It's Reed again. I promise I will be more than a movie critic when I post on this blog. I promise ;)
Well, when Jessica and I lazily woke up this morning she started to look through her phone and found out that there was a 9:50 showing this morning of The Half-Blood Prince here in College Station. Even though she knew that she would have to rush to work after the movie was over, and that we would have to hurry just to make the movie on time, there was no doubt in either of our minds that we were going. I love my wife :)
I must say that both of us have been eagerly anticipating the release of this movie for honestly the past 6 months or so. We are not the biggest Potter nerds ever, not by any means, but nevertheless we have been excited, with just the slightest hints of reservation. We both naturally like the books better than the movies. It makes us both a little sad that over the last few movies they have had to cut more and more things to maintain a reasonable time limit for the films. In fact, Jessica dislikes the fourth film for this reason, and both of us were hoping that the new movie would be more like the Order of the Phoenix than the Goblet of Fire. (We liked "Phoenix" a lot more).
I thought the movie was very well done. In some ways it might be my favorite of the series. I thought that all of the actors turned in excellent performances, Dumbledore in particular. Both Jessica and I prefer the first Dumbledore to the second (the first actor died after the second film, in case you needed the reminder), but I thought he gave a perfect performance. Harry and Ron were both excellent, and Hermione was not guilty of the over-acting that Jessica and I have thought she has fallen into at times over the last two films. Malfoy was even very good, a much deeper character than he has previously been. The special effects were superb and taken up a notch from the last movie. As a movie goer I thought the movie was absolutely excellent.
As a reader and fan of the books, I was disappointed with a few things. So as not to spoil the movie for anyone who has not seen it yet I will not divulge any important information. But having said that, the movie makers decided to insert a scene in the middle of the movie that was NOT in the book, and the time given to that scene came at the expense of another scene from the end of the movie. The scene that was inserted was not bad by any means, and I'm sure the decision makers for the film decided that they needed to insert a little bit of action to keep the audience interested during a period of plot building in the movie, but there were so many other things that they could have done with the time that they devoted to this scene. My only other problem with the film was that they handled a key event at the end a little differently (it was really only a few semantics and minor details), but I did not like it as much as how it was done in the book and I wish that they had just stuck to what was in the novel. All of this makes me wish that the producers would decide to mimick the Lord of the Rings and release an extended cut on dvd.
Well, all in all I still thought it was an excellent movie. I need to see it another time or two to really know if it might be my favorite in the series, but if you like the books and/or movies, I highly recommend it.
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