harry potter 6, two movies

I liked this one much more than I liked 5. 5 had too much whining. But 6 had too much of Dumbledore saying “I’ll tell you about my withered hand later.” The suspense-craft was too obvious. Also, I really didn’t like the way Harry+Ginny was done. Yes, I liked the beast in his chest, and the conversations with himself about being Ron’s sister, becuase those were funny. But there was no indication about why they should like each other, other than “Ginny is too popular for her own good, she turns heads everywhere with her good looks and also the Weaselys are good people” or “You can’t rest until you stop Voldemort. I guess that’s why I like you so much” … I don’t know, something was missing. It just felt so… blah. Especially how she’d kiss him and go upstairs and then the three would go off and do something. She’s so obvoiusly outside the inner circle that it just felt fake. Maybe I’m comparing Harry+Ginny unfairly to Lyra+Will, who were gorgeously written (yes, extraordinarily cheesy at times, but still gorgeous). You know? All that stuff about being a house with all the lights on, waiting for a flash of understanding, made me really excited about those characters, but nothing made me really excited for H+G. What about Hermione+Ron? I’m glad that that’s going as slow as it is, and I liked Harry’s “our trio’s down to two” moment.

Anyway you can see my shipper roots in full force. Apparently I never care about anything other then the +s. I’ll have to admit that I actually suck at Harry Potter lore. Who killed Sirius? Oh, wait, Sirius was like dragged into that black hole thing in that room in that big building which included Ron getting eaten by brains and the prophecy room where the prophecy got shattered but only Harry heard it, right? Oh, Lucius Malfoy was a death eater? How did I forget that? He’s in Azkaban? Blah, blah, blah. Pretty sad. But I liked how there were a few references back. “I was there too,” Ron said unheeded, “look I have these scars on my arm from when the brains got me…” That was really funny.

I thought that Snape was actually just bad, becuase him being good but an awesome actor and on Dumbledore’s side all along is just too facile, too “easy-way-out,” too feel-good. I want us to really be let down by him, really made cynical. I think that JKR will expect us to think that Snape’s just acting, so she can come out with the next book and BAM! devastate everybody. Like, maybe the overemphasis of Dumbledore trusting Snape was set up on purpose to devastate us further. However, I must admit that it is very likely that he is on the side of good and an awesome actor and that he killed Dumbledore because he swore that unbreakable oath thing to Malfoy’s mom. “Face twisted with hatred” obviously written to make us think “he hates dumbledore!” but actually “he hates that he had to swear that unbreakable oath to Malfoy’s mom to make her believe that he was on her side and now he hates that he has to kill dumbledore!”

Also to go back to what’s really important to me (ha ha ha ha) I REALLY despised Tonks+Lupin. That was just retarded. If I ever write a book and include love stories they will not consist of a scene where the girl hears about another couple vowing to love each other through disfigurement and hospitalization and burst out “see they can do it, let me love you!” while shaking the boy’s jacket front. That’s just pathetic. I want to say that I’m kind of annoyed by her nonHermione girl characters, but Hermione being there makes it better I guess. Though even she was intrigued by the Puff thingies. Then again I would be too. Oh whatever. I have weird conflicting thoughts about being girly-girlish. Also McGon… no…gal…. oh I can’t spell her name. At least she’s no-nonsense. Oh I don’t know what I’m talking about. The problem with my livejournal is that I spit out all these letters before I figure out what I am trying to say with them or if it’s worth saying at all, which results in an incomplete, absurd documentation of my demented thought-processes. Also I am mostly just exaggerating what I really feel about everything. I really don’t actually care that much. Most of this is facetious.

Well, I really was creeped out by them having to apparate to the deserted seashore and go to the cave, and the boat-on-a-chain, and all those corpses, and Dumbledore forcing himself to drink the horrible potion. My desire to see what happens next is as strong as ever.


I really liked Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which I always call “Willy Wonka” probably because that’s what we called our play amongst ourselves in 3rd grade. The Oompa Loompas were fantastic. The entire time you watched the movie with that blank, horrified expression that was always on the kids/parents’ faces. “All this time… and you never FLOSSED?” was fantastic, as was the squeaking of the rubber gloves. The whole movie was nervousness and awkwardness distilled to perfection, interspersed with “I can’t believe they’re doing synchronised swimming in leotards” oddballity. I didn’t like Batman Begins so much. The fight scenes were awful. The camera was too close-up and you couldn’t see anything. “Ok, someone is being thrown over something… maybe… who is it? what are they being thrown over? who is throwing? who is winning, who is losing?” I want more detail and I want to be able to see what’s going on. Etc. I lost interest in this post.

