I will put the book aside, be it Order of the Phoenix or Hollows... there is hype enough about it and I shall not make speculations on a piece I haven't read yet. I know better than to tarnish a great series with my own conclusions. Nope. I'm not a Potter head, but I do recognize excellence when I see it, and I will take a second or two to explain why JK Rowling is the reigning queen of fantasy... eventually.
So far, this is a Review of Order of the Phoenix. No Spoilers meaning that I Loved it.
I met Harry Potter in the Queens Borough Public Library as I worked as Library Assistant for the Children and Young Adult section. I read Sorcerer's Stone in one sitting, as it was required of me to know what kids were reading so I could answer trivial questions and amaze them with my coolness.
I read a lot of books, some, I must confess, far more elaborate than the one written by this JK Rowling person. None were as engaging, though. Harry Potter made it to my must read list, and I would happily recommended to every child that crossed my way ages 10-13. By the end of Winter we had about 30 copies... errr some 25 more than what we originally ordered, all in HOT CIRCULATION. Thus the big Snowball that Harry Potter is started rolling and it goes on strong with a movie release and the culmination of the written series coming at us this summer, almost ten years after I read a story about a boy who survived a curse, o algo...
I'll get to the movie in a second, but before I'll tell you why JK Rowling is the Queen of it all right now... just like Real State, much of a series success depends of LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION. By placing her characters in a school environment, Ms. Rowling had the guts to create characters that grow along with her intended audience, and that is a smart move when you write about coming of age...
YEEEESSSSS! I am sorry to disappoint the Christian right and the Liberal Left. Harry Potter is neither about the occult, nor about the growing discontent of the British People with Cornelius Fudge, their Prime... err their Minister of Magic. It is a simple and beautifully laid out story about growing up, year after year, from the threshold of Puberty to Adulthood. Sometimes is brilliant, others funny, awkward, maybe, others sad. Sometimes, like the movie adaptation of Order of the Phoenix will show, it's about 15 year olds trying to claim a place for themselves.
Compared to the other movies. Phoenix is shorter, which only add more weight into the level of darkness it throws at the audience. There is no comic relief, almost no magical wonderful structures to delight your eyes on (You will not see the display of wonder that was the road to Hogwart's or the Arrival of the Magical Academies in the last Installment).
In Harry's world, the mood is set by Potter. The boy is no longer a boy. For those who read the books and sort of read between the lines in the movies, it is easy to see that Harry didn't have much of a childhood. It was in fact miserable. Yet none can deny that Harry is innocent, or was. In the sometimes wonderful, sometimes painful ,always unavoidable road to adulthood there is the most revealing and painful chapter of it all... the Death of Innocence. This movie delivers it.
For the idiots who took their 5 and 6 year olds to a PG-13 movie, it was a bucket of Ice water to see that Harry out grew what they thought was the intended audience. Unlike the intelligent lay out of the written series, meant to grow along with the readers, the visual medium will take anyone who would buy a ticket. Don't blame harry if your 7 year old could not connect with him this time around. Potter is showing the first flares if teen angst and Daniel Radcliffe, whom like his literary counter part has grown before our eyes in this role, channels it to perfection.
To my judgement, this is the simplest of the movies in style, yet the most complicated, because it aims to destroy, and very fittingly, it will open the doors to reconstruct what is left and keep going...
MINOR SPOILER AHEAD: Click and drag if you want to find out.
- One of the praises that I must sing to the visual medium is this: Observe how after the confrontation with Voldemort, after the heat spell breaks all the glass windows, the glass is reduced to sand, and Harry falls on top pf it. The sand however is so fine it might as well look like ashes, from which Potter rises at the end, giving the whole Phoenix concept more meaning than what we initially are lead to believe. It thought the scene concept was just brilliant...
I've written too much already, I'll leave you with the QUOTE:
"LOOK... AT... ME!!!!!"- an annoyed and frustrated Harry as all of the adults around him rather treat him as if he is not there.
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