Oh, oh, oh, it's magic! You know...

I got up this morning, excited because I was gonna go catch the new Harry Potter at the IMAX. Note to self, pre-order that kind of shit. I got to the theater and it was sold out until the 10:45 p.m. showing, and from what the guy in the booth told me, those shows were all sold out by yesterday morning. So, I opted to see it on the regular big screen instead.

I've been catching a lot of shit from many of my friends because I hadn't read any of the books yet. I tell them that I don't want any preconceived notions before going into the films. Not that I don't want to know what happens, I'm not the kind of guy that avoids spoilers. It's just that the books always have better detail, longer scenes, etc. And I always find myself thinking of that kind of stuff going into the movies and getting disappointed that my favorite parts didn't make it in.

To the best of my recollection, there have been only seven movies that I've seen that I've read the books they were based on before I saw the film. Bonfire of the Vanities is probably too extreme of an example of why I do this. After seeing the movie, I wanted to beat the living shit out of Brian DePalma.

Another would be Stephen King's The Stand. I gave that mini-series the benefit of a doubt seeing as King himself wrote the screenplay. And, I know it was for network TV and it was only eight hours (six without commercials), but still, it could've been soooooo much better. My favorite part of the book was Harold's suicide note, which went into this great little diatribe about how he justified what he did and how he would explain it when he meets his judgment with God. This beautiful piece of writing got shortened to "I was misled." What a fucking cop-out.

I read Dracula when I was just starting my goth phase in my teens. I guess, to be fair, Coppola did the best he could with what he had. I really dug Hopkins and Oldman, but I really want to believe that Keanu and Winona was the decision of the studio heads...dumbasses.

The Lord of the Rings might qualify as a disqualification from this group. Two reasons: A) it had been forever since I last read the books, and B) anything I would've remembered got lost in the massive blocking-out of most memories of my childhood after my father's death. Technically, I was able to go into the movies with a fairly fresh mind.

Great Expectations just flat-out pissed me off. It barely followed the book, the characters names were changed, they set it in modern day and cast Ethan Hawke and Gweneth Paltrow back when both of them were in their "even we don't know why we're popular" phase. I left the theater putting the director on my shit list. That director was Alfonso Cuaron, who later redeemed himself in full with Y Tu Mama Tambien, Children of Men and Harry Potter and the Prizoner of Azkaban.

Which brings us back to Mr. Potter. Order of the Phoenix was pretty damned good in my opinion, although not quite up to Azkaban, which is my favorite of the films all so far. I would probably equate Phoenix to Back the the Future II. Fairly solid sequel, but for the most part, a giant set up for the next one; the best two-and-a-half hour trailer for Half-Blood Prince anyone could hope for.

I would go into much more detail about my likes and dislikes of the film, but given the fever-pitch of Potter-mania these days, I'd hate to be inundated with cries that I'm a know-nothing muggle, amongst other things.