Deathly Hallows / OOTP Movie Discussion 1147
At midnight on Friday Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows was released, ending the ten year run of J.K. Rowling's extremely popular book series. I imagine that there are a few folks here who have already read the book and want to talk about it. Likewise, the movie version of Order of the Phoenix was recently released (a film I was kind of underwhelmed by). So ... what did you think of them? Be forewarned: I imagine the comments will be filled with spoilers.
I haven't read SINGLE Harry Potter book (Score:0, Insightful)
What did I think of them? (Score:5, Insightful)
Now, if only we could find a way to make them read books like 1984, Brave New World, Catch 22 and Fahrenheit 451...
Re:What did I think of them? (Score:4, Insightful)
My opinion (Score:5, Insightful)
Spoiler: Voldemort is Luke's Father... (Score:4, Insightful)
All in all, the Deathly Hallows was a satisfying read. Rowling did a good job of creating the illusion of a Grand Unifying Theory of the previous books and make it seem like there was a clever thread running through them that sustained until the end. She is very good at writing herself out of the corners she paints herself into.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Spoiler alert. (Score:4, Insightful)
Good for you! Now why are you in this thread, again?
Entertaining, not Enlightening (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:What? (Score:3, Insightful)
I always use a Star Trek analogy with Harry Potter. It seems like it's all magic, but I'm always reminded of Arthur C. Clark's quote Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. The "Room of Requirement"? It's really a Holodeck. Disapperating? It's just a fast teleporter. The wands? A portable replicator (that one's a stretch). There is all sorts of technobabble, especially in Potions...
Anyway, I'm very impressed how well J.K. Rowling was able to tie almost everything together. This was probably the best of the series, but I'll need to go back and re-read them all!
Re:Spoiler alert. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:What did I think of them? (Score:3, Insightful)
That aside, "more cynical" people would spell the end of any human race anyone would want to be a party of. It's the end of hope, trust, love, and loyalty. You know, the four pillars of a worthwhile life.
Re:Should have renamed the film something else... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Spoiler alert (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Finished the book yesterday [no spoilers] (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Should have renamed the film something else... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:So unbelievable (Score:2, Insightful)
Not to mention that the actress that plays Ginny is kinda c&!@#!@#(NO CARRIER
Re:What did I think of them? (Score:4, Insightful)
Hmmm. Surely a more simple explanation is that CS Lewis is more to your taste than JK Rowling? The quality of writing isn't a one dimensional thing.
Re:I haven't read SINGLE Harry Potter book (Score:4, Insightful)
I just finished an excellent ghost story called "A Heart-Shaped Box" by Joe Hill. It wasn't exactly Nabokov, but it held my interest over a couple of evenings, and gave me that lovely shiver that finishing any earnest novel gives its reader.
I've talked about "first books" with others. Some started with "A Boy's Book of Baseball" and some with "The Life of Abraham Lincoln". One started with the great "Jazz Country" by Nat Hentoff (a terrific teen book about a young boy who develops a friendship with a black trumpeter and learns about being human). All of them found some tale, some words, that created a thirst that would never go away, a thirst for the stories of others. It's the way we create our own story.
No, we can argue the riches that J K Rowling has amassed or the desire of certain twisted people to keep the Potter books out of the hands of children lest their own children strive to learn a spell to make them disappear. But I'm glad that kids are reading. And maybe, just maybe some sad adult who never had that thrill of enjoyment from a tale well told will pick up Harry Potter out of curiosity and find their own undiscovered country of words.
Re:I haven't read SINGLE Harry Potter book (Score:5, Insightful)
Ms. Rowling writes acceptably, and unlike far too many others managed to balance the desire for an "epic" story with one that is "fun." She didn't bother trying to mess around with any deeper commentary, and regardless of what your high-school teacher says, that's a good thing.
As to fantasy books being "childish" -- so are sports, and yet a majority of adults in the civilized world will get quite excited over at least one "professional" sport.
Re:Spoiler alert. (Score:2, Insightful)
My S.O.'s got a degree in Religion, Philosophy, and is currently in grad school, and has (literally) tons of books most people would consider snobbish and high-brow,and damned academic.
She's also a HP fan, and finished the last book on Saturday afternoon, before the ink was even dry.
The point is: if ya like it, read it. If not, don't. But purposefully avoiding something because it's popular is just as brain-dead as seeking it out only because it's popular; either way, you're letting OTHER people make your decisions for you.
