Boring summer mostly, saw OOTP, Deathly Hallows comes out in a little over a week, and stuff like that

I don't feel like writing a long entry, so I'll keep this short.

~~ Boredom: My summer for the most part has been very boring. I am working pretty much all the time. Well, that's full-time work for you. I suppose it's sorta good, cause if I didn't have a job or was only working part-time, I don't know what I'd do with myself. Free time is nice, but too much of it, like any good thing, gets tiresome after awhile. On my days off, I tend to go somewhere, either by walking or on the bus, just to get out of the house. For the most part, making videos and watching the anime torrents I've been downloading (like the OVA for the video game Tales of Eternia) are the only things that have kept me sane...oh and the fact that new seasons of two of my favorite shows -- Code Lyoko and Pokémon -- are airing this summer.

~~ ORDER OF THE PHOENIX: Yes siree, the 5th Harry Potter movie, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, is out -- came out yesterday -- and today, as I had the day off (the first of three days off in a row...yay), I saw it. Now, as a rule, I tend not to see movies right after they come out cause of the crowded theaters, but I had been waiting for this movie for some time, so I decided not to wait. I had hoped to get one of those House Crest t-shirts from Hot Topic with the Ravenclaw crest, but as expected, they didn't have it. I bought a Ravenclaw crest keychain though, along with a pack of Order of the Phoenix trading cards (which had three cards with Luna Lovegood on it...yay...two by herself and one called "Ravenclaw DA Members" with her and Cho) and a postcard with the main members of Dumbledore's Army (Harry, Ron, Hermione, Neville, Ginny, and Luna -- on it. (Did you know Cho is actually supposed to be older than Harry? I didn't realize this until recently, when I bought Prisoner of Azkaban from my work, where they are selling paperbacks of the Harry Potter books, and re-read it -- in that book, when Cho is first mentioned, she is said to be a 4th-year, and Harry is a 3rd-year in that book. The trading cards confirm this too...the "Ravenclaw DA Members" one calls Cho a 6th-year, which is correct for Order of the Phoenix cause Harry and friends are 5th-year in that book, except for Ginny and Luna who are 4th-years). The reason I wanted the shirt was I was going to wear it to the movie. Oh well. Maybe this means I could make my own and not get into copyright trouble. (I'm planning, as soon as I can find a thrift store where I can buy some cheap plain T-shirts, to buy a bunch of shirts and some iron-on paper and make my own shirts, not only to save money on buying shirts but also to have cool, one-of-a-kind shirts). I did wear the little Hogwarts crest pin that I got free from Barnes & Noble when I bought a OOTP bookmark. It was dark in the theater though so I don't think anybody noticed me wearing it.

Anyway, the movie was awesome. My coworker Laura (coworker in that she works in the store I work in -- she's a CSR, a sort of special type of checker), who has read the books and went to see a midnight showing of the movie with her sister Heather (who works in my department) and some other people, said the movie was the "Cliff Cliff Notes Version" of the book. But I had expected this, once I found out the movie was only going to be a little over 2 hours long, seeing as the book is 870 pages long (the longest of the Harry Potter books).

Now, granted, they did cut out some stuff. But they kept the core of the story, with a few changes, like having Neville find the Room of Requirement for the D.A. to use, in lieu of Harry finding out about the room from Dobby, who due to the cost of having him on screen, has not appeared in the movies since movie 2. I sort of figured they might do that, since they did this with the scene in Goblet of Fire where Harry finds out about gillyweed as an option for him to use to breathe underwater for the 2nd Triwizard task -- in the book, he finds out this from Dobby, and in the movie he finds out from Neville. It actually worked there because Neville is really into plants, and plus there's a line from the fake Moody in the book about planting the book with the information on gillyweed in it on Neville in hopes Harry would be able to find out about it.

The cuts seemed to be more for time than plot (though they took out the whole "Weasley is Our King" subplot, which involved Ron doing badly as Gryffindor's new Keeper and Harry and the Weasley twins getting banned from Quidditch for life by Umbridge, which would've made a nice "cruel Umbridge" moment...but it was minor enough to get cut, I think). They condensed the many chapters spent on Umbridge's various changes at the school and her inspections of teachers into a montage of scenes, punctuated by the proclaiming of various decrees (even more than in the book -- including ones like "Boys and girls shall not be within 8 inches of each other," which I thought was kinda funny). The progression of the D.A. meetings was also made into a sort of montage, which worked out well. They changed the plot though slightly by having Umbridge actually have some inkling of the fact that the D.A. exists (since she overhears Harry and friends as they walk in the building talking about where to meet), and so the D.A. montage is punctuated with shots of Filch waiting outside the door to catch them, which includes a funny scene of him opening a box of what appear to be Valentine's chocolates, with Fred & George snickering behind him, which then switches to Filch reporting to Umbridge with a bunch of boils on his face from one of Fred and George's joke things.

And...glorious day...they actually included at least some of the Skiving Snackboxes plot, which I was hoping they would, but the fact they kept it in is really interesting cause they didn't have the scene of Harry giving them his Triwizard money at the end of Goblet of Fire in the movie of that book, so how would they explain how the twins got the money to make this stuff?

Okay I better stop blabbering now...I was going to keep it short. Basically, awesome movie. Luna was AWESOMELY TERRIFIC, as I assumed she would be the first time I heard Evanna Lynch's voice on a PotterCast phone interview. Umbridge was her perfect evil self, and Bellatrix was pretty good too, though she hardly had any lines. Oh and the fight between Voldemort and Dumbledore was pretty good, but a bit short. And, as the podcasters were saying, Dumbledore and Voldemort seemed to be having a little "Priori Incantatem" moment for a while, where the jets of light from their wands connected. I don't understand that.

There were some good lines in the movie. They gave Bellatrix's line about having to mean Unforgivable Curses to Voldemort instead, which actually worked a lot better. And I loved the part where Umbridge is being carried off by the centaurs and she yells, "Tell them I mean no harm!" and Harry says, "Sorry, Professor. I must not tell lies" ("I must not tell lies" was the line Umbridge was making him write in detention).

~~ Deathly Hallows: The 7th book of Harry Potter comes out in a little over a week, 8 days by the new MuggleNet countdown I put on here (to replace the one that also had a movie countdown on it), although technically here it's 9 days (the MuggleNet server must be somewhere where it's already tomorrow). It's sooo exciting. By next weekend I could be holding that precious book in my hands. As Sue of PotterCast would say, Squee!

Well that's all I feel like writing. Good night.