Deathly

[muckefuck]

At the end of Deathly Hallows Pt 2 I yelled, "YAY IT'S OVER AND I NEVER HAVE TO WATCH IT AGAIN!" What an awful franchise. I can easily see how I would've loved it had I grown up with it (in exactly the same way that I devoured Star Wars as if I'd been GMOed to have specific receptors for it) but I'm too old and jaded and the flaws are jaw-droppingly obvious. (Like, you know, everything Ron Weasley says.) It did occur to me that it's unfair to judge a work solely from its adaptations, and that perhaps this was a much better read than a movie. Then I happened to recall that this review existed. It concludes with the damning paragraph:

Overall: C-. Better than Half-Blood Prince, but then again a phone book is a better read than Half-Blood Prince. Has some gloriously inspired moments, it really does, but Harry Potter remains one of the shittiest, most pathetic fantasy heroes of all time, and that just keeps dragging it down. The movie will probably be good, thanks to the continuing lack of dreary internal Potter monologue.

On the plus side, the rest of the commentary was much more hilarious than the first time now that I've seen the incidents referred to, almost to the point of making it worth it to spend five hours of my life watching two compilations of CGI showreels intercut with tourist ads for the United Kingdom and adolescent snogging. Key word "almost".

All in all, I'd've been much better served finishing Nakagami, who's an exceptional writer. I wish I'd picked him up sooner, but I let myself be frightened off with warnings about how challenging his work is. So far he's not nearly on the level of some modernist writers I've attempted (yes, I'm looking at you, Uwe Johnson), but it does take more concentration than I'm used to. Actually, it's churlish to blame Rowling when I could easily have finished the volume this weekend if I hadn't been so obsessively studying Japanese and Korean. (Particularly when I spent over an hour checking and rechecking my notes because I was ABSOLUTELY CERTAIN there was something there describing archaic usages of 갓 only to discover eventually that I was thinking of the dictionary entry in Martin.) I get such pleasure from these benders in the moment, but they leave me so drained and hungover, and I'm just not a hyperactive twentysomething any more.

Comments

[princeofcairo.livejournal.com]

I gave up on the Harry Potter franchise somewhere around Book 4/Movie 4 because I just couldn't summon up a single jot of give-a-rip. (The fact that I can't actually remember how many of them I've read should be a clue to the depths of my disinterest.)

There are, as you point out, so very many vastly better and more enjoyable things I haven't read yet. I have just started reading Somerset Maugham, for example, and I may make him my next grownup fiction.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Thank the stars I've never wasted any of my time on the books. But the Old Man's been catching the films on cable and expressed an interest in seeing how it all ends, so I humoured him.

I finally got around to reading Razor's edge a couple years back and I'm glad of it.