Lightning Head and the Face He Makes

I just saw the sixth Harry Potter movie again. Considering that The Half-Blood Prince is one of my least favorite of Rowling's books (nothing could surpass the shit that is Sorcerer's Stone), I was pleasantly surprised that this was one of my favorite movies of the series (Cuaron's Azkaban, come to me).

First of all, I just have to gripe a small gripe about the way people gripe about unfaithful film-to-book adaptations. Venue: Facebook is not the place to complain about how that cunt of a director forgot your personal favorite scene; it's your own damn fault for not sending him an anthrax-laced letter, promising the antidote if he'll just include that one part. I purposely signed on to Facebook at about 3 in the morning the day Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince came out. All I had to do was hit Refresh every few minutes and I could see peoples' statuses change. Example: "Dipshit McDumbfuck is HP was pretty good and I know that they can't put everything in but they missed the most important stuff." I need you to note the authentic disregard for the 'to be' verb in that example status update. I know my shit. Then you'll have a few friends who decide to 'Like' that update, as if proving to the virtual world that you're a complete dumbass is an admirable thing to do. Next, a few dissenters will disagree, leaving comments that say, "Well, I thought it was pretty good too, but there was this one totally minute detail that they left out."

Fuck everyone. The fact that you admit your knowledge of the difference between books and films does not excuse you from being an idiot. Quite simply, film and literature are two totally different media; there is no way to make one match the other perfectly. Period. We bitch if directors don't include everything we like. We bitch if they include too much (first two movies, anyone?). Oh, and we bitch if the author tries to reinterpret the source material to actually make a book that takes hours to read fit into 90 minutes.

Here is my true gripe about the series as a whole: on page 184 of the book, Rowling mentions that one of Hermoine's hairs is slightly askew. In the corresponding part of the film, HER HAIR IS FINE! Now, I know that Yates couldn't have included every last detail, but couldn't he have put that in? That shit is pivotal! I'm just pulling your chain. My real gripe is with Daniel Radcliffe, the actor who plays Harry. When he was cast at the ripe young age of . . . youth (you know I'm tired if I'm too lazy to open up a separate tab and Wiki that), I'm sure no one could have seen what an obnoxious piece of douche that would inevitably turn out to be. So I suppose I have to forgive the responsible party for that little casting hiccup. My gripe is this: in every movie, Radcliffe gets a close-up 'wonderment' shot. We, the blessed audience, get to watch as the camera moves real close to Harry's face. He looks up slowly, his eyes alight with CGI amazement, and his mouth smiles/opens in a creepy way.

Yes, we get it. Magic is fucking cool. I've thought this since I was old enough to hate my life enough to wish there were such a thing. Harry has lived in the wizarding world for, at the time Half-Blood Prince, six years. The scene I'm talking about occurs near the beginning of the film, when Dumbledore and Harry are attempting to recruit Slughorn. They enter a house which is totally trashed. Dumbledore discovers Slughorn's ruse by homoerotically licking blood from Harry's forehead. Then, Dumbledore flips a Mary Poppins and spoonful-of-sugars that room spic and span. Harry gets his wonderment shot. Can he really be amazed so easily, even now? He watched Voldemort get resurrected from a bone, some blood and a severed hand, and yet this fucker manages to be shocked when Dumbledore cleans up a room with magic. Am I just too jaded, or is his surprise just overkill? That scene didn't surprise me. It did, however, make me want a life-size Dumbledore doll to do my cleaning for me. Oh, and to have sex with. Oh yeah, I'd be first to ride Dumbledore's Elder Wand until I expelled-my-armus. Gross. But seriously. Or should I say, Severusly?