Skip to main content

Muggles...

...is what I tweeted last night after having the privilege of attending a private screening of the movie hours before the midnight premiere. As much as the digital revolution has fragmented the shared experiences that we have, it has also greatly expanded the impact of those events that touch various peoples.

Witness Harry Potter. In the pre-digital world, this would have been an uniquely British story about wizards and boarding schools, but it has captivated global audiences and transcended the borders of its now-uber-wealthy writer. We were part of the crowd that spanned the globe to see this movie, which I can say, lives up to the hype.

On a Thursday evening, we could watch the lines of children queuing up to get a chance to say goodbye to a childhood growing up with Harry Potter and watching the actor grow from a plump-faced little boy into a serious actor and apparent alcoholic. It did not matter for 2.5 hours in the theater, of a movie that was pretty gripping from beginning to end. And in the end, the boy with the forehead scar... lived.

What also lived were the random costumes that adorned the young who snaked around the multiplex that we exited. Witches, goblins, a golden snitch. I heard accounts of people dressed as the Hogwarts Express and random schoolchildren from various houses, as well as various magical creatures. To which I say, well done and enjoy. This is a movie worth seeing (and seeing again), celebrating the end of an era on a wonderful story that will likely live on for generations.

Comments

Middle American Guy said…
I have to admit that when the HP series was just kicking off, I was a little condescending toward it all. That was when my love affair with the Lord of the Rings books (and movies) had just been rekindled. I spent too much time believing that LoTR was more sophisticated, had deeper moral lessons, etc.

I'm glad to say that smugness is gone now, and I can see how much there is to enjoy, and learn from, in the HP world.
07:48
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Little Bit of Proust

Somehow I started to read Proust. The blame goes to Alain de Botton , a writer whose witticisms deconstruct modern thinking and make intellectualism seem but a trifle and a whim. He wrote a book in 1997 called "How Proust Can Change Your Life" which distills the enigmatic French novelist into a self-help dispenser of pithy ideas. How clever I found Mr. de Botton to be when I dipped my toe into the vagaries of Proust; I picked up volume one of "In Search of Lost Time" and instantly fell into the deep end. What author dares to run sentences onward into the stratosphere that sometimes seemingly mellows behind the stars of a bright night, but never so much as an introspective person that wretches for the meaning of a simple thought, sometimes stumbling, but always emerging strongly as that same night in starry sky, almost an homage back to Van Gogh, whose rich paintings greatly represented the mood of a generation - and generations often afford a few mis-steps in l...
2 comments
Read more

Try Something New: 750 Words

If there is anything universally redeeming about writing, it is the ability to delve into the inner thoughts of one's own psyche and come back with perspective on feelings, motivations, and desires. In this way, journaling as the specific form of writing that provides this redemption can be a worthwhile pursuit. One might suppose that the internet world would offer various tools to make journaling simple, easy, and relatively painless, but that has not always been the case - until now. I came across this from Lifehacker, who was promoting the site back in March: 750words. The site is run by a former Amazon product manager who has an interest in journaling for the creative process and data visualization. Mash those things together, and you have an interesting site that is built around the premise that creative juices get flowing by consistently writing 3 pages worth of stuff on a daily basis, which translates to roughly 750 words. Logging in by using your Google or Facebook use...
2 comments
Read more

Netscape, We Hardly Knew Ye...

In 1995, I started using email. In my first college days, my friend Virge anointed me with a playful email handle - toddity. She never told me that your email address was somewhat permanent, and I spent the rest of my university days with an username that amused most who got a message from good, old Eudora. At that time, I used Netscape as my web browser. Fast forward almost 15 years. I moved on first to Internet Explorer (Microsoft had a monopolistic hand in it), and then to Firefox from which I am penning this blog entry. Somewhere along the way, Netscape was acquired by AOL and sent down the river on a slow obsolescence. Until next week, when Netscape will end up on the scrap heap with Prodigy, Compuserve, and Excite@Home. How much the internet has changed. I can wax poetically on blogs and social networks, but I can also remember messageboards, usenets, IM, forums, web 1.0, HTML, and the world wide web when www. was a foreign concept. The concept is still the same - connec...
2 comments
Read more