harry potter

Through the magical power of babysitting, I was able to go see the final Harry Potter movie, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part Two.

My mother refused to babysit Baby Man, because she said it’s a children’s movie. Maybe…if you like your children’s movies with a bunch of blood-on-the-floor scenes. I love Harry Potter, I love his world and his crew — I eat it all up. The movie is not necessarily great picture, with a beginning, middle, and end, but I kind of think that’s not why you go. They are excerpts of the book. I loved the action scenes the best — the crazy train ride to the vaults of the Gringotts bank, the Lord of the Rings-style battles. Here are some parts that did not work so well for me — does Harry have to marry a woman who looks like his mom? He marries his high school girlfriend? Really? Are you telling me that Snape’s lifelong motivation is a childhood love? Like he never dated anyone else?

Despite some unevenness, I love the series. One gossip columnist says she loves how the story is about the power of love — not just romantic love, but the friendship between the three lead characters. I’ve heard J.K. Rowling talk about how the Death Eaters are based on the Nazis, and from that, I gather, the story might be about do the right thing.

For me, the theme of loss had me hooked. Harry Potter starts off an orphan (they show the mom defending Harry as a baby to her death, and i love Baby Man as much as Lilly Potter loves Harry. Like I would take a Voldemort blast for him). Just as he becomes close to developing a father-son bond with someone, they get killed. In the last picture, he loses classmates, teachers, parental substitutes, an elf friend (Dobby! — Harry Potter’s answer to Jar Jar Binks). There is one interesting scene where he experiences a kind of afterlife, where he has an extensive conversation with the deceased Professor Dumbledore, who tells him, yes, the vision is in his head, but that doesn’t make it not real — an idea I feel I’ve seen in my superficial reading of Buddhism. Bear with me. I’ve read that life is an illusion, and from that I interpret, we can kind of believe what we want to. Maybe you can have conversations with people who are gone and enjoy them for a while, like in a dream. If feels real, why not enjoy it? I find that idea incredibly comforting.

But of course, the biggest thing I love about the Harry Potter series, aside from the characters, is the magic!!!! The magic freaking rocks.

4 Replies to “harry potter”

  1. ha ha! what did you think? i did like the patronious of a doe (how do you spell that) but the whole romantic one-love-of-your-life was too absurd for me.

  2. shoot cs, i read your comment, your big fat one, and it got deleted by accident. sometimes this blog eats the comments. i’m sorry! but i agree with you — i like that it was a story that was long that required investing time in, rather than the instant pay-offs, which don’t feel as gratifying

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