after all the anticipation and excitement, it is done. i have seen harry potter and the half-blood prince.

and what can i say about the movie?

truth be told, i have mixed feelings about it. on the one hand, i have heard many good reviews about the film that i expected so highly of it. tehnically speaking, it is better than all the previous films in the series. i especially love the scene when dumbledore re-arranged slughorn’s house in one swish of his wand. the characterization are spot-on and the acting is superb. on the other hand, i feel as if things are a bit rushed plot-wise, even though the movie is 2 hours and a half long

the movie does not have much action compared to OotP. it’s a quiet film with the focus being on the memories that define lord voldemort’s rise to power and on the raging hormones of the growing teenage characters in the film, which is perfectly normal to people their age at any school, in wizarding world or otherwise. this is exactly how i felt too while reading the book the first time. and yet, chapters 26-30 caught me by surprise as the narrative became darker and heart pounding with all the commotions that abound. soon enough, a battle in hogwarts began, culminating to the death of dumbledore. from his fall until the very last page of the book, i remember crying my eyes out as if it is the end of the series. in comparison, i think this climax is not successfully achieved in the film. i’m not sure if it’s because i know after all the betrayal that snape would do but it is disappointing to say the least, that there was no chaos to an impending war. in the book, the order of the phoenix, as well as dumbledore’s army or what’s left of them, fights back the death eaters until the end. if my instincts are right, they are saving the battle of hogwarts scene for the last film in the series because it happens under more terrifying and more tragic circumstances. i can only hope they do it exceptionally well to compensate what we have missed in this current film, and because the destruction of the burrow is not good enough to replace the lost action scenes in the book. i think it is unnecessary addition to the film. there was no motivation, no direct outcome, no aftermath to it

i’m happy (squeeing with delight actually like a high school girl) that many of ron-hermione scenes in the book (and more) made it to the movie. i empathized with hermione when she cried after seeing ron and lavender’s first kiss. it’s one of those few occassions that i believed emma watson’s acting. i would have liked to prolong ron and hermione’s fight a wee bit longer just to show how much love there really is between the two underneath the jealousy and pain. i would have liked to see, in particular that part in the book when ron brutally copies the know-it-all-hermione while in transfiguration class. it could have been another emma-watson-moment in the film. i wanted ron to follow hermione around trying to re-gain her friendship while still with lavender. i wanted very much to hear ron saying ‘i love you’ to hermione whether it was consciously or not. but more so, i expected to see ron comforting hermione in the end, when dumbledore dies. this is for me a powerful moment in the book which was left out. but these are all purely selfish and personal reasons. in the grand scheme of things, they are all irrelevant to the the plot. after all, the film is about harry potter and the half-blood prince and not harry potter and the unresolved sexual tension between ron and hermione

as for the harry-ginny romance, some of the moments are more contrived than awkward. this pair worked for me in the book because i see how harry falls in love with ginny, however subtle the signs are. in the film however, it is as if both are trying to acknowledge their feelings right off the bat. i would have liked to watch their first kiss exactly as it happens in the book – after a big quidditch match, harry and ginny’s eyes meeting, ginny running toward harry, him kissing her like no one else is watching, and after they broke apart, harry sought for ron in the crowd, needing to see her brother’s approval. i would have also wanted to see the break-up of harry and ginny during dumbledore’s funeral. it’s one of those heart-breaking scenes in the book when harry makes the ultimate sacrifice and lets ginny go. i have always imagined it to be akin to peter parker and mary jane’s break up scene in spiderman. i have expected a great deal of drama from harry and ginny with this one but sadly, there was none of it in the film

having said all this though, i enjoyed the film on its own merits. i’ve already accepted the fact that story-wise, the movies will never be at par with the books. i’ve always said, and i will say it again, that the harry potter films do not give enough justice to the magnitude and depth of the parallel universe that j.k. rowling. unfortunately for readers like me, there are many intricate back stories, poignant moments and memorable lines in the book that need to be cut down for reasons i couldn’t fathom. (i would gladly sit for a 5-hour long movie just to get a detailed representation of the books and i’m sure many obsessed fans like i am would do the same but i suppose, the business side of moviemaking dictates it’s all impractical to do so). so as much as i would like to be a book stickler, i have learned to yield to the commercialization of harry potter in cinema.

