**spoiler Alert** Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince

** spoiler alert** If you don't want to know about the movie, book or book #7 don't read below

July 18th

I love all things Harry Potter. I have devoured the novels hot off the presses. I have also enjoyed the movies very much- until now.

I read a lot of books and see a lot of movies so I am very used to things being left out or altered when a book becomes a movie. I realize the Harry Potter novels are very long and there is no way to get all the details of the book in the movie but to cut out as much as they did for this last movie is very upsetting. The fact that they not only cut out whole chunks of the book but actually added in new scenes is ridiculous. I personally was really looking forward to seeing the parts of the book that deal with Tom Riddle aka Voldermort as a young boy as well as his parents and all the details of his conception and birth. To me this information gives such insight into Tom and why he became the dark wizard that he is. If you never learn about his upbringing, his rejection as a child, then how can you understand how powerful Harry's mother's love is and why it saves Harry? If you want to cut out characters that may seem peripheral to the story then fine, don't put in the wedding story of Bill and Fluer, don't show the house elves or the ghosts ( although they do certainly play a part in the book) but you can't cut out huge fight scenes or all the details of the work the Order is doing with the giants and the werewolves. I think that the movie did a disservice to the ending of the novel. The fight that goes on in the school when Dumbledore is killed is important- it shows the students that they are now involved in a war, they are no longer safe at Hogwarts. We need to believe at the end of the movie that Snape is a bad guy- this is very strongly shown in the book but in the movie you know Snape is acting on Dumbledore's behalf when he kills him- it is either not well acted or not well directed --you choose. I am not sure how it is all going to play out in the next 2 movies. I hope by making the last book into 2 movies they will be able to stay true to the story, that we will get all the details we need to complete the story because JK Rowlings did an excellent job of wrapping the saga up- she answered every question I had and made the whole story tie in together and finish off properly.

Ok enough of my rant- the good thing is that we all got together and spent an evening at the movies. The Harry Potter movie releases have always been a big deal in my family. We have all read all of the books and we get together and see the movie as a group. At the most we have have 20 people all sitting together in the theatre. This time we were down to 9 but all the important players were there, my girl's, my parents, my brother and my niece as well as Josh and Katie's friend Paige. We had fun, most of us were disappointed in the movie, it was kinda slow and short on details as mentioned above but we were happy to be spending time together.