Re:I haven't read SINGLE Harry Potter book (Score:4, Insightful)
The 1400s called. They want their prejudices back.
A few problems... (Score:5, Insightful)
Molly Weasley kills Bellatrix Lestrange.
One of the most feared duelers on Voldemort's side is killed by Molly Weasley? Sure, she's a member of the OotP, but the only spells she had shown in the previous books were household charms. It shows JK Rowling's opinion of a mother's love. But that is going too far in my opinion. Made me laugh when I read it.
Snape's patronus is a doe.
I understand that Snape loved Lily, but why does a doe represent Lily? Sure, James (secret!) animagus form was a stag, but that would imply that Snape cared about James. Lily's patronus was a doe, but why would Snape's be the same? I assume Lily's was a doe to represent James (even though a stag would make more sense), but again, that implies that Snape cared about James.
Gryffindor's sword in the Sorting Hat.
I thought that Griphook took it? If he cared so much about it, why wouldn't he protect it in some way?
The Deathly Hallows.
JK Rowling introduces some super powerful items in this book that have never been mentioned before.
The Invisibility Cloak was around since the first book, but it was never noticed that it lasted much longer than normal? I'd assume Hermione would read up on it at least.
Voldemort made the ring a Horcrux without knowing its abilities? With his quest for power, I'd assume he would have at least heard of the Deathly Hallows.
The wand? An unbeatable super weapon was introduced in the last book in order to defeat Voldemort since Harry couldn't outduel him. And the concept of a wand changing owners was introduced to make sure that Harry owned it? None of this was ever mentioned before? Come on.
The Taboo.
So the Ministry can detect when and where a certain word is said throughout the whole country? Why didn't they use it before to find out when someone used the Unforgivables? Or when someone mentioned Death Eaters? Or plenty of other ways it could have been used.
Harry not moving when Voldemort cast a Crucio on him?
I understand not screaming, since the pain can be resisted somewhat. But not even twitching?
The epilogue.
If she insisted on doing an epilogue to destroy any future books, couldn't she have at least mentioned what happened to the other characters? The Ministry? Weasely Wizarding Wheezes? It mentioned that Ted Lupin wasn't living with Harry, but where else would he live if not his godfather?
Re:I haven't read SINGLE Harry Potter book (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Should have renamed the film something else... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I was mostly dissapointed in the book.. (Score:3, Insightful)
You might be right about some of the deaths being quick and sudden or random - but that was the point - they served the purpose that you did not know who would be next. I did not know for sure that Harry (or Ron or Hermione) would survive till the end of the book.
Maybe some folks would liked it all to have ended badly. Me, I appreciated that I didn't know whether it would end well or not till the very end - and having reached the end, I did not wish for a thoroughly sad and depressing end to the tale; however much I had anticipated one.
Re:I haven't read SINGLE Harry Potter book (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm sorry, but that's one of the silliest things I've read by someone who enjoys the books. She says the books are about death, but I see them as being about racism, particularly the Nazi genocide type. The Dursley's are all about child abuse (not the physical kind, but mental); there is corruption in government, huge amounts on freedom of the press, etc., etc.
One of the reason's I love the book is because of the social commentary she brings into it without ramming it down your throat.
Re:Spoiler alert (Score:0, Insightful)
And you are an elitist (Score:5, Insightful)
In this age of ever-deteriorating educational standards, dropping literacy rates, and a overall lack of mental challenges taken up by our youth, a story about jaded teenagers lining up in droves to buy a BOOK would flash right through science fiction and wind up as fantasy - if it wasn't actually TRUE.
Kids are reading, and it is cool to do so. This is a triumph beyond whatever "lack of challenge" you perceive in the writing.
And guess what? The stories are FUN. You're not getting Tolstoy, but you are getting a pretty good yarn with some deeper themes in it. Not every meal must be spinach and cod liver oil. It is OK to have the occasional ice cream.
Get over yourself and your pretentious attitudes.
DG
Kind of Underwhelming? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Spoiler alert (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:The three choices (Score:3, Insightful)
Reducing yourself to the level of the enemy who hates you will never provide a lasting victory. Rising above the enemy who hates you will. The end result may be the same (you have to kill them anyway) but how you get to that point is critical.
Re:I haven't read SINGLE Harry Potter book (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't make the claim that Rowling is on par with Shakespeare, but the point stands. Popularity is a completely seperate thing to quality. Confusing the two is poor thinking.
Popular taste is popular taste. Calling it low taste is elitism, pure and simple. It also fails to substitute for informed criticism.