(a separate review of the book can be read here:  http://gladyz.wordpress.com/2006/07/16/a-happy-birthday-review)

is this the moment?

yes, it is!!! <insert mary murphy ‘whooohooo’ scream>

today’s the midnight screening of harry potter and the half-blood prince. technically, it’s wednesday midnight but whatever. my mind’s got no room for technicality. i’ve been waiting for this day long enough. in hours time, i can finally see on-screen HBP.

i purchased our tickets on june 23rd via online (thanks fandango!) and since this morning, i’ve been holding it like an obsessed lunatic, which i am. my sister and i, and even raj, have also been talking about what we will wear tonight for the screening. i think i’m settling for my maroon dress with gold belt, gryffindor colors. i’m sure it’d be a blast watching the movie with harry potter fanatics like we are.

i can’t wait for ron and hermione screen time. oh, the love galore!

my incoherent thoughts are testament to my over eagerness so for now, i disapparate.

it’s summer and the weather lately has been pushing me to read r/hr fan fictions.

i started reading harry potter fan fictions summer of 2005. the sixth book in the series was recently released then and after reading the book in a span of two days (i attended a party so i wasn’t able to finish it in a day as much as i wanted to), i felt that there was something amiss. obviously, i craved for more. being the self-confessed obsessed ron-hermione shipper that i was (still am and will forever be), i thought that many things happened in between those pages that j.k. rowling chose not to write about. i sought for the undisclosed romance that  i was absolutely convinced existed in the missing pages of the book.

so i went to the next best thing – google. i searched for stories that would quench my thirst for r/hr romance and google did not disappoint. in fact, i was overwhelmed with the results i got. i never imagined that there were so many thousands of fans as devoted to r/hr as i was, whose written works were what exactly i was looking for.

i remember the first couple of stories i read – the multi-chaptered la vie en rose and the one-shot not as a last resort. i enjoyed both because the characters stayed true to the books and there was a story to support them. but there was too much literature that it was difficult to filter which ones were well-written and which ones were as bad as tabloid reading. fortunately for me, i soon found out through my sister that there is checkmated.com, a ron-hermione fan fiction archive. all the stories in the site are not only well-written; they are also proof read and edited before publishing. since then, i have stopped googling r/hr stories and became a regular visitor of checkmated. to this day, my two favorite fan fictions can be found in checkmated: the book of morgan la fey and the final reckoning by lavenderbrown.

if there is one thing to be said of fan fictions, it is that the magnitude of people’s imagination is truly limitless. and i envy such imagination.

scene: my colleague from london who i met for the first time in vancouver last month came up to me over dinner and told me he’s halfway through the seventh book and that i was the one who motivated him to read HP. wow! order of merlin, first class for me.

seen: raj and i were watching jeopardy last week. category was something about hermione(s). naturally hermione granger (clue: last name of harry potter’s friend) came up. sadly, none of the contestants even attempted to answer the question. crucio the dorks, i say.

source: obama’s 30-minute infomercial last week. michelle said her husband reads harry potter to his kids. as raj said, that clinched it for us. i swear i cried when i heard obama reads harry potter. how can a very busy man like him find the time to read to his kids, and seven books at that? this gives me another compelling reason to do the same for my kids in the future. the guy deserves his own chocolate frog card, special limited edition. on a side note, i can’t wait to hear the meeting of obama and kingsley shacklebolt. teehee!

score: hbp’s latest trailer. compared to the first full trailer which shows more about lord voldy in his younger and yet already creepy years, the second trailer also gives us a fleeting (yes, indeed!) glimpse of the other important characters to watch out for in the film – snape, draco, ginny, hermione. ten OWLS minus one for that heartbreaking ron-lavender kiss.

hail to the master

i was awoken this morning by this text from my officemate/friend robert, ‘check out yahoo. dumbledore is gay!’ i slept more thinking it was one of those mere speculations circulating in the web. when i finally roused, i checked my mail inbox and saw a similar message from my sister who is another devout HP fan. she wrote’ did you read the article on the leaky cauldron??? dumbledore is gay!’

i proceeded to read the leaky caudron link she pasted in the email and indeed the greatest wizard of all time is gay and that was revealed by jkr herself. wow! this is another testament to how diverse and multi-dimensional her characters are. i am sure the HP community is buzzing with excitement over this revelation. i can’t wait what everyone has to say about good ol’ dumbledore being gay especially her religious critics.

the other thing that struck me from jkr’s interview was how she compared molly and bellatrix. here is the q&A:

How did you decide that Molly Weasley would be the one to finish off Bellatrix?

