Thursday, January 31, 2008

The Dis-Order of the Phoenix

You may recall in an earlier blog I wrote of my effort to finish reading Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix so we could watch the DVD as I'd be caught up to the story which Carol, Ian and Taylor had already read (and beyond). Saturday night's Netflix was "the Order" and as Taylor was already in Austria it was just Ian, Carol and I to watch it though Ian and Taylor had already seen it. The book which in the first half I found to be a bit ponderous picked up a lot of steam in the second half and was a very exciting read though the conclusion.

In this candid photo from the set of the movie
(L-R) Rupert Grint (Ron), Daniel Radcliffe (Harry)
and Emma Watson (Hermione) can't believe what
they are hearing from the deranged director who
is trying to convince them that the scene they
are about to shoot will make sense when they see
it on the big screen.

Well, considering the effort I made to read the book the makers of the movie should have done the same. This movie was completely fragmented from beginning to end with story bits out of context or totally made up from a different book in a alternate universe. In the first place, we all know that books hold a lot more detail which can't be included in a movie or it would be about 83 hours long. Who has that kind of time? The choices the director made of what to use in the movie hardly made any sense at all and we found it hard to believe anyone who hadn't read the book would be able to follow along and instead wonder what the heck was going on, how certain circumstances came about and why the characters were doing what they were doing (as you may be wondering about this blog...I digress). Now making a movie out of a Harry Potter book is not impossible. The previous movie, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire was excellent. The story line used was cohesive from beginning to end. A lot of the book was left out but the parts that were used were linked strongly enough for the story line to make sense. Unfortunately this most recent release was quite a disappointment.

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