Harry Potter

My double check on Harry Potter, after a pleasantly surprising first go 2.5 years ago, did not disappoint. Rowling is fantastic, in style, plot, character, and world. Rarely can one master all elements; for example, Tolkien's unnatural dialogue and idealized characters convey Middle Earth as remote and academic. Meanwhile Rowling captures the anxious pulse of childhood while hardly lacking Tolkien's intellectual appeal. Harry Potter engages the heart and the brain with almost artificially intelligent finesse. But there's nothing engineered about it: this is the debut novel of one woman. Like Tolkien, she generates drama that excites young people and, after perhaps seeming silly to adults, reveals layers of maturity. Both authors have triggered and subsequently humiliated my incredulity at events that appeared overly convenient but turned out deterministic. The order by which the writers rescue their characters and justify said rescue would be curious to me, though hardly relevant for the final product if executed. In other words, I'm liable to call out deus when it's just machina.

Beyond Rowling, I think these are good adaptations. I suspect they'll be definitive, and synonymous with the books, for a long time, like Jackson's Lord of the Rings. What a time to be alive, 2001. Unfortunately I missed both boats. I was busy sorting and re-sorting football cards.

Of course the first few movies are painful for adults without nostalgia -- but they also ramped up, in spurts of excitement, quicker than I remembered. Some cheesy crap persists for half the series, but in another light darkness descends already by the Chamber of Secrets. Gradually it takes over until the only light left is painfully dark-aware. It starts earlier than I remembered, necessary shades from the flat light of youth in the first five or so movies.