Showing posts with label Harry Potter. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Harry Potter. Show all posts

Monday, November 21, 2011

I'm Harry Potter, Harry Harry Potter

Lets just get this out of the way:

I love this YouTube video. Now it is going to be in your head while you read this. Now I have you right where I want you...Recently I reread all of the Harry Potter books and watched all of the movies as well. Since I have done that, I have found my mind wandering quite a bit. I hadn't read them sequentially since they were first released, and I have to say that I forgot just how good they really are.

When I was in 6th grade, my teacher shared with us the story of Harry Potter. It was this book that was sweeping the world about an 11 year old boy wizard. It just so happened that I was 11 years old at the time as well. I anxiously waited for each book to come out (and they were coming out every year), and Harry was the same age as I was in real life. I didn't grasp the depth of the books then, but I remember reading and rereading the first 3 about 10 times. The books stopped coming out every year, and I got older than Harry. It sitll played an important part of my preteen years I think.

I can't heap enough praise on the books, which are phenomenal. The movies...eh. I am a little so-so on a few of them. Additionally (Warning, here be potential spoilers), I think the epilogue of the whole book is extraordinarily corny. After reading it as an adult, there are also some lines of dialogue in the book that make me cringe because they are weird. Luckily, there are only 2 or 3. The movies though seem like half of them were written by monkeys.

Here is the age old problem that we find when great books are turned into movies that fail to live up to them. The best theater is the theater of the mind. Nothing can be as true, scary or awesome as it is in our own heads. When movies try to capture that, they always fall short somewhere along the line. In that way, I think movies should try to take inspiration from the books, but also liberties that make them stand alone. Some of the movies did that, some did not.

The Lord of the Rings though...that was spot on. I am also tremendously excited for the 2 Hobbit movies that are going to be coming out!

Lastly, I watched Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 on Friday, and watched Aladdin on Saturday. I am now convinced that Jafar is a dark wizard, and possibly an alternate dimension Voldemort. Think about it, he has a things for snakes (even turns into one for a while there), he uses his snake staff to mind control the sultan...he has a pet bird (wizards have birds). I think I am on to something here. Disney should sue J.K. Rowling. JK (that JK was meant to mean Just Kidding, or my initials)