Peg and I went out and saw the new Harry Potter movie last night. Forthwith my rambling thoughts on it.
First off, be aware it's long -- at least 2 1/2 hours, maybe closer to 2 3/4. It won't seem like it for most viewers, mind you, but just so you don't go into shock when you look at your watch after it's over, be warned.
Overall, good job of adaptation. Things were, inevitably, left out, as OoTP is where Rowling's books start getting really big, but to my surprise a lot more major points made it in than happened with Goblet of Fire. Hmm. Kreacher's betrayal is gone. Marietta Edgecomb is gone, with unexpected repercussions, plot- and character-wise. The painting of Mrs. Black is hinted at rather than shown, and we never get to hear her go off on a tirade. And most disturbingly, almost all Ginny plot/sublot is gone. (More on this below.) Um. I'm sure there were more but I can't recall them now.
Pleasant surprises: The Thestrals -- one, for looking really well-done, and two, because the trailers with the shots of Harry on a broom flying through London led me to believe they might have scrapped the thestrals entirely. Luna Lovegood -- Evanna Lynch is a lot lower-key than I expected Luna to be, and a lot less, um, spacey, but surprisingly good. Sirius going through the veil is profoundly creepy -- and more heartbreaking because of how it's done.
Disappointments: Because of the sheer amount of material the move had to cover, Tonks, Shacklebolt and others in the Order had very little screen time. I especially wanted to see more of Tonks, because Natalia Tena seemed to be doing a particularly good job with her. She just didn't get to do much. The Ministry battle -- is unexpectedly gutted. All the heroism and tragedy of the DA's participation has been completely removed. They break into the prophecy room, they run into Death Eaters, they get cornered in the veil room, the Order comes and does the real fighting. Worst of all, the Prophecy is edited and Neville's part in it thrown away -- this is just unbelievable, given how central the prophecy is to the overall plot arc.
Unexpected: Umbridge. I'd been conditioned to expect a harsh-voiced hag; I wasn't expecting her infamous "hem hem" to turn out to be a high-pitched titter. Still want to murder her in her sleep, though. Harry's brief relationship with Cho seems more... grown-up? mature? ... than it does in the book.
No cast changes in the kids this film. Looks like they've finally standardized their Patil twins, so I think they've finally locked down the student cast (tho' they've had most of it permanently defined since the first one).
One major concern, related to that: Bonnie Wright, who plays Ginny. She was hired for the first movie at something like 9 or 10, and all she had to do in it was hide behind Julie Waters and peer at Daniel Radcliffe. I don't remember much of her performance at all in Chamber of Secrets, and over the subsequent movies, I've noticed that she gets almost no lines. In this film, the only things I remember her actually saying are spell incantations! I am beginning to wonder if they signed her for a long-term contract, and then discovered that she couldn't act... because by god, they are writing the movies such that she is little more than a piece of moving furniture. She's got the most powerful zap in the DA, yes, but there's no real interaction between her and Harry. Luna Lovegood gets more screen time with Harry by orders of magnitude -- in fact, I think they were trying to set up a Harry-Luna relationship in this film! Harry and Luna have two good-length scenes together where it seems clear that they're trying to show a kind of kinship between the two, and Harry's clearly responding to something about her. I'd really like to know what other people think on this one when they see it.
Anyway... capsule review: Nicely done, far fewer inexplicable deletions than the last film, worth first run prices and the nearly 3 hours in the theatre that it'll take.

-- Bob
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The Internet Is For Norns.

From the Ain't It Cool News review of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix comes this casting note:

Quote:

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(...) I think the producers were inspired finding this non-actress. Its almost like they literally held open Rowlings book and shook it until Luna Lovegood, in the flesh, fell out and asked to be called Evanna Lynch.

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Enjoy!

