(no subject)

[gwenfrankenstien]

So I was out last night for dinner/drinks with the artist formerly known as colonize for my birthday (WHICH IS TOMORROW, FOR THE RECORD) and we decided it was imperative that we see Harry Potter right the fuck now. So we did.

Things I liked:

- Hermione-Bella. Infuckingcredible. The way she set her mouth even changed. It honestly felt like Emma Watson in very convincing HBC makeup, at times.
- Aberforth being The Actual Bitterest. (FAVOURITE DYSFUNCTIONAL WIZARD FAMILY.)
- NARCISSA. (So the Blacks are also my favourite dysfunctional wizard family)
- So um Dean/Seamus is movieverse canon, right?
- "Harry talks in his sleep." YES. a) Makes so much more sense than the book and b) ACCIDENTAL PARSELTONGUE ACCIDENTAL PARSELTONGUE ACCIDENTAL PARSELTONGE. YES. (...This is a Thing. It is Scott's fault.)
- Holy shit, Maggie Smith. Seriously if Alan Rickman gets the Oscar nod and she does not I will be PISSED.
- NEVILLE, although I am pretty sure in the book it was less The Neville Show as The Neville, Luna, & Ginny show, but whatever.

Things I didn't like:

- Taking out the creepy parts of the Snape flashback. If you just saw this movie and none of the others you would legitimately think he was a nice person, which um.
- I mean, I know the movies are generally shit at flashbacks/backstory (see above point!) but um. They cut out the one word-of-God-canon queer story in the entire series. That is a thing that just happened.
- What the fuck, Neville/Luna out of nowhere. Ahaha just no.
- Absolutely zero effort put into making James look even remotely like Harry, what even.
- Pansy Parkinson was a jerk, so let's just lock a quarter of our school in the dungeon, including some eleven-year-old kids who have spent this year literally being tortured as part of their schooling, this is in no way overreacting!
- Everybody still dies off-screen. I was hoping that because the films don't HAVE to keep as tight a POV on Harry, we might actually see more of the main battle? See the people we care about go down? I GUESS NOT. At least nobody tripped over dead Colin Creevey in the movie.

Things that just reminded me of stuff I didn't like in the book:

- Ginny does NOTHING in this movie. Nobody in the series deserves to kill a Horcrux more than the girl who spent a whole year possessed, dammit. Still think she should have killed the snake and Neville should have killed Bella.
- Goblins. Because every obvious Holocaust parable without any Jewish characters needs a fantastic race that's a terrible Jewish caricature!
- The epilogue. It was less terrible than the book's epilogue! But oh god, I sure as fuck hope that at 36 I do not look the exact same as when I was seventeen.
-(Also Harry hey Harry guess what. Your son is named after two headmasters of Hogwarts and one you've decided was the bravest man you ever met and the other was the SLYTHERINEST SLYTHERIN TO EVER SLYTHERIN, I don't CARE that canon says he was probably Gryffindor, that's clearly bullshit)

Comments

[feverbeats]

ACCIDENTAL PARSELTONGUE *________*

Still think she should have killed the snake and Neville should have killed Bella.
RIGHT? How the actual fuck was that not a thing that happened?

Goblins. Because every obvious Holocaust parable without any Jewish characters needs a fantastic race that's a terrible Jewish caricature!
. . . Oh. Oh.

[gwenfrankenstien]

Because then JKR would have missed out on a chance to call one of her characters a bitch? (I like how when Molly kills her she doesn't actually DIE. Just um turns to dust or something? What even was that.)

It is a GIANT SNAKE not unlike the one her first boyfriend who happened to be the Dark Lord made her set on her schoolmates when she was ELEVEN. Also Bellatrix is the one who for all intents and purposes orphaned Neville. MAKES WAY MORE SENSE THAN THE ACTUAL ENDING, DAMMIT.

Yyyyeah. (Surprisingly few people seem to have picked up on that? But ew ew ew.)

[labellementeuse]

Pansy Parkinson was a jerk, so let's just lock a quarter of our school in the dungeon, including some eleven-year-old kids who have spent this year literally being tortured as part of their schooling, this is in no way overreacting!

This also annoyed me, because I felt that McGonagall is the only adult who really comes out of the books with her integrity intact wrt: children and houses - which is hilarious because she's such a Gryffindor partisan wrt Quidditch etc. But I always felt that she was the only character who took houses exactly as seriously as they should have been: as a means of pastoral support and developing relationships among 11-year-olds, but not great judgments upon the characters of those same 11-year-olds. (And, of course, it doesn't happen that way in the book at all - Slytherins have a choice. And they all choose to leave, which again is not exactly JKR's finest moment, but at least Minerva is intact.)

[gwenfrankenstien]

She is very much the closest thing the series has to a responsible adult, in the books.

Yeah. I didn't think the film would find a way to make that more problematic, but somehow they managed!