Inexplicable Movie Review: Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

Continuing my tour of Harry Potter movies way after the fact… If you missed the first couple posts, movies 1 to 4 are here, and Order of the Phoenix is here.

At times I definitely feel like my watching of Harry Potter is skewed way too much because of Star Wars. If I was a kid watching these wizard movies for the first time, I feel like I’d be more genuinely surprised than with the valuable life lessons of Star Wars already engrained in my mind.

As it relates to Half-Blood Prince – It was hard to believe that the Potter series was going to let one of the teens go full evil, even if we’re talking about Pretty Boy / 1980s Movie Villain Draco. I mean, that would be kind of dark for a kids’ movie series. So, once Snape made that pact with the Dark Lord, and Dumbledore kept making references to being old AF to Harry, well, I figured this was the “SNAPE KILLS DUMBLEDORE!” movie of the series.

Most of my complaints about Phoenix carry over to this movie – We have a lot of long scenes with Dumbledore and Harry that mostly bored me. We don’t have enough scenes with Luna Lovegood or Tonks. (It was good to see Luna invited to the fancy party, but then, we don’t really get any of her interactions at the party.) Ginny actually gets to do some stuff in this flick, which is nice.

Anyway! Despite all of these complaints, I’d rank Half-Blood Prince as the second best of the series. There’s enough going on with Luna to carry the movie through some otherwise dull points, and while I think the Harry-Dumbledore stuff is a bit too focused upon, the last 30 minutes of the flick are a good, dark romp.

Stray thoughts:

- Slughorn was a good addition, and interesting. Maybe I’ll do a ranking of Random Hogwarts Professors at some point, but if I don’t, he’s near the top of the list. Snape and Hagrid, of course, are at the tops of the list.

- Speaking of Hagrid, he’s among the characters sidelined through much of this movie. Hermoine and Ron also don’t really get many glory moments, since they’re too busy having awkward encounters with one another over who they’re snogging. By the way, Ron’s girlfriend for a moment is Lavender Brown apparently, who 1) is barely named in the movie and 2) has a name more appropriate for a 1970s Blaxploitation film or a 1980s porno. “Lavender Brown and Foxy Cleopatra used to be menaces on the street, now they’re menaces TO the streets and all of its hustlers!”

- Outside of the whole killin’ bit at the end, the big reveal is that Snape is the half-blood prince. However, I didn’t think this was such a surprise. After all, Harry found that book in Snape’s old classroom, and during the course of the movie, it’s obvious that it couldn’t belong to other evil characters. Draco’s family is notoriously pure-blooded, and we find out that Tom Riddle / Voldemort is essentially an orphan, making it unlikely that he would give himself that name.

- I probably won’t get around to watching the final two movies until March, since my movie buddy (also known as a girlfriend) is traveling for the next week. So instead, I’ll be writing about Fallout 4 and some other things. Also, a reminder to check out Your Parents Basement, the podcast and blog I do with some buddies.

Inexplicable Movie Review: Harry Potter and The Order of the Over-Stuffed Phoenix

Continuing on with my power rankings of films that are almost a decade old…

One issue that seemingly compounds with the later Harry Potter films is a sort of lack of focus on the characters that are actually appealing and interesting. By this, let me clarify what I mean: Dumbledore kind of sucks.

Now, he’s a necessary character, in that he serves as a sort of a surrogate character for Harry. However, when it comes to my own enjoyment, as a movie watcher I’ve seen the Dumbledore-Harry relationship in about Every Other Movie Ever. I don’t want to list all of the movies, because that would inadvertently spoil some of their aspects, but there are plenty that feature an older, sagely “protector” with the young learner. Some might say the young padawan.

By itself, this isn’t bad. I mean, it’s not like Danny Radcliffe or Michael Gambon are horrible actors. And to not pick solely on Dumbledore here, plenty of the lore and Teenage Angst could have been trimmed as well. However, every moment of screen time with them takes away from stuff I find wayyyy more intriguing, and by that, I mean Luna Lovegood.

Luna steals just about every scene she’s in, which is awesome, except that she’s relegated to about three scenes in Order of the Phoenix. Likewise, there is some female member of the Order that can shapeshift and seems bad ass, and I don’t even think we’ve learned her name by the end of The Half-Blood Prince. Other folks I’d like to see more about: Draco (he’s kind of sidelined until movie 6), Ginny, even Ron and Hermoine are just kind of along for the ride in some of these movies.

I’m positive that some of this information is more detailed in the books, but I can’t help but approach these later flicks with something of a reporter’s mind. Pretty much all of the films are well over two hours, but too much of each film feels like fluff to vault it into my personal Best Series Ever. (I admit that plenty of this is probably sentimental; if I saw Harry Potter at 10 instead of Star Wars, maybe they would flip-flop in my mind.)

I don’t think it’s a problem unique to this series, though. Bloat has kind of spread to pretty much every significant summer movie and movie franchise, and stuff like Making A Murderer. I wouldn’t mind some more editing going on with pretty much all of this content. I need that time to do other valuable things, like beating Final Fantasy VII for the fifth time.

Anyyywaayyy. After kind of crapping on this movie and this series, I’d like to note that through the first five, it’s my second favorite. While it definitely plods along at times, it’s not actively bad or anything. It’s just an average fantasy flick about witches and wizards fightin’ Voldemorte. Although, oddly, there aren’t any actual phoenixes in this movie, which is odd, since one was a major plot point in a previous movie.