Bums authenticate. On seats that is. This 7th (of 8) film in the Potter franchise replicates at the box office the Potter phenomenon in the book business. Bums, large and small, male and female, child and adult are excitedly plonking onto the nations cinema seats and then perching anxiously on their edges as this latest, darkest of the Potter saga unwinds.

I must confess I dont really get it, book or film. Its not that HPATDH (DH) is a bad film, it is good fun, full of incident and if the convoluted plot is arcane and impenetrable to a mere muggle such as me, most of the kids and some of the grown ups can answer every esoteric, bemused question one asks with a confident authority that would leave University Challengers looking like ignorant dullards.

Any story that can motivate millions of children to avidly gobble up the books and then watch the films with such passion must have something really special. I wish for the life of me I could see what it is. Though as one who failed The Hobbit without ever graduating to the Lord Of The Rings, perhaps I have a blind spot for magical, fantasy, fairy tales. I never found Tolkien remotely Hobbit forming.

For me there is something irreducibly Enid Blytonish about our famous Three - Chums Harry, Hermione and Ron: and measured against the genuine talent in support, the acting of Radcliffe Watson and Grint is never more than adequate, displaying an innocent amateurish charm rather than conviction or technique. Mercifully, our chums having now reached puberty, we are spared in DH the Public school "I say you chaps" house system structures of Hogworts school of magic. However having lost this wonderfully gothic setting for the now trepid teenage trios adventures, DH loses any clear sense of place and setting for the events that unfold. Here with slightly irritating convenience our heroes escape most dangers literally with a wave their magic wand. This device lies at the heart of Rowlings vision and as the meticulous detail with which she builds up the credibility of the wands and spells and potions in the books is completely missing from the films, this can all seem a bit of a dramatic fiddle.

DH is very plotty, for blind devotees and cognoscenti alike. Apparently the Ministry of Magic is turning a dark, desolate world into a quasi Nazi state where the magically challenged muggles are herded up threateningly and evocatively in droves. Visually recalling the grey conrete aesthetic of a cold war Eastern Euoprean state, muggles and dissenting wizards are subjected to Kafkaesque arbitrary tests of legality and ethnicity.

Meanwhile in the shadows the evil Lord Voldemort is seeking the absolute power of the ultimate elder wand with which as far as I can gather he wants to destroy the world rather than just run it.

Harry and Co apparently have to track down and destroy 3 evil and indestructible artifacts, Horcruxes, the first of which is a kitschy glass pendant that even Gerald Ratner wouldnt give shelf space to. They are aided in their quest by hints left behind by Harrys now dead spiritual mentor, Professor Dumbledore. With some pretty nifty gismos bequeathed by the Prof, Hermiones spellbinding powers and Rons doggedly determined perseverance there is much running about, last minute escapes and impassive staring into space before the plot is dripped out to us drop by painstaking drop.

The downside of making Hermione so bright and brilliant at spelling is that this does tend to make not so happy Harry seem a bit thick; though his IQ stock zooms back up as soon as Ron returns from his huff at thinking H&H are having a thing. As dear reader this is the liaison I have been awaiting with bated breath until the two protagonists became old enough for the connection to become seemly, I must confess it was in the end disappointing: more shuffle-footed embarrassment than burning teenage passion. More Tracy and Wayne than Romeo and Juliet. In terms of the disturbing challenges of burgeoning womanhood it is hard not to empathise with poor Hermiones desperate dilemma: hapless Harry or Rustic Ron.

Rhys Ifans pops up from nowhere to regale us with more plot, notably a fairytale parable of three brothers, 2 of whom first cheat then succumb to Death leaving the third wise brother as guardian of the uber wand made mysteriously, to me, of elder. From what I can recall of my childhood, the elder tree grows very fast aided by pith running through the centre of its wood thus making it very weak and easily broken. Quite unlike the super wand here which looks like a cross between ebony and hickory. Sorry about this tedious detail but J. K. Rowling is nothing if not detailed. Forensically.

So after one off screen and one on screen poignant passing, the scene is set for the eagerly awaited denouement in May 2011 when I assume Voldemort will get his just desserts and Harry, Hermione and Ron will toddle off into the sunset towards marriages, mortgages and motherhood. Or maybe after a few years theyll get the band back together and track down the Wizard of Oz.

A potboiler must for Pottertons. A pleasant enough meander for muddled muggles like me.

Mark my words though: it will all hang on Hermione in the end.

Another great review, Zettel, and no doubt more entertaining than the movie, which I don't plan to see. Like you, I just don't get HP; well, I just don't think there's very much to get. Unlike you, I did enjoy The Hobbit and LOTR (minus some of the Tom Bombadilish balderdash). But the big difference between Tolkein and Rowling is the former spent years establishing backstory, mythology and most importantly character before telling his actual tales. Whereas JKR appears to have always written direct on to a long series of fag packets, sorry, brie wrappers, adding tons of details after instead of before the event, in an attempt to fill in the yawning plot, character and back-story holes created earlier. What's truly staggering is that despite the vast sums spent on the movies, all they serve to do is show up the chronic shallowness of just about all the characters.

Thanks Terry

The Potter phenomenon is a bit like the Dan Brown thing. It obviously isn't about depth or in Rowling's case compared to Tolkien as you say, thorough research. But I am intrigued by the universality of the appeal: across age groups, gender, etc etc.

