Coincidences

This will by my 713th post, made on my birthday, July 13. Of course, since I usually write the date European style, this loses much of its significance. ;^) Another oddity: this is the 91st day of my second 108 days, and 7*13=91. It's also the 199th day of the two sets of 108 days, but I haven't found any way to make that appear numerically significant as of yet. Anyway, to celebrate, Mom and I went to see the new Harry Potter movie. Review below the fold (which seems to be working again, but just in case, you can click on the title to read the whole thing).

UPDATE: Found another irrelevant coincidence. Harrison Ford shares my birthday. *sighs* This would be much more satisfying if he'd been in the movie. ;^)

Awesomely done. Much much MUCH better than Goblet of Fire. Goblet of Fire felt cartoonishly silly. Order of the Phoenix does not. In fact, it is very very dark. The closest to bright it gets is in the pink, frilly things favored by the on-screen Professor Umbrage. The actress who plays Umbrage hits the despicable notes admirably, even if her appearance isn't quite what I'd pictured. Pretty much, I wanted to throttle her the moment she showed up on screen, which is about how I felt about her in the book. Luna Lovegood was well-cast, though we didn't learn quite as much about her in the movie as we did in the book.

I'm sure they left out a bunch of stuff, as the book was long, but the movie did not feel like it was missing anything (well, Quidditch was missing). I did notice one difference as for how the Dark Arts group got found out, but the difference actually works out very nicely (and nastily). It's been a while, but my memories of the book call this a spot-on adaptation. The effects from the first use of Umbrage's punishment quill were impressive, though a tiny extension, showing Harry continuing to write and write and write, would have been useful to show how bad it was. If that was filmed, it was probably cut to shorten the movie.

But the dream/nightmare sequences were absolutely splendid, er, splendidly awful. The way they were interwoven with Harry's waking life, and the way that Voldemort's image kept showing up in odd places... Beautiful. They captured Harry's sense of losing himself, and that's hard to do on film.

This last bit is a (whited-out) spoiler if you haven't read the book, but I don't know if it's a complaint or not. It just struck me as odd. I knew that Sirius was going to die, so I was waiting for it, and it seemed...anticlimactic. Maybe because I knew it was coming; I'm not sure. I'm the type who generally feels real grief when an on-screen character dies, so my lack of reaction surprised me. Again, this could just be because I knew it was coming. *shrugs*