…Or, Why Half Blood Prince Was Not a Good Film

Blah, blah, blah. I am a Harry Potter fan. Books, films, etc., I love the world of Harry Potter. I think they are great stories and a lot of fun. But too many Potter fans have trouble facing reality. Whether they feel they can’t say anything bad against the franchise or their infatuation tricks them into believing nothing can possibly be wrong–for whatever reason–some of the films are just bad.

Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince (HBP) is definitely not a good movie. No matter if you look at it as a book adaptation or as a standalone film, HBP did not live up to its immediate predecessor’s quality, nor did it turn out to be a compelling, decently paced movie.

As my friend Robb pointed out in a Facebook discussion:

[Order of the Phoenix] is my least favorite book but my favorite movie, mainly because they realized they couldn’t fit everything from the book into the movie so they focused on getting the themes and feel right. HBP reverted back to the Goblet [of Fire] mold where they fit in what they could and what they couldn’t they brushed over or left out.

This was frustrating to me. Especially as HBP, the book, has some of the most spectacular and tide-changing action in the entire saga. So what was wrong with the film? Let’s get into it.

Beware of Spoilers Ahead »

I didn’t have an incredibly great week last week. It started out pretty good but got increasingly poor as the days went on. This weekend was a blessing of a break. Even though we did a lot of driving I was still able to get away from here and that was good.

Saturday we drove to Poplar Bluff in Southern Missouri for my friend Ryan’s wedding. It was a 3 1/2 hour drive, but entirely worth it to see him get married. I also got to see my good friend Rod who lives on the East Coast now.

And we slept in. That was really nice. Today we went to the bookstore and I picked up Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue which I’ve been eyeing for a while. I’m excited to start reading it tonight before bed. I think it’s going to be really interesting.

But I am not excited to have work tomorrow. I need a break. I need an extended vacation. I need some time to recover. I haven’t had any time away from work since Christmas and I am definitely starting to feel the effects. I was going to take Jessica to Six Flags last week but didn’t feel I was able to after some things that happened at work and with Kevin taking Friday off. So hopefully I will be able to work out a long weekend this week and we can take care of these cheap Six Flags tickets I have.

And today was Father’s Day. Looks like I will finally be starting on a design for my dad’s site which is good. He needs it and I have a good idea for what I’m going to do design-wise. Hopefully  I’ll have some more freelance coming my way in the near future.

I’ve been sort of obsessed this year with a couple of specific times in American history. The first is the 1920s-30s, and the Golden Age of Aviation. I find the style and class of those days enthralling and engrossing. Beyond that, I love the designs that happened then. I guess this could extend a bit more forward into the early 40s and the beginnings of WWII. Hence, the way this blog is designed (more in the British fashion than American, however).

I love the typestyles and rounded motifs. I love the music and the clothing and hairstyles of that era. I love the shapes airplanes took during that time and cars and travel posters. The idea of wireless radio being pretty novel and prohibition causing raids on night clubs. The glamour of the cities… Indiana Jones. It all brings out a strange sort of longing in me to be on the cusp of the new. It tends to bring out the adventurer in me… and makes me long to create… for some reason. The stories and imagery of that time serves as a muse for me.

But I am fairly positive that many of those feelings stem out of the nostalgia of it all. If I lived then, I’m sure my feelings toward the world would be much the same as the ones I have now. Hopefully not, but probably.

The other time period in American history I am currently engrossed in is the mid-1800s. Our larger cities were growing up and the the West was being settled. The Mexican-American War was fought, the California Gold Rush filled the hills and territories of the West coast with people from all over the world, and what has become a patchwork quilt was still a melting-pot with immigrants arriving to start new lives in the throws of a young nation that was ‘free’–a truly novel concept at the time.

I’ve been reading a book this past week called Heydey by Kurt Andersen that deals with these issues and it is absolutely addictive.

The story follows four different people; three of them are New York natives while the fourth is a recent English immigrant. As their lives become too confined and ordinary for their tastes, the group heads West to see what they can make of their fortunes.

I haven’t finished the novel yet but I love it so far. I always enjoyed the old cowboy stories and the legends of cowboys and Indians. Having grown up in Southern California, I heard a lot of California history in school. That included our rich Mexican history and heritage and all of the wars fought out West during the 19th century.