I always knew Molly was going to finish her off. I think there was some speculation that Neville would do it, because Neville obviously has a particular reason to hate Bellatrix. ..So there were lots of optios for Blelatrix, but I never deviated. I wanted it to be Molly, and I wanted it to be Molly for two reasons.

The first reason was I always saw Molly as a very good witch but someone whose light is necessarily hidden under a bushel, because she isn’t in the kitchen a lot and she has had to raise, among others, and george which is like, enough… I wanted Molly to have her moment and to show that because a woman had dedicated herself to her family does not mean that she doesn’t have a lot of other talents.

Second reason: It was the meeting of two kinds of – if you call what Bellatrix feels for Voldemort love, I guess we’ll call it love, she has a kind of obsession with him, it’s a very sick obsession … and I wanted to match that kind of obsession with maternal love… the power that you give someone by loving them. So Molly was really an amazing exemplar of maternal love. … There was something very satisfying about putting those two women together.

not for us though whose muggle lives revolved around HP and his world for the past decade.

i was one of thos thousands of people who vigiled until midnight when the 7th book was released. i was one at union square with ray, robert and his two french friends. we patiently waited until 3am to get our copies. it felt good to be with hardcore fans like me, some of them even dressed up in character. my favorite was professor snape complete with the wig. i would for sure remember that night in the years to come.

irrevocably heart-broken, that’s what i am.

the wisdom of my younger sister said denial. it’s the way to go.

pretend that he’s not dead. pretend that after nineteen years, he too lives to see his children off to school.

i wish it was that easy. to dismiss the nagging feeling of sadness. of concern to the ‘one’ he left behind.

denial. from somewhere, i can hear him laughing and playing jokes as he would when he was living.

7 years is a short time to know him and yet forgetting is too long. nigh impossible even.

he will be remembered in the many years to come.

*** out of courtesy to those who haven’t finished reading DH, i will not name this character to whom i offer my last respect.

paulo coelhlo in the zahir writes ‘…it’s better to live cherishing a dream than face the possibility that it might all come to nothing.’ this is almost how i am feeling now with the impending release of hp and the deathly hallows. part of me is eagerly anticipating to read what happens in the last book; the other half of me wants to hold the time still not only because i fear it would not go exactly the way i want it to but more so because i do not want it to end just yet.

just thinking about how the wait will soon be over makes me excited and nostalgic at the same time.

harry potter’s life told through his years at hogwarts is a reflection of my personal journey through time. i started reading hp three years after the first book came out. it was at the time when i was fresh out of college and was looking for a fulfilling job in manila. it was my first plunge to the so-called real world and as many others would testify, it was scary, shocking and depressing. however, discovering the world of hp made those bleak days bearable. it provided an escape from the harsh realities of adult life. it offered comfort when i felt everything i hoped for was beyond me. since then hogwarts has become my parallel universe. hp, my elixir of youth.

books five and six came out when i was a student in japan. until now it remains so vivid in my mind the day i got my copy of Ootp and HBP — how i woke up early to wait for the delivery guy from amazon, how i longingly touched the cover of the book and hugged it before i finally began reading, how i savored every image i conjured from every word penned, how i cried buckets of tears over the death of the two major characters.

apparently, i will be reading the seventh book seven years later after i read the first one. i will be reading it in my most favorite city at a time when i feel like i am at the height of things. such a fitting end and yet i am melancholic. i have written so many blog entries about hp but none as somber, none as sentimental as this one. i’m sure this won’t be the last though as there will be many more writings to come. maybe more somber, more reflective than it is now.