International Relations (Score:5, Insightful)
It was all basically centred around Britain. All the wizarding history and what not. Then, in book four, all of a sudden there are other wizarding schools out there. And a few are friendly with Hogwarts. There are suddenly wizards in Egypt and China, and other areas of the world. With a whole world of wizards, why didn't any of the come to aid them in their struggle?
I know the latest book says Dumbledore didn't get a chance to travel abroad after he left school, but surely a wizard of his stature would have in later years at least communicated with and shared bonds with other great wizards from around the world. Why hadn't he formed friendships with other great wizards? Surely there would be some as skilled as he, or even more so. It just seems that Voldemort was strong enough to be a threat to the entire world. Why didn't Albus send word to other great witches and wizards, telling them he was back, and that they should form a gang to kick the snot out of him?
Just some of my thoughts after reading the first hundred pages of the last book...
Re:I haven't read SINGLE Harry Potter book (Score:3, Insightful)
Something is not good because it's popular, it is often true that popular things show bad taste, BUT and that's where your logic fails (or rather, where you fail logic), that doesn't mean that if something is popular then it's not good. Something can be good AND popular.
Or rather
if p then g
being false doesn't imply
if p then not g
Re:Not a Tolkien fanboy, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
I understand that you like Tolkien but I suggest you take a look at literary history before you make such a claim.
Epic fantasy/mythology - take a look at the ancient greeks for early work. Ever heard of Homer's Odyssey?
C.S. Lewis also often gets compared to Tolkien though I'd call his books lighter reading and the Christian metaphors are a little bit annoying.
Invented languages? Here's a list
http://www.lib.umt.edu/guide/lang/artifph.htm [umt.edu]
By the way I love neither the Harry Potter books nor Lord of the Rings nor Homer's works. All eventually put me to sleep with the rich detail. (I don't enjoy multi-page descriptions of things I'm afraid).
Harry Potter on Copyright issue? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:I was mostly dissapointed in the book.. (Score:4, Insightful)
Doing a death like this, avoiding the temptation to milk it for drama like a cow on a mechanical milker, that's cliche. Doing the opposite can be quite unexpected.
Re:I was mostly dissapointed in the book.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:What did I think of them? (Score:3, Insightful)
For me, personally, I don't care much for the LotR books. Tolkien's main thrust was to create a world (specifically some languages), and the story is completely secondary to that. Rowling's main thrust is her story, and her world is secondary to the story (but not as secondary as Tolkien's story).
The unfortunate result in Rowling's case is that her world isn't always consistent. The unfortunate result in Tolkien's case is that 1/3 of the book is spent waiting for something to happen, and a further third is spent doing random stuff that doesn't further a plot (back off, Tom Bombadillophiles).
So it's really a matter of what you want out of a fantasy book. If you can stomach the fact that the rules change slightly between books, HP could be up your alley. If not, perhaps you should look elsewhere.
Re:Entertaining, not Enlightening (Score:3, Insightful)
Harry tossing unforgiveable curses around like nobody's business, the nice touch with Petunia as she left, Dudley's unexpected humanization, etc.
Almost every significant character in the series ended up having both redeeming and problematic qualities about them. Ginny may have been the only one who emerged from the books a "perfect" character.
To say the book was a clear black-vs-white tale is to discard a lot of the stories. It raises many issues about when is it acceptable to kill. I mean, holy shit. Harry fucking tortures people in this book.
Re:I'll probably get modded down but... (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't think he could exploit the mind link anymore. I think Snape protected Harry against him much better than we are lead to believe directly in the text. It's not credible otherwise. Harry had occlumency lessons from both Snape and Dumbledore. And I think they worked.
To put up a teleportation barrier is to shine like a torch in the darkness screaming "beware of trap".
Re:What? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I was mostly dissapointed in the book.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Your other points are good. But with this one, a recurring theme in the book is that life is not fair. In her world, often bad people go unpunished and good people die cruelly. I think this is one of the more adult themes of the book that makes the book so appealing.
For example, there is a high probability that this week someone will die in a fatal car crash here in Oregon. The death will be pointless and will probably have no reflection on the goodness or badness of the person who dies. In fact the victim might do everything right and still die - either because of someone else's carelessness, or just plain bad luck. So many "children's" stories avoid this.
Take Hedwig's death, for example. They weren't using owls to communicate any more and there was no need to kill her because Harry could have just left her at the borough. It was a senseless death (and for me the saddest) that only contributed the idea that bad things often happen to good people/creatures, and it's just the way it is.
