Fellow blogger and Harry Potter fanatic Travis Prinzi reviews the Goblet of Fire DVD. I said there was no way the book Dumbledore would have allowed that dragon to chase Harry around the school, and Travis disagrees, citing Triwizard Tournament Rules. I believe the book Dumbledore would have flouted the rules rather than watch Harry risk his life.

Granted, Harry has been in several dangerous situations, and in most cases, Dumbledore wasn't around to save him. But sitting in the stands twiddling his thumbs while a dragon breaks loose from its chains and breaths fire at The Boy Who Lived?

Travis writes:

I disagree with this reasoning [mine] in particular, because Dumbledore was just as bound by the rules of the Triwizard Tournament as anyone else. By magical law and contract, my guess is that Dumbledore simply would not have been allowed to interfere. The Tournament had killed people before.

My problem with it is its length. With so many great things to cover, and the final scene rushed, I would much rather have seen a shorter dragon scene and a longer LV rebirthing scene. Nevertheless, I can understand, from a Hollywood point of view, why the cool dragon action scene was added.

We definitely agree that the rebirthing scene should have been longer. It was the climax, after all. It should have been diabolically slow and well-paced. And we agree about Michael Gambon: he's no Dumbledore.

Despite all the fan grumbling about deleted and embellished scenes, here's a cold, undeniable fact: J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter’s “mother,” obviously approved the changes. So that settles it. I suppose.

Thanks for the post material, Travis.

Nine years ago today, I broke a destructive drinking habit. There was a time I couldn't imagine going a day without drinking. Life just didn't seem worth living if I couldn't drown my thoughts and drink myself into oblivion every day.

When the shame of being a drunk became overwhelming, I decided to stop. It was scary. I was giving up my crutch, ready to face the cold, cruel reality of sobriety. No more excuses.

My sobriety is one of the main reasons I'm always harping on "personal responsibility." It seems that too many people get away with making excuses these days, and I have no patience for excuses. And this is where I have to be careful. We all have weaknesses and vices, and at one time or another, we all need compassion.

Too much moralizing can lead to too little compassion. As I listen to people make excuses for their weaknesses (alcoholism, drug addiction, bad decisions, dumb choices, whatever), I think, If I could overcome it, why can't you? Stop wallowing! But I didn't overcome alcoholism without help. Although I chose to attempt it without a support group, I didn't do it alone. I had a compassionate and merciful Creator on my side.

Continue reading 9 Lives

Wednesday, May3: Please see an update and correction to this post.

Update (3/13): This is such a cool idea for hard-core Harry Potter fans only. The podcasters at the Leaky Cauldron (Melissa Anelli, John Noe, and Sue Upton) put together a fan DVD commentary podcast of "Goblet of Fire." (Didn't know Leaky had a podcast? Check it out.)

To the irritation of many HP fans, Warner Brothers has yet to release a DVD with directors' commentary, probably as a spoiler-prevention measure. I listened to the podcast as I watched the movie for the fourth time, and it was kind of cute. (Am I the only HP fan who didn't cry when Cedric Diggory was killed?) They're thinking about doing commentaries for movies 1-3. Hey, this is the sort of thing fans do between books. Don't laugh at us.
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My "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire" DVD arrived the other day, and I've since watched the movie twice. It was a better movie the second time around, but much of my criticism from the first viewing still stands.

I suppose it's a bit ridiculous to be such a Harry Potter purist at this point. Screenwriters and directors must cut and condense the books for the screen and add exciting sequences, but here's the danger. Inevitably, subplots are lost, characters are flattened, and the canon is butchered when combining or removing scenes.

For instance, I can live with the truncated Quidditch World Cup sequence and the absence of the house elf Winky, but a few scene changes left me dismayed, and two involve Barty Crouch, Jr.'s character. (pictured)

1) The presence of Barty Crouch, Jr. (BCJ) in the Riddle House in the opening was appalling. Why was that necessary? I can only assume it was intended to help viewers who hadn't read the books understand that there was a prison escapee in cahoots with Lord Voldemort gunning for Harry. But it destroyed the tension. BCJ was in awe of Voldemort and came up with the plan to impersonate Mad-Eye Moody on his own. Like many of V's followers, BCJ hadn't seen V after his failed attempt to kill Harry.

BCJ asked Harry so many questions about what it was like to be in Voldemort's resurrected presence because he hadn't seen him since his downfall, was excited that he'd returned, and knew he'd be rewarded for his evil plot. His presence with Voldemort in the Riddle House in the beginning dampened some of that anticipation at the end, at least for me.

2) The presence of BCJ in the Pensieve scene. Not only was the man not in the courtroom audience, in the book he was a prisoner, a scared 19-year-old (not an arrogant rogue) calling out for his mother, pleading his innocence, and begging his father not to send him to Azkaban. He was guilty, of course, but that scene in the book was powerful. There was nothing arrogant or menacing about BCJ until after he transformed back into himself.

Barty Crouch, Sr., a ministry official who tried and condemned Death Eaters, was disgusted and embarrassed that his son was an accused Death Eater. And the kid's mother…well, she was distraught. Her heart cried out for her son and she ended up fainting from the grief of it all. She loved him so much that she ended up trading places with him in Azkaban, which is why he was at the Quidditch World Cup and at Hogwarts masquerading as Mad-Eye Moody.

It's all much more subtle and intricately plotted in the book, and there's the rub. A two-hour movie based on a book with over 700 pages doesn't have the luxury of being subtle, I suppose. The film makers had more than book purists in mind; there was a legion of potential moviegoers who hadn't read the books and had to understand the movie as a stand-alone film.

