pottering about (note to self: no more puns on subjects' names)

My reaction to the Harry Potter movie accords pretty well with glenn mcdonald's. The opening was worrisome - even though real-life mega-events are equally tacky, that's no reason to subject us to gigantic magical exploding faux-Irishmen in the movies. The movie was dead-on in its exploration of adolescence...which made it all the more irritating when it asked us to utterly overlook the moral culpability of Hogwarts in subjecting not only willing participants, but also non-consenting friends and relations, to risks apparently foreseen in their severity if not specificity. And I might have been able to put that at the back of my mind...had the movie not rubbed my nose in it, by asking me to bleed in sympathy with Cedric Diggory's father: as if Fleur Delacour's family wouldn't have been every bit as distraught had her sister died, and as if the school wouldn't have been every bit as culpable for that death as the League of Pointy-Hatted Men was for Diggory's. This, of course, is Rowling's fault, not the filmmakers' - but it somehow had more impact on the screen for me than it did on the page, and failing to make anything of the issue was their decision as well.