Movie Review: Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

That's it! I finally finished the 5th Harry Potter book today, about 3 or 4 years after receiving it as a birthday present from my brother, my sister-in-law, and my stepniece. Why it took me so long to get around to reading it, I can't really say. It is embarrassing to admit that because the final Harry Potter book came out today, and I haven't even read the Half-Blood Prince yet. It's quite obvious that I am waaaay behind in my Harry Potter reading.

The book itself was a fantastic read, and I think it's the best and the most moving Harry Potter book so far. I cannot wait to read the next one. After finally finishing it, I rushed over to Grauman's Chinese to see it on the big screen. Unfortunetly, the parking lot was completely full, something which rarely ever happens over there. So I went to see it at The Grove where it was fortunetly not sold out, probably because everyone else is now busy reading the 7th and final book.

I am not going to go into detail about how the book differs from the movie because I feel that's just pointless. Adapting an 800 page book into a two and a half hour movie is usually asking for a lot of trouble. The big fustration with the Harry Potter movies is that they are either too faithful to the books, or they are not faithful enough. For me at this point, I am more worried about whether or not they got the tone of the book right, because there is no way they can include every single detail in the books. The first two Harry Potter movies tried to do that, and affected them quite quickly. But now the filmmakers are a lot more flexible with the material, and they managed to get the stories down to their main story, ridding it of subplots that while great in the book, would probably just slow the movie down.