Half-Blood Prince (2009)

While all the pointy-headed liberal elites are off at the flim festival, we got to watch the new Harry Potter. It was good! I liked it!
I think what I like best is that it just doesn’t care. “Chum,” it says, “I’m adapting book 6 of a gigantically successful 7-book series. I don’t need things like ‘narrative’ and ‘causality’. All I need is those kids and a selection of the most impressive British actors I can find and then I can bloody well do what I like with them!”
The film is almost incomprehensible on its own terms, but for the initiated it’s great. I thoroughly enjoyed it. I particularly enjoyed Jessie Cave’s Lavender Brown, whose completely over the top scenery-chewing, in the hyper-real world of these books, curled all the way around again to start ringing true.
Also great: every visual gag involving Luna.

6 thoughts on “Half-Blood Prince (2009)”

  3. Sadly after losing too much of my life to the first 2 (or 3?) movies, quoth the raven, nevermore.
    This puts the potters in the same class as the spidey’s, and the starwarsies.

  4. Aw, you’re too hard on Spidey 2.
    I do like the HP movies. I like watching the kids grow up. Is that weird? Perhaps it is weird.

  5. Though Spiderman 1 is actually a worse movie than Spiderman 2. It just has a more intense dynamic between hero and villain. Spiderman 2 is the only film in the franchise that sets out to tell a story in movie form and not a story in comic form squashed into a movie. 3 is clearly the worst offender in this.
    I have to agree though the Potter films are generally universally bad. The first 2 were dreadful, the 3rd survived because it has the best story, the 5th suffered from the same narrative of the book. The only reason I even saw the 5th was because we were on the ferry. They are definite wait for DVD and borrow off someone who likes them movies for me.

  6. A ‘friend’ told me that Harry Potter 12 (or whatever this one is) is the most boring movie she’s ever seen. She called it “two hours of teenage kissing”.
    I just about fell into a coma watching the first HP movie, and way too many people have told me “the books are great if you don’t mind the writing being shit.”
    I mind. Besides, I already read the Chrestomanci books, why would I bother with a knockoff?

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