Well, I haven't posted in nearly a month...

But, to be fair, I'm still getting back into the swing of real life. Also, I'm adjusting to managing having a legitimate social life with having none at all... which is what I call it when I'm on the Internet for more than 4 hours at a time... like today. Gah.

I've also learned that I hate almost all the music on my iTunes. Why is this? Because it's on shuffle. So, of course it never lands on what I WANT do desperately NEED to hear. ANYWAY...

I've been alright. I've been... going to this new place. It's called "outside". Apparently, it's not actually new. I just hadn't heard that it existed until recently; but, it's really great. There are people there. REAL PEOPLE! And things to do. It's quite a miraculous discovery. I feel like I may have heard of it a long time ago... but it was lost to me.

I'm also hungry. I want food. There is no food. This sucks.

Nicky's birthday is in 10 days, which is kind of cool. He's going to be 20. I'm not sure what we're doing or anything, but we'll see. Something great has to come up. Maybe we'll go skating again like we did over the summer when he broke me. Perhaps that's a bad idea... I don't know, we'll think about it.

Harry Potter tl;dr

We went to see Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 at the midnight premiere. That was pretty rad. The movie, in general, was a lot better than some of the previous ones. It kept to the book for a lot of it, however, for being a "character driven movie" I did not understand why they decided to change Harry's character as in his mannerisms.

This observation can be noted from the scene when Hedwig is killed. First of all, they glorified Hedwig and her death. I'm not saying that I have something against her or anything, but that's not how she died. She didn't die a hero saving Harry's life. She died in her cage and then Harry dropped it out of the sidecar. She didn't give Harry away as the real Harry, though that is a viable explanation, it's just not the real one. The real explanation was that Harry was identified by the spell he chose to defend himself with. Expelliarmus.

The usage of Expelliarmus in duels of this caliber is almost unique to Harry. All the others use Stupefy or even Avada Kedavra; Expelliarmus has become a sort of signature spell for Harry. In the movie, he uses Stupefy. It's a minor point, but I think that it deserves to be looked at. One would think that it would have been easier for the director to keep that part the same... but, perhaps that's wrong. Who knows.

The effects were decent. I liked the gold sparks shooting out of Harry's wand to meet Voldemort's. Those were pretty rad. However, the Patronuses once again are a let down. Patronuses are NOT glowing orbs with weird tentacles. They just aren't. I don't understand why that is how they're portrayed in the movies. They're animals. Kingley's is a lynx. Kingley's is a lynx. Kingley's is a lynx. They used the doe patronus... why couldn't they use the lynx...? Who knows.

Dobby's death was done nicely. I feel like he was given the respect that he deserves, fictional character or not. I didn't like all the contrived speeches he made though. I felt like Dobby wouldn't have, especially the character of Dobby that the movies create. They don't even mention Dobby after the second movie, I believe... and now he's back and making speeches like he's the head of the mother fucking state. Hermoine was supposed to be unconscious for practically the last 20 minutes of the movie... and yet she wasn't. No one helped Harry with Dobby's grave in the book, unlike the movie in which he was helped by several friends, and I was kind of disappointed that he didn't carve a tombstone for Dobby reading "Here lies Dobby, a free elf.".

The directing in general, I felt, was not great. The movie went through events too quickly for comprehension. I myself have read the book 6 or 7 times and I got lost a few times. The movies generally tend to take place in the bracket of a year and this one was meant to be about half the year... but it felt more like 2 weeks, maybe a month, tops. It was awkward and the transitions didn't help. They shot from one scene to the other without flowing.

There was key information left out. Such as, the identity of the woman with the snake in her. Of course, those of us who've read the book would know it was Bathilda Bagshot, but what about people who hadn't? She's just a freak with a snake in her trying to kill Harry Potter with a painting of a handsome man in her living room.

There was odd information added in. Harry and Hermoine's dance... uhm what? No. Why was there a scene in which Harry and Hermoine seemed to consider being more than just friends? That never happened. In the book, after Ron leaves, Harry couldn't get as much as a smile out of Hermoine because she missed Ron so much and blamed herself for not going with him. She never loved Harry as anything more than a friend and they never had a moment in which they mutually did. It was superfluous and it veers off course. I'd like to point out that ONCE AGAIN, for having a character driven movie, they changed the characters a good bit.

A few other things I wondered about were why every serious line that Ron was supposed to have was turned into a punchline... in my theater, every time he said something serious hilarity ensued. It may have been the low-wit idiots in Theater 3, but I doubt that. I was also curious as to why no one really worried when George nearly died... though, I was glad he got to keep his "holey" joke. Now that I think of it, the movie was as if they took the criticism for the 5th movie (Order of the Phoenix) and applied it to this one.

The criticism for the 5th movie was that it was dark and there was never a happy moment, not really anyway. The argument for that is that that is how the book is. There is literally never a happy moment, but it's the keystone to the series and is essential for sense making. The 7th movie is almost as if they knew it would turn out to be dark without a lot of happiness and then ending on a sad note unless they made everything a joke. This, to me is not a good methodology for movie making, but what do I know? I'm not a director. I just happen to know what works for me and what doesn't.

Anyway, I think I dweebed over the movie enough.

There's a squirrel in my wall... I've named her Rebecca. She makes Liam freak out and try to climb the walls... it's adorable. For those of you who don't know, Liam is my kitten. Nicky got him for me while I was in rehab. Also, for those of you who haven't heard, Midge passed away two weeks ago. It was a sad time for the two of us, but we're carrying on. Nicky was especially broken up. He's a sensitive little guy.

I think we're going to have a quite Thanksgiving just for the two of us.


That's all, for now, I suppose.


-Peter