And onto the film . . .

I saw 'Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince' today. To be honest, my thoughts on it are still a bit of a jumble. It didn't help that I got very little sleep last night (mainly due to the crazy brightness of the streetlamp outside my window. It's getting to the point where something must be done. Hammers at the ready!), so I was a bit confused before I got in there.

I remember really enjoying the movie whilst it was on. Largely because it looks gorgeous, everything is so well lit, some of his simplest shots are absoloutely breath-taking, characters literally glow . . . and, as anyone who knows my film taste well will tell you, I'm often won over by movies that look pretty, almost regardless of plot. It was funny too, and seeing it with the siblings meant that we all sniggered at the wrong moments, and shrieked hysterically at anything intended to be humorous. And the acting of the whole cast has improved by leaps and bounds - I think David Yates must be brilliant to work with, as even the more minor characters have lost their awkwardness. It was nice to see the girl from Basil Brush playing Katie Bell. And, as everyone has been saying, Alan Rickman was fantastic, but Tom Felton was extraordinary, giving new depth to a character who is complex enough in the book, often with no lines.

But I'm wondering if reading the book the day before the movie was a mistake. I'm very glad I watched the film aterwards and not before, but a longer gap between the two would have been a good idea. Noticing all the differences from the plot, big and little, got in the way of appreciating the film for what it was, and I left the cinema in one of those die-hard 'they got it all wrong' moods, which I've never had with Harry Potter. I think the big 3 for me were the constant references to the cabinet from a couple of scenes in, when it's meant to be a big mystery; the missing out a whole chunk of story about the Muggle world/PM/ Ministry of Magic; and the absence of large sections of Voldemort backstory (surely what this film is meant to be about). Other additions/omissions (Tonks+Lupin, Bill+Fleur, Dobby, the crazy Burrow Attack) were sad, but more understandable in terms of pace, though you wonder how much extra stuff they'll have to cram in to the final two-parter just to make it make sense. Other minor character develepment things were frustrating though - most crucially, as far as I'm concerned, the switch of 'he'll kill my family' with 'he'll kill me', which seemed to partly undermine the symapthy they'd built up for Draco. It's the pointless little word swaps that make me annoyed with the screenwriter. And, now I'm looking for it, I can see what is meant by Steve Kloves creating his own, far less believable, versions of J.K's characters, largely by reassigning lines. Oh, and I was frustrated that they kept so much teenage romantic angst in at the expense of more important parts of the book.

But that's enough complaining. As a film it is fantastic. It does everything a good family flick should, it's funny, tragic, scary, exciting, it shows teenagers in a fairly realistic light, it has characters that you care about deeply. It gleams with quality in every aspect (apart, perhaps, from the script), and it looks so good that you'll want to wrap it round you like a blanket and take a nap, or eat it or something. I'm already wanting to see it again.