In other news, this video is fantastic: http://files.filefront.com/Paladin_DPS_is_Fine/;3960522;;/fileinfo.html
The forum post I saw it in was here: http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.aspx?FN=wow-paladin&T=309338&P=1
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!! Oh man, I laughed so hard.


  1. i expect dumbledore to be exactly right and snape to turn out to be a brilliant actor, of course – and when that fails to happen i shall fall off the edge of the earth.

    1. the only beef i had with wonka is that the kids get buggered off far too quickly. there’s not much in between or suspense there. other parts were done too slowly, so the timing was off.

      i guess my thing was that i wanted to see burton’s interpretation of the factory as a whole, and you only get to see a small part of things as you whiz on by. also, charlie’s little boy angst in the first was cut out in order to put in wonka’s bit. quite an interesting trade-off.

      that said, the oompa loompas were fantastic, i loved the sick, sick puppets in the beginning, the braces, the squirrels and the boat and the eyewear throughout.

      1. I agree, when Augustus got sucked up I kept thinking “already?” even though I knew it was going to happen.

        Their setups were great. The only one that went overboard, I thought, was the constant cutting of the camera back to Violet’s mom. That was just… a little much. Very, very funny, but she totally stole the scene, where the kids are supposed to have the focus.

        And Wonka was a little too childish. “I’m Veruca Salt!” “I don’t care!” From the book I never got the feeling that Wonka was acting like a petulant child; he was crazy, yeah, but always in control of the situation, and I never got the feeling that he was “buggering” them off on purpose. They were sad coincidences that the kids brought upon themselves. Like in the book did the other kids ask “how did the oompa loompas already know our names?” and guess that WW had planned for their eliminations? Maybe I just missed it or something and it was obvious that WW had planned them and i was just too naive.

        Hahahhahaa, loved the bracers. They stretched that one out so well… naming the kids one by one… lifting the sheet to create expecation… and little WW gives such a huge, mangled smile… ahahhaha….

  2. I agree with the Harry/Ginny stuff. That just kinda came out of nowhere.

    I also agree about Willy Wonka. Very few of the people I’ve talked to like the new Oompa Loompas or the songs, but I did. And I did like the Depp and the glasses and stuff, although parts of it were not done too well I thought, especially when he breaks down remembering his father and stuff.

    1. Man I should have put these in separate posts since R hasn’t read hp6 yet and keeps clicking on these comments and closing the window in horror. “I read something… about snape… and … dumbledore…”

      Sure, why not? (on Harry = Horcrux.) It would lead to a very satisfyingly horrible ending where Harry is forced to destroy himself in order to destroy Voldemort, or some beautiful redemptive ending where he manages to make it so he doesn’t have to destroy himself (he finds some loophole involving the ability to love; he turns V over to the Light; he goes through a horrible exorcism but emerges Chistlike from the bloody mire). Ok I’m going a little overboard there but you know what I mean. Aslan-like? Ok. I mean that makes sense, right, if you were an evil overlord (haha) and wanted to ensure your survival and one dude was prophecied to kill you, you’d make it so that dude would have to destroy himself to destroy you too, in the hopes of buying some more time while he mulls over the terrible decision, or swaying him to your side, or whatever. Also the “i could hear him” stuff and the scar pulsing and stuff. I remember him talking about the “i could hear his thoughts” stuff in the end of hp6, but I don’t remember what he said about it. Or was that “i could hear him” stuff explained by some other phenomenon already? I can’t remember

  3. My question is, why didn’t he just pour the nasty stuff out?

    Conjure a bucket and pour it back in when you’re done, if you think that’s important. Hell, turn the goblet into a monkey and force the monkey to drink it, I don’t care; just don’t drink something Voldemort wants you to drink. It seems like a fundamentally bad idea.

    1. Cuz he couldn’t just pour it out. It couldn’t be moved, they couldn’t part it with their hands, couldn’t conjure it away, couldn’t pick it up. Unless it was with a goblet. Why not just pour the potion out on the ground once it’s in the goblet? Maybe it only goes out of the goblet if it’s going to be… drunk. She should have made D try to pour it out of the goblet and have it magically return to the cauldron, or stick immoble to the goblet or something. But then D would have looked reluctant, afraid to drink it. You have to admit the gusto with which he approached the task was formidable. Yeeeahhh… Then why not fill a million goblets? Ummm… maybe… it only goes into the goblet if… there are no bits of itself in other goblets. Yeeeahhh… Maybe you (or your trusted student) could only pick up the horcrux (or fake horcrux) if you drank it. Yeahhh….

