dark times

Did I never tell you the story of why I stopped reading Harry Potter? Oh, it's a humdinger, check it out:

So, being an Engrish teacher and very pleased that Harry Potter made reading 'cool' (and this was particularly odd in Taumarunui, where demonstrating any form of intelligence was usually rewarded with brutality), I decided that, in the interests of keeping my finger on the pulse of popular culture if nothing else, I should really crack on and read these Harry Potter books everyone was talking about. I thought the first one was very good, it had an extremely amused, Roal Dahl-ish narrative voice that I found very entertaining. The next three weren't so good, I think, like Lucas, the author started to believe her own hype, and they went from being an amiable fantasy to an overblown drama that took itself far too seriously- certainly the narrative voice has lost its postmodern charm. Still, I was enjoying the ride and looked forward to the fifth one.

Around rolls the release date to book five which was, you may recall, some two or three years ago, now. As it happens the day it was released (I remember it well because one of my flatmates was a Potter-nutter and went to the midnight opening to pick up a copy), I went to Greece to spend two weeks with my brother. Greece was awesome as you'd expect, and a great part of my holidays usually consists of, well, catching up with all my reading. After I'd churned through all my books and started bugging hJeremy for some more, he asked if I wanted to read the new Harry Potter, which he had on his Palm Pilot, and said he'd beam it to mine if I wanted it. I was like: "Wow, really, that's been ripped to Palm already? It only came out, like, the other day."

But he assured me that a copy had leaked to the web a week before the book release and, well, he DID have it on his Palm, after all, so I started reading the latest book (The Order of the Pheonix). And it was very good. It had secret cults and a Griffindor conspiracy and Quidditch and, y'know, all the excellent HP staples that everyone loves. However I do remember, whilst I was reading the first chapter, looking up at Jeremy and saying: "It's a bit racier than the last ones." This was because Harry was like, going through bodily changes and noticing Hermione's figure and a variety of other teenage tropes that the earlier books would have sidestepped. However I had read that ol' JK had been planning to make them more mature, so it all made sense at the time.

However, the seed of doubt had been planted. And it grew and grew as the book progressed. And the book was perfectly fine and good, very well written now that I come to think of it, but there was just something a little bit...wrong with it. Something not quite right. And it got less and less right, the deeper I read. And I remember sitting in the airport lounge about halfway into the book when the suspicion turned into a conviction. I looked up from the page I was on (in which Hermione was about to fellate Harry) and realized that, well, this surely couldn't be possible. It'd be all over the papers if JK Rowling had suddenly decided to write teenporn. It'd be the literary scandal of the new millennium. So I turned to the person next to me (everyone in the airport was reading the same book) and asked if I could please just read the first page of the new Harry Potter.

I didn't need to even read the first page. The chapter heading alone told me all I needed to know. I'd been reading...fan fiction! Some psychotic Potter fan with waaaaaaaay too much time on their hands had written this mammoth, FAKE version of Harry's fifth year at Hogwarts. And I'd been reading in, thinking it was the real thing! Someone had been fecal vomiting into my mind and I'd been a willing accomplice, spooning it up! I felt dirty. I still do.

I tried to read the real thing, God how I tried. I couldn't. I couldn't finish the fake version and I couldn't start the genuine article. Because the sad truth is...the fake Potter had character growth and consequences and it broke the mold and treated Harry like a real teenager with real teenage problems. The real one just repeated the same opening chapter as the previous four books, and I knew I couldn't believe in the world anymore- the fourth wall hadn't just been torn down, its ruins were covered in fornicating teenagers. I gave up on the world of Potter. Although word on the street is: Dumbledore? Dead.

Now, what was I saying? Oh yeah, the movie review. The first two movies were shit. Like, not even amiable, they were just confusing and messy. Chris Columbus couldn't find his way to the India of quality films (huh? huh?). Three was gorgeous. I mean, even if you take off points for the confusing time-travel plot, the film just looks amazing. It's actually an exemplar of how important a director is to a film, because this previously shitty franchise suddenly just looked so damned good. I loved three and thought that, all else aside, it was a brilliant fantasy film (and there aren't many).

Four is, well, it's certainly better than one and two, but I didn't think it was quite as good as three (although to its credit it is very, very close). I think it's a pretty healthy melange of the two extremes. It's a decent, often amusing, good-looking kids film that advances the overall plot and is a lot of fun, but also feels pretty rushed, despite being incredibly long- it's streamlined very cleverly given the massive size of book four, but still feels like it's cramming, and the first twenty minutes in particular are confusing and poorly edited.

Plus... I really miss the sex scenes.