I guess I want to say that while it ain't deep or serious....it's not rubbish. For me it sort of fits into the bag of good trash. And I'm a great lover of good trash movies. Hokum I think they used to call it.

All my loved ones, young and old, love to Potter so there's SOMETHING there that I wish I could get.

Maybe it's innocence. There are only black and white villains in the HP world: whereas in life most people are morally grey with life offering them moments of opportunity for black acts or white acts which - they rise, or fall, to. So HP's emotional world is more like a placid lake with only occasional disturbance: unlike the sea which is beautiful and terrifying, where storms and violence are inherent to what the sea IS. Thus we get no remorse, regret in HP; indeed not even much guilt. Without the moral contrast, threat, uncertainty of real life, the HP world is ultimately, irreducibly SAFE. But the downside, as in real life, is that HP's world therefore lacks depth of emmotion, the power of passion - Tracy and Wayne.

regards

z

Sorry about the capitals - but the system is iffy with italics it seems.

z

Z, I think you've hit the wand on the head. HP is reassuringly shallow, emotionally. The author's POV is always a safe couple of yards away from any character at any given time. So the reader is never really threatened with anything too close to the emotional bone. There's a lot of stuff like it out there, I guess because a lot of people want to experience stories at a safe distance. Not that I believe 'gritty' fiction necessarily gets in any closer: it just chooses a different kind of emotional world to stand off from. EastEnders is just like HP in this respect: nothing is too real, e.g. no characters have unpredictable sides; villains don't have occasional moments of kindness, heroes don't do occasional horrible things. Or, if they do, it's always at a distance, with the author making sure readers/viewers are well prepared for it. Having said all that, I also think there is an audience that wants entertainment with emotional depth; it's just that publishers/producers don't often trust its existence enough. I'm thinking of Buffy, for example, which had plenty of fun and action, yet often provided heartbreakingly painful punches for its main characters and therefore its viewers, too. And the Hunger Games, despite its sloppy conclusions, showed that commercial YA fiction can tackle morally ambiguous issues. So, maybe JKR doesn't trust her audience enough, or herself enough, or it's probably a redundant point for her now anway, considering how many bums on seats prove she's right.

Terry

Hey Terry

The only time I get annoyed with the J K Rowling thing is when she or others claim the HP world is exemplary or desirable - thus claiming to a realism, a reality her stuff manifestly does not possess.

A bit like Dan Brown claiming The Da Vinci code is either serious literature or worse, truthful and accurate about religion.

Otherwise I'm content for them both to laugh all the way to the bank. £5.99 on the Da Vinci gave me 2/3 hours light-hearted entertainment at a price less than 2 pints of beer.

And so for Harry P.

z

I would add a comment which I think is worth making about this film: you have to have seen the ones that came before it to make sense of it. I'd only seen the first one, years ago on TV, so found myself having to struggle to make sense of the plot, helped only partly by having read (only) the Half-Blood Prince. So I could make sense of Dumbledore having died, but most of the rest of the plot was nonsensical. The characters, too, were obviously known to the 'in-crowd', but not revealed in any significant way to outsiders.

Not for the director of this film, the idea that it should stand on its own merits. (But I have to say, that was my impression of the Half-Blood Prince book, too - it required you to have read the ones before it, to make sense of much of it.)

Personally, I think I know why these books/films have been such a huge hit: they are dumbed-down, in an age where this is the main requirement for being popular.

Alex

A while back I read some readers' reviews of the final HP book, on Amazon.Com. Some of the one star reviews were extremely well-thought out and highly analytical. The responses to these reviews were largely the same - all from HP fans. There appeared to be two main areas that had disappointed them: JKR not appearing to understand her own plots (as well as some of the fans did) and her inability to provide satisfying (in story terms) endings for her characters, i.e. either just killing them off or giving them a sickly HEA. They also complained that the last couple of books were full of catch-up by JKR, filling in plot holes, having to explain stuff that should have been explained much earlier.

I think a lot of the confusion, as such, with HP may be caused by the fact the books were always essentially commercial stories. And there's nothing wrong with that, of course. The problem is a) JKR seems to believe she's not a commercial writer, and that the books were actually meticulously planned by her long in advance, b) no one really likes to label a children's book as commercial, and c) (possibly a British thing) many children's writers don't like to admit they're writing commercial stories.

Then of course there's the hype. So, by the time you have umpteen millions pouring over these books, including many who are following every plot turn and character development with a fine tooth comb, it's probably too late for JKR to come clean, even if she wanted to.

But as writers, I think it's important to see what a book is and what it isn't. Like I said, commercial fiction is fine, lots of great, and if you read the first HP book, that's clearly what it is. A jolly tale, full of old ideas, not meant to be anything more than an undemanding read. Then, it's very clear from a writing point of view, that she got in too deep with the notion these were 'serious' books (I don't mean as in miserable, more as in proper children's literature) so they start increasing in length - considerably. Which is the sure sign of someone back-filling on a shallow beginning.

I know quite a few British children's writers who now write what is essentially commercial fiction. Once more, nothing wrong with that at all. But what's wrong, as such, is they don't really admit that's what they're doing. A few even teach writing, but they don't teach commercial writing. Why not? Well, without swinging this in the direction of the 'Katie and Will' thread, I suspect middle-class educated aspirations may have something to do with it.

Terry