i haven’t decided yet what to do tomorrow on the eve of the last book’s release. on the one hand, i want to go and party with obsessed readers like me. on the other hand, i just want to go home and vigil – stay away from the crowd and the spoilers, prepare for the big day. but one thing is for sure, i am not ready to let go. i think that when i get my copy on saturday, it may take a while before i turn the pages because years and years from now, i would like to remember how it feels like to have this time of my life end. i would like it to be etched forever in my memory like a lightning-shaped scar.

this entry is dedicated to my sister who like me is an avid r/hr shipper. this is to reassure her that our favorite couple will be spared from the avada kevadra curse.

here are the top five reasons why i am convinced jk rowling will not kill them BOTH:

(1) ron is the samwise gangee of harry potter. he represents the common folks. to kill him off is to crush the dreams of ordinary young men who can relate to ron’s struggles and who hopes to succeed like him in the end. ultimately, we want to see ron rise above poverty and to prove himself worthy, just as he perceives himself in the mirror of erised.  on the other hand, hermione personifies the book’s feminist ideals. she is strong, smart, passionate and brave. although jk  says hermione is vulnerable, she will not kill off the central feminine character who is always the voice of reason. there is so much in stored for her but ultimately, we want to see her become empowered more than she is right now (e.g. advocating elf rights)  while building her own family at the same time.

(2) killing both or either of the two is anti-climactic to the story. we already know that ron is willing to sacrifice himself for harry. he has shown this kind of loyalty even at a very young age during the chess match in PS. he overcomes his fear of spiders in CoS to help harry.  he challenges sirius black to kill him and hermione first before he can touch harry.  he sets aside his personal feelings (of jealousy) when he realizes that someone wants harry get killed in  GoF. he fights side by side harry in OotP. and, he is in the thick of action in the battle against the death eaters at hogwarts in HBP. similarly, hermione who is always little miss goody two shoes, has broken many rules in order to help harry. although she would question the means through which harry acts on his impulse, she nonetheless is there at his back to show loyalty and to offer her service. in addition, both characters’ lives have already been put in danger – hermione in CoS and ron in HBP. it just seems unoriginal already. remember, jk is full of suprises. most people did not expect black to die in book five or dumbledore to be murdered in book six (we were counting for him to live until the first chapters of the 7th book at least) and this is why their death impacts the readers. on the contrary, many people are betting on ron and/or hermione’s death so she will take a different turn. i am betting peter pettigrew is the one who will sacrifice himself for harry because he has to pay his debt.

(3) i have faith that jk knows her readers and values them. harry potter started off primarily as a children’s book. much of the success of HP can be attributed to its being a good read for kids because it carries the universal theme of good versus evil, with the former triumphing in the end. ron and hermione represents the good side and their death will contradict this common perception. jk owes it to these children (and parents) who believed in her when she was still a nobody to let the main characters live happily ever after (and yes this includes harry). the trio has been deprived of their childhood, they have aged faster than they should – the least she can do for them (and for the readers) is to give them a longer life to enjoy what they have missed.

(4) she cannot kill the trio, this is for sure. she can kill harry and let ron and hermione live but she cannot simply do the opposite. harry’s survival is pointless if she’d kill the two most important people in harry’s life. they are not only his best friends, they are also his family. harry has already lost so much people he loves in his lifetime, i don’t think he’d be able to bear the death of either one or both of them. killing ron and hermione while allowing harry to live is akin to handing the cup of victory to voldemort and his cohorts. if they cannot kill him, seeing him suffer in guilt and live haplessly alone would still give them the satisfaction they want (which i don’t think is the message that jk would like to impart in the end).

(5) what’s the point of building ron and hermione’s relationship, dropping advil-size hints when there is no future for them anyway?  the book will not bank on the tragic love story of ron and hermione. jk is so much better than that. ron and hermione will lead the new generation of couples, who would rebuild the wizarding world after the war. they will live to tell the heroic tale of harry and the gallant men and women who sacrificed their lives including black and dumbledore. they will produce plenty offsprings, one of them named after harry. and, most importantly, they will be the living testimony of love and friendship that is worth fighting for.  either they die both for each other or live and be together happily ever after.