Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (2009)

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (2009)
David Yates

When it comes to a movie like Harry Potter, everyone has very different opinions and strong feelings to support their opinions. The following review is my opinion of the movie, and I will attempt to explain why as objectively as possible. The Half-Blood Prince is arguably one of the weaker movies of the series thus-far; it is not a bad movie, but unfortunately, it could not live up to the standards of the Order of the Phoenix, which was easily the best of the series. While there were some redeeming factors of the movie, including the improved acting and some very good comedic moments, there were two major reasons why the movie failed. First, the pace of the movie made it very difficult to watch. The action sequences were randomly placed throughout the movie, many of them not even appropriate to their place in the story. Secondly, and most importantly is that the entire essence of the book was lost. Here I must note that I do not think movies should follow the book chapter by chapter; in fact the reason that I love the Order of the Phoenix so much is that they filmed it as its own movie and not a film-version of the book like every other HP movie thus far. The reason HP5 worked so well is that the scenes from the book they chose to include were important in capturing the foundation of the story. In HP6 however, the scenes they chose to include were not important to the story and left out scenes that are essential to advancing the story. In addition to this, they added new scenes that weren't even in the book that served no purpose rather than including important details. The prime example of this was the entire storyline of Snape being the half-blood prince and the several memories that Harry witnesses. These parts of the story are not minor details, they are essential plot points and are in fact the entire purpose of the book. If anything should have been left out, it should have been some of the romance scenes, which could have been explained in a scene or two, not half the running time of the film. Although I feel that the movie was heavily damaged by its failure to tell the story, the visual effects were very good and the added humor helped to make the movie more appropriate for children. In the end, it is worth seeing, and perhaps could be very entertaining for someone who has not read the books, but do not expect to see a Harry Potter masterpiece this summer.

Acting: B+
Visual: A
Audio: B
Story: D
Other: D

Parney Points: 2.5

To see the imdb listing for this film click here.

Three Kings (1999)

Three Kings (1999)
David O. Russell

This film was better than I was expecting. From the previews it seemed like another George Clooney political statement, but it was actually a decent movie. What really stood out to me about the movie was the graphic detail of some scenes. Not graphic as in gore, but the scientific detail that you would see in CSI. I first ignored this because this type of filming is common place now in shows like CSI and NCIS, however when I realized that Three Kings was created before any of these newer shows debuted, I was impressed. Another thing I found interesting about the movie was that it was based on the first gulf war, obviously with no idea we were going to go back again in just a few years. I would not reccommend going out of your way to rent this movie from blockbuster, but you can catch it on TV every month or so, or just add it to your Netflix queue and watch it when it comes in.

Acting: B
Visual: A
Audio: B
Story: C
Other: B

Parney Points: 4

To see the imdb listing for this film click here.