Guilty Mommy Pleasures

I’m a Harry Potter fangirl. This isn’t one of those reviews where I got free tickets or anything. No, I paid cold hard cash to see Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. (Although, to be honest, I did get the tickets for a discount after we had dinner one night at Johnny Rockets, which is across the hall from Regal Cinema in Crossgates Mall. Pretty sweet deal, since it was also Kids Eat Free night!)

We planned an evening out with friends in order to see the movie. My mom babysat TJ for the occasion. It was an awesome night out with grown-ups. And I totally turned my hair pink to attend the movie as Tonks. Seriously. Check out the pics.

tonks1Our other friends were supposed to get dressed up, too, but they didn’t. We pretended that Tom was Remus Lupin because he was scruffy enough to be a werewolf. (He didn’t shave and he needs a haircut!) My friend Rhea said she has Ginny Weasley hair already, so she was about as “in character” as Tom was. But that’s okay, because Tom really liked my pink hair, despite the fact that my hair was too dark to get the “shockingly pink” results I was aiming for. And Rhea called me “smokin’ hot,” which is quite a compliment from someone I envy for her gorgeous curly red hair. It’s tricky to see the pink in my hair from the photos, but it was very subtle in most areas, despite the fact that I used an entire can of pink hairspray!

By the way, if you don’t want to read spoilers about the movie, you shouldn’t scroll past this next photo.

tonks2

I finished re-reading the book the night before we went to see the movie. Probably not the greatest idea, because then all of the gross inaccuracies were fresh in my mind. But I’ll run through the good parts first.

What I liked about Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

The teenage hormones were running wild. It was freaking hysterical to watch Ron and Lavender together, especially since she was completely overacting with the whole moon-eyed thing. But then I realized that teenage girls do tend to be stupid and obvious about their infatuations, even when they think they’re being subtle. In any case, we were literally laughing out loud over many of the ridiculous relationship antics. (There were some heart-breaking moments, too. Poor Hermione.)

Ron Weasley totally stole the show for most of the middle act. He plays such a great gawky boy when he was sulky and unsure of himself. Then when he thought he drank the Felix Felicis, he was all super confident and cocky. I’ll get to Quidditch next. But the best emotional acting in the entire film was Ron’s scene where he had ingested the love potion… Harry took him to Professor Slughorn’s office to get an antidote. The look on his face as he transformed from goofy, over-the-top obsessed with Romilda Vane to completely horrified at his memory of the event… PRICELESS. No cut away with the camera. Just one seamless transition from bliss to horror. And of course, he can faint dead away with the best of them when he started convulsing from the poison in the mead.

Quidditch. Cormac McLaggen was awfully pompous, wasn’t he? He played it well. I could not get over the camera angles with him on the broomstick, though. Phallic symbol, much? And then when Ron thought he’d taken the luck potion, he had the same posture. These actors are all over 18, right?

Speaking of impure thoughts attached to Harry Potter characters… The director seemed to be going out of his way to incorporate sexual innuendo in whatever way he could. There was really only one comment, where Ron asking Harry if he and Ginny “did it,” that used such a play on words. The rest were visuals. Ron and Cormac on their broomsticks. Ginny bending down to tie Harry’s shoe… So wildly inappropriate, but amusing at the same time.

I loved that some of the dialogue was verbatim from the book. Loved it. I approved of the way they summed up Tom Riddle’s mom by saying the locket was hers. Luna Lovegood was awesome, as always. I kept expecting Slughorn to start singing “Becase We Can Can Can,” though.

It may sound stupid, but the cinematography was awesome. They had some visually stunning sequences. When the camera would pan to reveal Draco brooding… Very nice. The film looked far crisper than any of the previous films.

What I disliked about Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

Okay. Let’s get this straight. The director cut out pretty much the entire battle scene at Hogwarts, but he inserted a scene where the Death Eaters burned down the Burrow? WHAT WAS HE THINKING? So completely unbelieveable that Snape and the Death Eaters would get out of Hogwarts without any resistance. And the Burrow? Hello, Fleur and Bill’s wedding? Oh wait, nevermind. We didn’t see either of them in this movie anyways. I can only assume that the burning of the Burrow has some significance for the adaptation of the next screenplay, but it seems like a really stupid decision to me right now.

Oh, and Harry wasn’t petrified when Snape killed Dumbledore? He was watching the whole thing from one floor below, simply obeying Snape’s shushing motion while the Death Eaters were all above in the astronomy tower? Totally out of character. THAT was what I hated the most about the whole movie. I disliked the absence of the Order of the Phoenix and the ensuing Hogwarts battle, but the fact that Harry wasn’t immobilized under his invisibility cloak made me really angry.

I also thought it was stupid how Luna found Harry on the Hogwarts Express instead of Tonks. Harry was supposed to have had a bezoar in his backpack because of Snape’s potions book – he wouldn’t have had  time to rifle through the drawers to find one. And they couldn’t have beat us over the head about Draco and that vanishing cabinet any more bluntly. Would it have been so difficult to have Rosmerta under the Imperius curse? Makes no sense how Draco was supposed to have given the package to Katie Bell and poisoned the mead without her help. Two seconds of dialogue! And no Dark mark over the castle before Harry and Dumbledore returned? Bah.

Do you agree? Disagree? Leave me a comment to let me know!

Christina Gleason (976 Posts)

That’s me: Christina Gleason. I’m a writer, editor, and disability advocate. I'm a multiply disabled autistic lady doing my best in this world built for abled people. I’m a geek for grammar, fantasy, and casual gaming. I hate vegetables. I cannot reliably speak, so I’ll happily conduct business over email or messaging instead.


By Christina Gleason

That’s me: Christina Gleason. I’m a writer, editor, and disability advocate. I'm a multiply disabled autistic lady doing my best in this world built for abled people. I’m a geek for grammar, fantasy, and casual gaming. I hate vegetables. I cannot reliably speak, so I’ll happily conduct business over email or messaging instead.

One thought on “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince Movie Review”
  1. TOTALLY agree! I didn’t re-read the book before I went to see it, and I’m sort of glad I did. But things about that movie have been nagging at me since I saw it and I couldn’t quite put my finger on what was bothering me. You just cleared it up for me.

    I knew beforehand they were going to burn the burrow. I read a spoiler review before the movie, thinking there wouldn’t be anything to spoil since I’d read the book. Wrong. They said they inserted that sequence to sum up all the reports of attacks in the book, and to make it more personal to Harry. I cried when I saw the burrow on fire, and saw Mrs. Weasley’s face while she watched it burn. And even though I knew it was coming, I cried when Dumbledore died. (Yeah, I’m a movie crier. Can’t help myself.) But yes, there were so many things about this movie that rang hollow. It felt like a placeholder to get to the final two movies. Can’t very well skip one, can we? So let’s get this over with. Bad form.

    There were things I liked about it, and a lot of laugh-out-loud moments, but overall, it wasn’t as good as I expected it to be, and definitely not as good as I hoped it would be. I’m sure I’ll watch it again when it comes out on DVD, and maybe I’ll find more to like, but for now, I’m mostly disappointed.

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