of the movie-makers was quite different from what I had in mind, and after the first movie I have begun treating the movies as a separate entity in themselves.

The first preview of the next movie - HP6 - Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince has been released, and I cannot wait for next summer to roll around. It does not look anything like my imagination, and there are many scenes in the preview that do not exist in the book but I don't care - it looks good and it looks like another blockbuster is on it's way. See for yourself:

Exercise in futility

JK Rowling likes to leave clues on her website for her young fans to figure out questions they may have about her books. The question whose answer was most eagerly anticipated, of late, was the name of the 7th book in the Harry Potter series. The answer has been revealed. Fans had a chance to figure it out by going to the webpage.

I tried to find out the title before I read about it, but it is a puzzle only in name. There is no rhyme of reason to all the clues, is there? How is a person supposed to decipher how to open the door except to blindly click all over the place until some combination of lucky clicks gets them in? This particular puzzle is not even a test, it is just an exercise in random luck. (If there is a pattern to the clues, please do elucidate).

Anyway, for those that are still flummoxed, here are the instructions:

If you go to her home page, click on the eraser and you will be taken to a room -- you'll see a window, a door and a mirror. In the mirror, you'll see a hallway. Click on the farthest doorknob and look for the Christmas tree. Then click on the center of the door next to the mirror and a wreath appears. Then click on the top of the mirror and you'll see a garland. Look for a cobweb next to the door. Click on it, and it will disappear. Now, look at the chimes in the window. Click on the second chime to the right, and hold it down. The chime will turn into the key, which opens the door. Click on the wrapped gift behind the door, then click on it again and figure out the title yourself by playing a game of hangman.