But I have to confess that after moving out to the Midwest for college, I kind of started to forget all of that. Or at least to not pay any attention to that time period. I never liked Westerns — though I once cruised on a boat formerly owned by John Wayne, I never enjoyed his films (except for The Quiet Man, excellent film), I always found them hokey or just kind of boring. But the stories and books were my favourite. They were just exciting to me. I still love the tales of Zorro and the old cowboy songs my grandpa used to play on the guitar.

The history of the California Gold Rush always made me happy–learning about Sutter’s Mill and then seeing the ghost towns left behind where mines were. I was lucky to have many of those nearby when I was a kid. We’d travel to Calico Ghost Town a lot and even our amusement parks were western themed.

In any case, I was inundated early on with the legends of the Old West and today those recollections create a nostalgia that makes me yearn for excitement and adventure and change.

So, what am I going to do with all of this? I’m not sure. But I think I’ve got the beginnings of my NaNoWriMo novel for this year. It’s going to have to do with a Soviet spy who wakes up in the American Midwest during the 30s. Haven’t got particulars down, but I’ve got till November.

And that is what has been interesting me lately.

It’s no secret that I love this awesome reading social network called Readernaut. The site is awesome. it keeps track of your library, current reading progress, pages read, and shares that with friends who are also into reading.

Also super exciting is the fact that Readernaut is now out of private beta. That means anyone can sign up for a beta account and start helping make the site even more amazing than it is right now.

If you are at all a reader, go over to readernaut.com and sign up for an account. Then follow me so we can share books recommendations and stuff.

Wow. Sorry for the lack of posts. A ton is going on at work. And at night, well Jess and I have been burning through the How I Met Your Mother DVDs. Hilarious show. I highly recommend it.

So what else has been going on? Well, we’re rolling on our dotCMS project at work. We’re in the design stages, which is fantastic, and I’m acting as project manager. Kevin started work on Monday and is getting into the swing of stuff. We’re going to have a lot of fun with this as it moves.

I’ve been working on a site design for my friend Chris. I’m hoping to start slicing and markup by this weekend at the latest. I would like to have his blog rolled out by the middle of February, and once the designs are done, the actual coding shouldn’t take too horribly long. I’m pretty proud of it too, it’s pretty cool, if I do say so myself. Here’s a sample.

Implementing some new stuff over at AgapeFest.com. New videoBlog up, a deal with Sonicbids, some other stuff. It’s going good.

I’m reading this incredible book called The Meaning of Night. It’s incredible and complicated, so it’d take a lot to explain it. Hit up Amazon and read the summary. It’s so good.

Jess is finally reading Eats, Shoots and Leaves and thinks it is great, just as I predicted she would.

It is super cold here this morning. -2ºF. And my office is drafty.

Last night I did something crazy. I committed myself a grueling, month-long excursion into authoring an entire novel in one month. November is National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) and I will be joining the thousands around the world participating in this crazy write-off. The goal is a 50,000 word novel, from scratch, in a month. But I think I can do it.

NaNoWriMo.org sponsors the event and has a little community going on on their site during the month of November. Jessica is going to be joining me in this quest. I’m really thankful for that. I am not sure I could make it through writing fiction every day for 30 days without some help and motivation.

There’s still time to sign up if this sounds like something you’d like to do. If you decide to, let me know here and we can be “writing buddies” and hopefully get through this huge challenge. I am really excited for it as writing a novel is something I’ve started and stopped several times over the last couple of years. This time, I’m going to finish.

I’m just guessing here, but I would expect my blogging to slow down a bit, though I will try to post excerpts from what I’m writing–that aren’t complete trash–to this blog. And if you are going to be writing for this, I’d love to give you a link in my blogroll and follow along with what you’re doing.

If you’ve stumbled here and are already a participant and need a writing buddy, click here to go to my NaNoWriMo author profile.

The writing starts tomorrow! I’m excited, nervous and a little intimidated. But let’s do it!

Currently Reading:

War has to become an instrument of policy, regardless of differences in culture, ideology, nationality, and personal morality, because with weapons that powerful the alternative could be annihilation.

- John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War: A New History