The Order of the Phoenix: don’t mess with wizards
Harry Potter 5 is now officially my favorite (both the book and the movie). I just saw the film on Sunday and it has proven that wizards don’t always have to look fruity when pointing wands at each other. On the contrary, this movie shows us some bad ass wizard skills. The third installment, the Prisoner of Azkaban is still a close second in both the book and movie categories, but it just doesn’t have the magical ass-whoopings that Order of the Phoenix has. The massive wizard battle in the Ministry of Magic alone edges this movie over all the others, in my opinion. Watching Dumbledore and Voldemort go head to head is, I think, what we’ve all been waiting to see throughout the whole series. I only wish Richard Harris hadn’t died after the second film… he was a much more authentic Dumbledore. He made Dumbledore feel older, wiser, and more respectable, sort of like the Yoda of the wizarding world. Imagine the shock and awe had it been Harris dominating Voldemort instead of Michael Gambon. It really would’ve been like finally seeing Yoda bust out his true Jedi skills in Attack of the Clones.
Though I loved Phoenix, I still think that all of the Potter movies suffer slightly from “bookish-ness” (sometimes you gotta make up words, right?), which is to say that it’s trying to be a little too true to the continuity, pacing, and storyline from the books, so the movie feels more like watching a book than watching a movie. In some ways this is a good thing, especially having read each book before seeing the movies. You get more of that fulfilling of expectations when you already know the story and events. But when it comes to watching a blockbuster movie, the bookish traits wear on me a little. It’s not that staying true to the novels’ events ruins the movies, it’s just something that I’m constantly aware of while watching them. I think given a slightly tweaked screenplay and a little different pacing/directing, you could achieve the same goal without making it so obvious that Harry Potter is a book first, and a film second.
I hope they can keep this stellar cast around for all seven films, even though Dan Radcliffe’s gonna be 35 by the end of this saga.
Torrents.to - an amazing torrent search site
Ever since I discovered Torrents.to a couple months ago, it’s been my go to site for all-things-bittorrent. It has a single search box and a dropdown to select any of about a dozen (give or take) torrent search sites to pass your query to. Once you submit a search, you get your results from your selected search site with handy tabs along the top of the page for passing that same query to the other search engines. I can’t believe how much easier this makes the use of torrents. When I initially started using torrents, I felt that the whole soup-to-nuts experience was just too drawn out and complicated (in my opinion, torrent client optimization and configuration still has a long way to go before I would suggest it to non-techies… check here, though, for a highly recommended solution). I’m always on the prowl for new mashups like this one. If anyone’s got anything good, comment it up.