Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince: Two Views.

The Nurse:

Warning: this is your Nerd alert. If you can’t handle this level of nerdiness I recommend you skip ahead.

After months of anticipation and watching the days count down to zero on my Google homepage…….. At long last, July 15th and the theatrical

Mom and I at the Bookstar midnight book sale for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

release for Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince! (Wild cheers!) I am a big  fan of the Potter-verse, so I was super excited to see this movie. The usual preparation for viewing a Harry Potter movie on opening day/night back home is as follows:

• Buy tickets for the movie at least 48 hours in advance, if not earlier.
• Make sure you have the 3-5 hours before showtime set aside for waiting in line for the movie with all the other uber-fans.
• Pack a snack for waiting in line…preferably one involving HP candy.
• Dust off your Harry Potter costume complete with wand, tie and robe. (Never mind the 115 degree heat, being in character is more important! Besides, how will everyone know what house you are in if you are not wearing your uniform?)
• Bring your camera. There are always lots of photo ops on opening night.

I wasn’t sure if I would still be in Bournemouth for the opening so I did not buy HP tickets way in advance. I ended up buying them online the day before for the 8 pm showing, and I thanked my lucky stars that the show wasn’t sold out yet. Dave gets off work at 4:00PM, so I figured that would be just about perfect. Four hours should be enough time to walk into town, print out my ticket confirmation, grab some food and get a good place in line at the theater….but just barely. Unfortunately I didn’t plan ahead for the movie when I packed for this trip, so no costume this year.  It felt a little strange.  I considered drawing the lightening bolt scar on my forehead in eye pencil but decided that would just look silly. I ended up having to settle for my muggle clothes.

We ended up leaving the house at 5:00, which was later then I liked. My 4 hour buffer was suddenly a 3 hour buffer.  I just hoped that the line wasn’t outside the theater yet.  We finally arrived at the theater at 5:45, and I didn’t see a line outside so I felt a little better. I ran up to the box office, grabbed the tickets and made a B-line for the theater. When we stopped to have our tickets checked the guy looked at us really funny.

• Ticket Dude: Can I see your tickets please?
• The Nurse: Sure.
• Ticket Dude: You realize this showing of Harry Potter starts at 8:00 right?
• The Nurse: Yeah it’s okay. We wanted to get here early so we would have a good place in line.
• Ticket Dude: Okay…..I guess you could wait inside then.
• The Nurse: Thanks!

At this point I was terribly confused. There was NO ONE there. NO line.  Nothing.  You could have heard a pin drop. We were t-minus 2 hours until the movie and it was just Dave and I waiting in an empty hallway. It was like an alternate reality. Dave suggested that since no one was there we should go wait outside where it was cooler, but I still felt like someone was playing a trick on me, so told Dave that he could wait outside but I insisted that I wait at the head of my imaginary line. People didn’t show up until 7:05 and when they did I noticed something else that I found strange. NO ONE was in costume! How is it, that every weekend since we arrived, we have seen people running around Bournemouth in costumes, but not a single person dresses up for this?? England is strange I tell you. I figured that Harry would get a better reception then this, especially in England! I had one final objective, for the evening, get into the theater as quickly as possible so I could get the perfect seats. They finally let people into the theater at 7:45. Dave tells me there was a guy tearing tickets at the entrance. Apparently he gave me a really strange look when I blew passed him at the speed of light….but I didn’t notice, I had my eye on the prize.

So how was the movie? Awesome!! It lacked a lot of the Tom Riddle character development from the book and felt a little splotchy in places, but I guess you just can’t fit that much story into 2.5 hours. It was still great.

The Nerd:

So, here is my Harry Potter background. I read the first two books. I had my complaints about them. Didn’t find enough interest to keep reading though. I watched the first two movies several times as well. Living with Courtney I couldn’t really escape them completely. The 3rd and 4th movies I think I saw once each plus or minus some scenes here and there. The 5th movie I hadn’t seen at all. On Wednesday I had Courtney update me as to what was in each of the movies.

Starting a bit before I got off work Courtney started watching the 5th movie, which I hadn’t seen, but soon enough it was 5 and we hadn’t finished the movie and it was past time when Courtney said we needed to go. So we left in quite a hurry. Courtney would not stop to hug me. She practically pulled me down the road. She made us split up so she could go print out the tickets and I could get a place in line and then I would leave line to go get dinner when she got there. I cheated and stopped at “The Chippy” on the way to get some fish and chips. We then met up at the nearly deserted theater.

Courtney was worried that we would be too late (too late for what I do not know, we had already purchased tickets.) When we went in to the theater the guy looked at our tickets and told us that the ticket was for 8. “Yes” Courtney replied, not phased. He told us that we could go wait inside. There was not a single person. Not one. The lunacy doesn’t end there. We did not have drinks yet, but Courtney would not leave for fear of losing her place in “line.”  I convinced her that we should leave get drinks and candy. When we came back a second ticket checker looked at us like we were crazy and wasn’t going to let us in. Courtney told him that the other guy had let us wait inside, so he did too. No one showed up for like a full hour. It was only about 45 minutes till that people really started showing up, and even then, not a single one in costume. We watched the people from the previous show leave as well. Not a single costume amongst them either. Not even a Griffendorek tie.

The movie itself? Eh. I am sure there were things that I was missing, but the movie was easy enough to follow. It felt like it was waiting for a director’s cut 10 DVD set. There were scenes that seemed rather abrupt and almost non-sequitorish. I imagine that I was the only one there though who had not read the books 10 times or seen all of the movies all the way through. I was entertained enough though. Now how’s that for a review?