A Muggle Weighs In

HARRY POTTER AND THE HALF-BLOOD PRINCE

As you know, I'm not a Harry Potter fan. I don't particularly have anything against the series, either the books or the films, but they've just never interested me that much. (As I may have told you before, Tolkien ruined me for all other fantasy; everything else just seems to pale in comparison to the scope, depth, and poetry of his works. Why should I read thousands of pages of adolescents going to boarding school and speaking in pseudo-Latin when I can have epic, millennia-spanning power struggles and genuine invented languages?) Though I've never even cracked any of the books, I think I've seen all of the films—I may have missed The Goblet of Fire, I can't remember—though never more than once. Generally, I've found them fun and entertaining, but never especially moving or compelling, and sometimes confusing—I often find myself wondering why Harry has to find the X or discover the secret of the Y, which then hinders my ability really to get into what I'm watching. (I'm reminded, again, of the fact that Nabokov would give away the ending of Anna Karenina when teaching it, so his students wouldn't focus on following the plot. This also explains why I can often watch the same film a second time right after the first—as I did with The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser—since the first time I tend to miss a lot of the forest of a film's craftsmanship for the trees of its plot points.) So take my comments for what they're worth, a pure layman's perspective.

— SPOILERIA SUBSEQUENS —

I just got back from seeing The Half-blood Prince, and I think I enjoyed it about as much as any of the other films in the series. Though, given your opinion of it, I'm not sure if that means I liked it less or more than you did. Having read your assessment before seeing it this evening, I couldn't help but carry what you'd said about it into the theater with me and compare it to what I was watching. I found myself agreeing that it had an episodic, "series of events" structure, rather than an clear, coherent plot course; you'd think the mystery of the "Half-blood Prince" would be a major element of the plot, given the title, but it's set aside for most of the film while Harry gets to the bottom of Voldemort's past and present activities, until Snape reveals that he's the Half-blood Prince (what the significance of that revelation is, though, I have no idea, other than that he knows some good potions). Meanwhile, interspersed throughout, the kids fall in and out of love ad infinitum, there's the obligatory Quidditch match (though better integrated into the plot than in the earlier films, as I remember them), and Helena Bonham Carter (consistently showing no respect for others' personal space, in my opinion) and crew attack Harry at that big house and chase him through the grass, leading to perhaps the most inappropriate use of shaky-cam I've ever seen. All in all, as with the previous films I had a good enough time, but I just didn't really take anything from it.

I will say this for the Harry Potter series, though, I do enjoy the unmistakable Britishness of it. The kids attend a neo-Gothic boarding school, they and their teachers regularly go to class in their caps and gowns, they go to pubs and drink ale (oh, how I miss the Horse Brass), and most of the characters have names that are strange in a particuliarly eighteenth-and-nineteenth-century-British way: Hermione Granger, Albus Dumbledore, Severus Snape, Horace Slughorn, etc. (An almost-too-good-to-be-true real-world example of this was Sir Cloudesley Shovell, an English admiral involved in the capture of Gibraltar in 1704. Also, not to keep bringing up Tolkien, but such names were also common among Hobbits: Peregrin Took (Pippin), Meriadoc Brandybuck (Merry), Gerontius Took, Fredegar Bolger, Lobelia Bracegirdle, Drogo Baggins, etc., etc., etc.) I'm a bit of a Britannophile (being of Scottish and Irish descent, I could never bring myself to call myself an "Anglophile," especially since my interest extends throughout the isles, not just to England), so I can't help but see and enjoy the Harry Potter series as, partly at least, a kind of celebration of British cultures, institutions, and peculiarities at their most distinctive and colorful—oops, sorry, I mean "colourful."

And an added bonus of this film was the fact that Jim Broadbent reminded me a lot of a favorite history professor of mine at Reed, Ed Segel (and perhaps it's not a coincidence that Prof. Segel describes himself as an Anglophile). Basically, if the film's Horace Slughorn lost some weight, taught nineteenth- and twentieth-century diplomatic history instead of potions, and spoke with a rhotacism (like Jonathan Ross (here), or Nickolas Grace's Anthony Blanche (here and here) in the Brideshead Revisited miniseries (another indulgence of my Britannophilia) minus the cartoonish flamboyance), you'd have Prof. Segel. So that was cool.

P.S. — While we're on the topic of movies (haha), this is pretty cool: "The 50 Greatest Trailers of All Time," courtesy of the Independent Film Channel. (I suspect that this is the only list imaginable where Cloverfield ranks above Citizen Kane.)