And then looking at battles, so often in "war stories", somehow all the main characters make it out unscathed either through good luck or good skills. It's very typical in popular stories. It might seem extra tragic that Tonks and Lupin died in the battle, especially after having a newborn, but real-life doesn't spare people just because they are good and have new babies.
This, I think, is one of JK's strongest messages.
Mozart... (Score:3, Insightful)
Popular entertainment of the present often becomes the high-brow fare of the future. Of course, eventually that leads us to the world of Idiocracy [imdb.com] but that's another story for another time.
Re:I haven't read SINGLE Harry Potter book (Score:4, Insightful)
Spoilers:
Re:I'll probably get modded down but... (Score:4, Insightful)
I think it was an Ok book, and indeed that the rest of the books were Ok. Where people criticise them, they often seem to forget that they were written for children and were phenomenally successful.
I have a huge amount of respect and admiration for JK because she wrote some very enjoyable books, but more importantly because she wrote enjoyable books that kids would read and see their parents reading. If that isn't a good thing for literature generally, then I don't know what is.
Oh, and I get really ticked off with the professional literary critics telling us that this isn't "great literature." Maybe, maybe not. But it's never been for the critics to judge that - our descendents will decide that (with a bit of perspective) and the critics rarely have much insight into it.
Re:The three choices (Score:3, Insightful)
Let's think of it in terms of single people, since that's easier.
Suppose you're in a room, with a bunch of other people, and someone punches you. (Or someone else.) And you decide that you need to respond with violence. (We'll assume that everyone in this room is equally good at fighting, just to remove the "well, I kung-fu them all!" from the list of possible responses.)
If you punch him back, then people may nod approvingly, but he'll probably punch you back, and you have a fight that could go either way. If you lose, you lose, and if you win, there is always the chance he'll hold a grudge and come after you later.
If you can restrain him without hurting him until he calms down, then people will probably nod more approvingly, and no one gets hurt. (This is the "best case" scenario, although since restraining is harder than hurting, it's also admittedly less likely, if you're equally good at fighting. Probably helps if you can convince some other people in the room to help you.) (Note that this still potentially has the grudge problem listed above.)
If you whip out your switchblade, and start violently stabbing him, and/or people who been friendly with him recently, then even if you take him out, everyone else in the room is going to look at you and think things like "That person grossly overacted, and responded with a heck of a lot of violence. Am I safe in this room with him? Maybe we should gang up on him, since having a homicidal maniac in our midst isn't safe." Heck, they might even pull out THEIR switchblades at that point.
Now sure, you could argue that "you just need to apply more violence, i. e. kill everyone in the room", but aside from the practical considerations, (no guarantee that, after everyone is against you, and willing to use deadly force, that you could win) is killing the entire room because someone punched you really your idea of a solution?
I realize that these seem like extremes, but if you replace "people in the room" with "countries", I'm sure you can see the parallels.
Re:The three choices (Score:3, Insightful)
The question is, what is the "right" level of violence to use? Knocking a guy's teeth out will probably make him think twice about messing with you, but may also make him harbor a grudge, and/or may make other people watching nervous of the level of violence you're willing to go to, to the point that they begin to feel unsafe. And if the guy has a buddy, or a friend, or a younger brother, who feels he needs to avenge his brother's "honor", then you'll have to repeat the same performance possibly many times.
The problem of course is that most peoples' response to violence is violence in return, so if you respond with a lot of violence, you either need to have it be so overwhelming that no one ever thinks about (or is able to) come after you again, [which is historically hard] or be prepared for a bunch of violence coming back at you at some point.
It seems like a better way to deal with the guy punching you is to figure out "why is he punching me in the first place? What makes punching me the most attractive option for him at the moment?" If you can change the circumstances that make his reasons valid, then as long as you can avoid the first punch, maybe you won't have so many problems later.
Now obviously this can break down. (It's no more a panacea than violence is.) For example, an extreme case might be that his reason to want to punch you is "there is something wrong with his head, and he wants you unconscious so he can kill your children without you stopping him". You may find yourself in a situation where you don't have much choice. I'm just saying, to quote the cliche, (which is a cliche for a reason) that violence tends to breed more violence. So even if you ignore the morality side of things, and just go with pragmatism, most people have friends/allies/etc, so even if you violence them into submission, it's often preferable to find a solution that doesn't require you to watch your back for their buddies afterwards.
Re:Spoiler alert (Score:3, Insightful)