      1. Why not conjure another goblet from where the first one came, transfigure it into a monkey (or what have you) and force the transfigured goblet to drink it. I’ll cry tears of insincere regret for the goblet/monkey, because D would have been fine.

        It seems like a decision the author made (and not the character) to set up the scene when they return.

  4. Finally saw the video.
    Not playing world of warcraft, I haven’t personally experienced the expectation and disappointment these guys clearly felt, but the chorus of “SHIT!” when the last guy died was hilarious.

    1. Small bit of background: the dungeon they’re in is called the Molten Core, which used to be the most hardcore raid dungeon until last week when they introduced Blackwing Lair. MC requires a full raid group (40 people) to do. The boss that they’re fighting in the video is named Lucifron, and is only the FIRST boss in MC, which has like 8 big bosses. Not only that, it takes a couple of hours to even GET to Luci (not to mention coordinate 40 competent people; if you’re not a hardcore raiding guild where that’s all you do, this is the most difficult part. haha). Luci has two cronies which are very hard to kill (the pickup groups I’ve gone with have managed to kill one of his servants that are part of the event, but not the other… and not even get 2% off of Luci. It was sad). Also, he has a bunch of curses he puts on everyone, including one that does a billion (or so) dmg to you after 15 (or so) seconds, and one that makes it so that every spell you cast 2x as much mana; you have to have like 20 people whose entire role is to cleanse everybody else in order to win. At the start of the video, 35 people are dead, leaving 3 pallies, a warlock, and a mage. Which is why there’s all that yelling… 35 people are dead and have nothing else to do. And bringing Luci down to 0% health (HAHAHA) is so frustrating… it probably took 4-5 hours to get to that point, and it’ll take another 15minutes to get everybody ressed and ready to go again.

      Some info about the classes and why this video is particularly hilarious: Plate mail is the highest armor class in the game; only warriors and paladins can wear them. They are both melee classes, but warriors are a pure (and powerful) melee class, while paladins are build to survive: they have two invulnerability shields, an ability that lets them regain 100% of their health, and a bunch of healing/cleansing spells. But everybody who plays a paladin complains about their weakness and the sheer length of time it takes to kill anything (just ask Mike, who has a 60 paladin, or Ryan, who has a 57 pally). So it’s not surprising that in the end there were 37 dead other people and 3 pallies whacking pitifully away at Luci with their hammers, since the paladins were probably standing back during the rest of the fight and healing/cleansing the others. Pallies have an ability called “seal of the commander” which makes it so that every hit you land, there’s a chance that you will do 2x as much damage… this is one of the only ways a pally can deal big damage, but the problem is, it’s random. I don’t even know if they were using that seal (they probably had 0 mana left, anyway), but it’s hilarious that they weren’t able to take him from > 0.5% health to 0% health, hahaha.

      In the beginning, everyone’s yelling “DOTS! DOTS!” at the warlock. “DoT” stands for “Damage over time”; warlocks have powerful ones, and they were probably yelling at the warlock to get some DoTs on him before getting squished to a pulp. You can see a little red icon with a slash through it appear under Luci’s health bar in the beginning of the video, that’s from the warlock. Umm.. then you can see a few frostbolts coming in from the right side, that’s coming from a mage. He seems to be doing ok, very far away from Luci… but then one of the pallies gets hit and throws one of his invulnerability bubbles on himself, causing him to lose aggro and so Luci runs over and turns the mage into mincemeat. “Consecrate” is a paladin AoE (area of effect) spell… it does a little damage. One of the pallies does it right after the mage dies (it’s the big yellow firey stuff that poofs on the ground) before the girl yells at the other pallies to also “consecrate! consecrate!” at the end.


    2. Also, “DPS” means “damage per second.” Paladins are always lamenting their low DPS on the boards, and the mods always say that Paladin DPS is fine and where it’s meant to be. “FTW” = “for the win” which means … you know … for… the win. Yeahhh… people are always saying that though. For example, “chocolate chip cookies ftw” and “spammers ftl” (for the lose). Yeahhh… Often FTW is used sarcastically too (just like GG for good game/good going… in warcraft 3 all the kiddies would say “GG NOW LEAVE ALREDY B2TCH UR PWNED LOLOLOL UR GHEY” if they think they’re winning against you). Etc etc etc.

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