I spent Thursday at the movies - I took the kids to Winnie the Pooh in the afternoon, and we adults went to Harry Potter that evening. What can I say? The high was 101, and while we had Harry Potter planned for a while, taking the kids to a movie sounded like a great way to spend the afternoon, given that ticket prices go up significantly on Fridays and we really needed to go to Ikea wednesday (incidentally, I discovered last summer that if you live close enough to one, Ikea is a great way to spend an afternoon - cheap lunch, and hour of free child care for K to have fun in the ball pit while Alec and I hang out in the children's department where they obligingly have samples of all of their toys set out to play with, not to mention lots of drawers and cabinet doors to open).
Winnie the Pooh (no cut for spoilers because really, it's Winnie the Pooh) was very sweet and a surprising throwback to the original 70s Many Adventure of Winnie the Pooh, the one where they simply animated stories from the books, with the cute addition of including the book and interaction with the animator in the story. You know, the good ones before they started simply beating A.A. Milne's corpse repeatedly to see how much more money might fall out of his pockets. Today's movie had the same animation style of the Shephard backgrounds with the more Disneyfied style of characters, plotlines taken from the books (although they went off in different directions from the books, but not in a way that seemed out of character for the books), and even 70s Disney style music and a cute animated short that made me think I was sitting on a square of carpet in my elementary school gym on one of the days they decided to troop us in to show us cartoons for a treat. It got two thumbs and two feet (she was literally leaping with excitement as I bought the tickets) from K, and I certainly recommend it with children in the 2 to 6 age range who need to get out of the heat.
Harry Potter was simply fantastic. It made me cry in several spots and always seemed true to the spirit of the book.
Inserting spoiler space because there are most definitely spoilers and while Blogger is able to put a cut in, it's hella complicated:
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Watching Lily Potter desperately tell her son how much she loves him as she waits to die - oof. This isn't the first time that being a parent has made these books and movies hit me harder (end of Goblet of Fire, for instance) but this one was the strongest for that. It's one of those things about having children - the idea of dying starts to not bother you so much about not being able to live anymore as the idea of leaving your children behind helpless without you.
There were changes in the final battle, but I felt they were all appropriate to make the action more cinematic. And don't shoot me, but I think it actually improved on the books in one place - one of my big problems with the book was how Snape gave his memories to Harry without any clue about why they're important, and then Harry just decides to go browse through them in the middle of the battle because he's so darn depressed. The movie's decision to have Snape say more (and thank you, Voldemort, for deciding to kill Snape in a way that would let him linger instead of your customary method of execution that kills people instantly - supervillain syndrome strikes again, I suppose), and to have Harry look at them in the lull between battles made a lot more sense.
So all in all, a good end to the series and definitely worth the babysitting money.
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