Movie Review: Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

(Sue me. It's not a book. But it's only the second movie I've seen this year!)

(And sorry for this very late post--I saw the movie about 3 weeks ago but just didn't have the energy to write about anything.)

I had very low expectations of this movie since I'd heard it was relatively short, and the writers had been ruthless in the cuts they made.

First, I have to give props for the brevity of the film. In spite of my overall disappointment with the film, I think the choices the writers & director made were fair. NOT fantastic, but fair.

Second, the film is great enough for non-readers--it convinced one of my dearest friends, the one person who turned me on to Harry Potter in the first place but gave up the series because she couldn't make it thought the 5th book, to go back to reading the books. (She actually managed to read books 6 & 7 in the 3 weeks we didn't manage to talk to each other on the phone, and she's considering giving book 5 a second go.)

But I was actually disappointed in Imelda Staunton--everyone went on and on about how brilliant she was, but I didn't think she was all that.

The biggest disappointment for me was how the DA was discovered. It just didn't make sense. Why would Cho have been the one to betray them, when all the students were being interrogated by Umbridge with the use of veritaserum??? Why did it take so long, then?

Plus the portrayal of the Room of Requirement was a letdown too--it didn't live up enough to its name.

And while I got annoyed at times with the books and how Harry took forever to understand his power over Voldemort, I thought that was a necessary process. So I didn't appreciate the scene that includes Harry telling Voldemort, "You don't even have any friends" (or was it "You don't know how to love"?).

Feh! I just hope the next movies are much better!!!

Second Chance

by Jane Green


I feel that Jane Green lost the inventiveness in her fiction quite a while back. I became a fan of her work when I read Jemima J. But so far, from her impressively-sized backlist, I've really only enjoyed The Other Woman.

Second Chance had an interesting premise: the death of Tom in a terrorist attack compels the rest of the gang (Holly, Olivia, Saffron & Paul) take a long hard look at their lives and wonder whether they're making the most of their time. However, I feel like JG didn't spin out anyone's storyline very well except for Holly (had a thing with Tom in their youth, now married to a very stuffy, pretentious divorce lawyer). The others' stories felt like filler. (Paul & his wife struggle with infertility, Olivia has been burned by a long-term relationship that ended badly, Saffron is an actress involved with a very successful, married Hollywood star.)

Plus the resolution just annoyed the heck out of me.

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OK, clearly I don't care too much about upsetting you if you get to this paragraph (you really shouldn't allocate time to this book, if time is a valuable commodity over where you are). But Holly ends up leaving her husband after spending the first 95% of the book bemoaning how little time he spends with them, how pretentious and stuck-up he is, how he belittles her; after comparing him unfavorably with both Tom and his brother Will (who she develops a crush on!). What killed me though was that she basically bitched about all these issues, only to suddenly realize toward the end that she was also to blame since didn't try to help him or talk to him enough and fought him instead of trying to find a solution to their problems.

Huh???

I mean she acted and talked like a victim the whole time. She never gave the impression that she tried to fight and tried to assert herself more, in that first 95% of the book.

Reading this book brought me to one conclusion: no one writes ChickLit like this gal.