Tuesday, July 19, 2011

Posh People Squabbling



“Ahem. My Lord. I’d like to volunteer myself
for this task. I want to kill the boy.”




Okay, this is going to be me talking briefly about “Harry Potter.”

I’ve read at a show business site that the concluding movie of the Harry Potter storyline—or, the original storyline as I’m sure it someday will become known, since almost certainly there will be more movies made for the ‘franchise’—is setting all kinds of records. So I’m just going to do one post about this saga of ‘witches’ and ‘magic.’

*

First of all, a disclaimer: I’ve never read any of the Harry Potter books and I’ve never seen any of the Harry Potter movies.

However, various people have been enthusiastic enough about them to talk at me about them and tell me about Harry Potter, and I’ve read enough second-hand stuff about them to be able to have content for this one trivial post.

*

Second of all, another disclaimer: I’ve never read any of the Twilight saga books, either, and I’ve never seen any of those movies, either. So I’m not going to be talking about that stuff. And I’ll probably never do a post about that stuff: Hey, it’s a sad, lonely teenage girl who decides she’d rather be a monster than a human and there are good monsters and bad monsters [sighs] and the author presents the troubled girl’s choice as a good thing and it leads her to love and a fulfilled life. Nice story, “author.” NEXT!

*

Anyway, I more or less like some real-life witches and alchemists so I decided to rent a Harry Potter movie and just do the very least I could do to stay current with the real world.

So I rented “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows, Pt. 1.”

I bought a can of Redbull and a bag of candy and sat back to watch.

Oh my God. I made about ten minutes before I hit the fast-forward button. And then even that was too much and I kicked the fast-forward into its high-speed mode.

At one point—only one point!—I dropped out of fast-forward. The beautiful (and passionate! hey, a passionate British person!) Bellatrix Lestrange, I guess the evil witch of the Harry Potter saga, was “torturing” someone or another.



Basically it was Helena Bonham Carter squabbling in a mean voice with someone. It was better than nothing.

Then that the scene ends with Beatrix Lestrange killing a Hobbit—or something like that—and the movie gets back to its real plot and I hit the fast-forward button again.

So I feel I still can say I’ve never seen a Harry Potter movie since I watched the vast bulk of one mostly entirely in fast-forward mode, except for a scene with Helena Bonham Carter, which I did watch.

(To be fair, I did enjoy Bellatrix Lestrange in that scene. I would have been all in favor of her knife killing the Potter boy instead of the “elf” or whatever it was and then just make the rest of the movie about the pretty, energetic crazy witch played by Helena Bonham Carter.)

Anyway.

I hate this stuff.

I don’t regard it as corrupt, like the horrible Twilight saga. I just see the Harry Potter stuff as boring. In a typically British way.


Brits often seem to see all of existence as just people squabbling.


And it’s always posh people squabbling.

It’s never, say, drunk sacks of wet newspapers like Amy Winehouse and Kate Moss squabbling. It’s always posh, well-educated, clean, polite, energetic and interesting people squabbling.

Forever. Even when British people turn their attention to metaphysics, they typically just embrace some Greek gods scenario or something similar where you have omnipotent immortals who are also posh, well-educated, clean, polite, energetic and interesting people squabbling. Literally forever.


I liked the books of the “Lord of the Rings” saga. There was a lot going on there. Certainly there were people squabbling, but there was a lot going on around the squabbling and, for the most part, even the squabbling was minimized. As it should be. But Tolkien was a real writer.

Now we get just endless rip-offs of the Tolkien stories that rip-off only the trivial squabbling and put endless fluff around the squabbling.

I hate this stuff.

But I wanted to say something about Harry Potter and now I have so I am done with it.

*

However, just as a kind of afterward, I’ve always been looking for an excuse to link to this little YouTube clip. I very much liked “The Blair Witch Project” and I even liked—not as much, and just in passing—the sequel, “Blair Witch 2: Book of Shadows.”

Now, as bad as “Blair Witch 2” was, the evil witch—more or less—of that movie was really good and INFINITELY more interesting than ANY of the characters of the Potter saga. (To my eyes and to my thinking.)

Anyway, someone put up a little selection of excerpts of Tristen from “Blair Witch 2” gradually bringing the dark side out into the real world. It is a great part of a mediocre movie and here are just some clips of it:




























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