The Magic Is Back
Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince opened here in the U. S. yesterday after an eight-month delay when Warners wanted to save a "blockbuster" for summer release. A blockbuster it is and I was not disappointed by this latest installment of the Harry Potter saga. The previous two films, Goblet of Fire and Order of the Phoenix played fast and loose with the books and missed a number of opportunities to create some real feeling. Especially missed was the book's scene (Phoenix) at St. Mungo's Hospital when Harry, Ron, Hermione and Ginny encounter Neville Longbottom visiting his parents, tortured into madness by Belatrix Lestrange, a Death Eater who makes Voldemort seem a pleasant person. Of course time constraints force a lot of a book's content to be scrapped, but the writers seemed to make some poor choices in films four and five. Phoenix (again) fails to explain why the Dementors attacked Harry in the opening scenes. One line could have done it. That's a