By Kate Nepveau on her LJ:
See it Like Saruman: Reconciling Fantasy and Progress.
Judith Berman, John Crowley, Ken Houghton (L), James Morrow, Michael Swanwick.
History is written by the winners. That explains why Tolkien never mentions that the destruction of Fangorn Forest and other efforts towards industrialization by Saruman significantly raised the standard of living for the wild men of Dunland, in fact creating (for the first time in Middle Earth) a comfortable middle class. While there is a natural opposition between the romantic and pastoral ideal embodied in traditional fantasy and the Enlightenment ideal of progress (especially in its modern industrial and technological modes), we don't believe they are completely incompatible. What works of fantasy have attempted to accommodate both? What interesting new direction might the heroic fantasy novel be taken if the true positive effects of modernization were acknowledged? Readercon hopes to put the audio recording of this panel online at some point after the convention.
kate-nepveu.livejournal.c...tml#cutid1
The Case for Archetypal Evil in Fantasy.
Ellen Asher, S. C. Butler, Jeanne Cavelos, James Morrow (L), Joshua Palmatier.
The pervasive trend in modern fantasy is to give the bad guys moral complexity and psychological depth-good reasons to be bad. This approach stands in stark contrast to the legions of past Dark Lords who were utterly evil because, well, they were utterly evil. Tolkien, however, wrote pages of philosophy on the nature of Melkor / Morgoth (published in Morgoth's Ring), suggesting that our rejection of the old model was a reaction only to badly done Dark Lords. Is there an argument for making things at least somewhat black and white (how much psychological depth does a human sociopath have, anyway)?
kate-nepveu.livejournal.c...ml?#cutid1
They're not exactly whole transcripts but they're interesting condensed reads.

The hollow plastic crunching sound that one of the neighborhood kids' big wheel makes rolling across asphalt..

...is the same sound my neurotic retard cat, Rev (erend, olution, olver, olt, your engine) makes when he's horking.Wire Geek - Burning the weak and trampling the dead since 1979Wire Geek - Burning the weak and trampling the dead since 1979

Today's gaming was interrupted by severe thunderstorms deciding willy-nilly to take out the various nodes of my ISP and just plain being scary in general. Sad, sad panda Foxboy.
''We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat
them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.''

-- James Nicoll

Musician's Aid Society
Rumor has it that the Filkers are building or have completed building a space port-sized habitat for use as a kind of "Bardic College". Further rumors hold that this habitat is or will be named "Argo," solely so that the Federation can be banned from it.

-- Bob
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The Internet Is For Norns.

Something that's been percolating in my brain.
Edit: Argh! Tabs don't work.

An acquaintance of mine watches current anime in raw Japanese, and posts his opinions to Usenet. He's been giving most of the summer titles a thumb-down, but is impressed by the first episode of Code E. His full writeup's
here; I'll just quote part of it:

Quote:

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In 1997 an unusual meteorite lands in a lake in Japan. Twenty years later 17 year old megane-ko Chinami Ebihara leads a very, very low tech life, particularly when you consider that her dad is a techie and her mom an executive. But Chinami has none of the "necessities of life" - no cell phone, no pc, no smart cards - nothing electronic. This is because Chinami "interacts" at short distances with any electronic equipment, causing it to malfunction.
Chinami and her parents have kept this a secret, but this has made Chinami a very nervously self-conscious girl who tries her best to stay away from electronics and has developed a habit of apologizing to anyone very quickly. But Chinami lives in a Japanese city in a Digital World, and there is no way that she can do the "usual" things without interacting in some manner with all of the electronic and electrical infrastructure that is around her at all times.
Chinami transfers schools once again in 2nd year high school and fortunately for her she makes an immediate friend in classmate Keiko Komatsuna who shows her around the school. But problems start as the class techie-freak Kotaro Kannagi develops an interest in Chinami and "in her body".

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I was just reading a recent acquisition, The Magician's Arsenal by Lee Scott and it just taught me how to make ninja flash bombs. It's all actually simple gunpowder, flash paper and a simple detonator in the form of ball bearings and popcaps and aluminum foil.
Then it taught me how to make flash powder (aluminum powder and potassium dichromate) and flash paper (soak paper in nitric acid and sulfuric acid - leave out to dry)
That is so not definitely how I thought it would be made.
Then I saw in my head how that worked in Naruto. I can see pretty much every ninja in Naruto land being well-versed in practical chemistry - I can just imagine young Naruto experimenting with iron oxide and aluminum powder - oh yeah.
Then you throw chemistry in with all that chakra mumbo jumbo. My head spins.