The presence of BCJ in those two key scenes destroyed the powerful father-son subplot, rendering the father's character shallow and his motives murkier than portrayed in the book.

3) The dragon scene was terrible. There is no way Dumbledore would sit idly by while a fire-breathing dragon chased Harry around the school. No way. Those who've read all the books know how important Harry is, and keeping him alive is of the utmost importance. Yet, in the movie version of Book Four, a dragon breaks free from its chains and chases Harry to the roof of the castle, and nobody in the stands, all witches and wizards, do nothing to help him or even see if he's OK? The sequence was exciting, but this is what I mean when I say that adding or deleting information "butchers" the canon.

4) Michael Gambon. I don't like his "interpretation" of Albus Dumbledore's character, and I use quotation marks because I heard a rumor that the actor hadn't read the books! I don't know if the late Richard Harris had, but his Dumbledore was true to the book. Harris was in a delicate condition at the time. He was suffering from Hodgkin's Disease and died after appearing in the second HP movie. Perhaps it was his illness that made him less animated, but Harris's Dumbledore matched the book's character: wise, clever in a subtle way, dignified and sure. Gambon's Dumbledore is troubled, uptight, and too animated. I'm sure I wasn't the only fan who gasped when he grabbed and pushed Harry after the champion selection scene.

I don't know how all you early Harry Potter fans dealt with it. For fans who read the books before the movies came out, it must have been quite exciting to see the characters on the big screen and at the same time, confusing and disappointing that scenes had been changed, cut, and rearranged. I didn't have this problem with the first three movies because I started reading the books only last summer (Can you believe it?). I didn't have anything to compare or complain about.

Bottom line: "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban" is still my favorite HP movie.

I guess I shouldn't take it all so seriously. It's only fiction, after all. We're supposed to be having fun, right?

Can you imagine what they're going to do to Order of the Phoenix?

(Warner Brothers image)

The Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire DVD will be available on Tuesday. I'm excited. I admit it.

I went to see the movie with my mother, and she hadn't seen the other three movies or read any of the books. "It's OK. I don't need to see them to enjoy this one," she insisted. I was a woman of little faith because I didn't believe her. The result? I talked through most of the movie, explaining characters, why they did this, why that did that. My favorite line: "It didn't happen that way in the book."

Sorry, Mom!

Now I'll get to watch it and really enjoy it, although it's not my favorite of the four movies (See Favorite HP Books and Movies). That honor goes to Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. Reasons: 1) Director Alfonso Cuarón's work was beautiful; 2) I hadn't read the books yet, so I didn't know how much of the plot was changed. I could focus on the great special effects and continuation of the first two movies.

Now we face a long wait for the as-yet untitled final book.

Related posts:

• Differences Between the Book and the Movie
• Great Big Goblet of Fire Review Round-up

Offline life (and other things) has a way of overwhelming you, doesn't it?

Let's return to my series on John Granger's article, Why Half Blood Prince is the Best Harry Potter Novel.

The first post in the series addressed Granger's and my ideas about Dumbledore and the cave. In the second post, I started on the first of 20 questions not answered in Half-Blood Prince. Question #1 dealt with the who, what, where, when, and how of horcruxes, and although I didn't do the subject justice, it was a start!

Review question #1:

1. How do you make a Horcrux, that is, what is the spellwork procedure, and what are the four remaining Horcruxes? We learn a lot about what a Horcrux is in Half-Blood Prince but not about how one is made or what the four Horcruxes remaining are. Until we know this, it is impossible to speculate meaningfully about what can and cannot be a Horcrux…

Today we'll look at question #2:

2. What is the nature of Harry’s scar? Harry’s scar in Half-Blood Prince went from constant reminder in the previous story of his psychic link with the Dark Lord to not a twinge in Half-Blood Prince (a change that allows for Harry-Dumbledore contact but with the thin excuse that the broken link was because Voldemort didn’t want Harry to know what he was thinking). We don’t know still if the wound is an echo of Frodo’s knife wound from the Dark Rider on Weathertop or a Horcrux or a “curse scar acting like an alarm bell” or what…

The first two questions (as well as #3) focus on horcruxes. I wrote in a previous post that I don't believe Harry's scar is a horcrux, but that leads us to the next question. What, then, is the nature of the scar?

When Harry was a baby, whatever curse Lord Voldemort tried to perform on Harry (not Avada Kedavra?) was unsuccessful. The curse rebounded on Voldemort, and he was physically weakened as a result. All the surviving baby Harry got from the failed curse was a lightning bolt-shaped scar on his forehead. Throughout the series we've read that Harry's scar burns and hurts to varying degrees whenever Lord Voldemort is angry. Clearly there's a connection between it and Voldemort, but what?

Let's look at Granger's #2. Since I've yet to read the Lord of the Rings Trilogy (Don't stone me!), I don't fully understand the Frodo reference, but I get the gist. Harry's scar is a cursed scar, but is it just a means to warn him and others of Voldemort's moods, physical proximity, etc., or does a part of V's soul lie in wait there?

I'm going to take the easy way out and say that Harry is obviously connected to Big V through the scar, and that connection is not meant to imply that the scar contains part of V's soul. Can I back it up? Not really.

If, according to my theory, the scar is not a horcrux, it's something approaching that kind of significance. Why does it hurt when V is angry? What does his anger have to do with a healed wound on Harry's forehead? I did a search in Yahoo! to find some helpful scar theories to link to, and guess what the #1 search result was. This blog! I'm just asking questions; I have no answers.

So…I'm afraid I won't be able to expound on the nature of Harry's scar beyond the usual, "It connects him to Voldemort."

The how and why will have to be answered by smarter theorists that moi or by Ms. Rowling herself.

(Warner Brothers image)