July 19, 2009

Harry Potter (and the Half Blood Prince...wait what?)

(May contain spoiler. Steer clear should you not want to be spoiled)

Initially I wasn't interested to watch HP:HBP, until I saw the trailer to the 6th installment during our rewatching of Star Trek (which QJ got free cuz of his birthday in June thanks to GSC)...scenes we saw were heavily packed with rich CG that actually made me go "ooooo....OK now I wanna watch" ...'sides, it's been a while since I've seen something from the fantasy genre ;3

Went watch with Kel and his GF (yes that bastard has a GF and he didn't bother to tell his friends! boo!) and his bunch of friends...had no expectation...nor much memory of HBP cuz the last memory I had of reading that book was probably before I got together with QJ. I vaguely remember holding Dexter's copy of HBP inside Baswira riding back from town...scribbles in the potions book and debates over who exactly is this Half Blood Prince...

Overall...I thought the movie was decent. I thougth the filmakers did what they could do best with the material they were given...afterall all the book did (the parts I did remember anyway) was run in circles about who this Half Blood Prince was...

What the movie did was...remove this 'frustrating running around in circle' and put only minor emphasis on the Half Blood Prince...No Harry and his friends didn't really ponder much who this Half Blood Prince was...they never really suspected it might be Tom Riddler...they never really put too much thought to it until in the end the owner of the book just steps out to say "Oh yeah btw...I'M the Half Blood Prince" .....kinda makes me feel that the whole title of the movie's rather pointless since it does not seem to be the main focus of the movie....but in a way I suppose it makes it less dull....

Instead..the movie focused A LOT A LOT on Ron Weasly's love life...as well as Harry's....much more than I remembered anyway...actually make that every girl in Hogwarts. Hormones seem to be raging this year...*shudder*...very little on classroom life in Hogwarts, and all the side characters got minimal screen time. What was excellent was that all the casts have pretty much settled snugly into their characters like its their skin. Everyone's grown up so much, and their portrayal of their character is so much more 'in character'....even when Harry was supposed to be 'out of character' after drinking the Felix Felicis. Luna's as charming (in her own way) as always...the girl really knows how to play her character well...gotta love her. Dumbledore felt like Gandalf. McGonagall aged so much in the past 'academic year' of Hogwarts...that it felt like she was gonna double over anytime >.< ...Draco drank some 'manly potion'...shot up so much that you'd almost forget that he was that white haired whiney kid he used to be...but also made him lose whatever 'sleekness' he had in him previously...repetitive scenes of him 'pulling cloth from cupboard' got a bit meh after awhile....

Nitpicks aside...I had a good time :) It wasn't 'true blue' to the book...but I felt it was good.

...and some guy behind us actually said Transformers 2 was actually so much better than HBP.....well at least Harry Potter actually HAD a plot... =.=

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