Harry Potter

The open-captioned version of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire finally came to the theater this weekend, so my wife and I went to see it. It's a good flick! I'm told it doesn't match the book as well as the other films did, but I honestly can't remember much of what happened in the book, so that didn't really bother me. I remembered the scene when the Dark Lord returns, and I remember that Hermione ends up dating Krum, but that's really about it. Since they got both of those scenes right, I didn't have a problem with it.

What I did have a problem with is that the cast can no longer convincingly play a group of fourteen year olds. When the first movie came out, I was amazed at how much the cast looked like the characters from the book. They did a really good job. I don't think they should have recast the parts (Dumbledore was recast, sadly, for obvious reasons), and it simply takes longer than a year to make a movie (or a book), so I don't know really what they could do. Nor do I know what they will do for the next one. At some point, the age of the cast is going to be so out of whack with that of a bunch of high school students, that it will distract from the story. Really, this should be the last Harry Potter movie, from a practical standpoint.

I am absolutely certain that won't happen.

A Harry Potter movie -- any Harry Potter movie -- will make its producers a fortune. Hollywood has never been one to let a sure thing pass by, to say the least. It's the safest movie ever made. The series is simply that huge a phenomenon. I don't know how J.K. Rowling did it. I really wish I did. I wish I could even identify what it is about the books that makes them such a sensation. Maybe it's time to dig out the books and read them again, this time with a critical eye. I never finished the fifth book, and really didn't care much about the sixth either. Nevertheless, there's an education to be had here.

If I can just figure out what it is I should learn from it...