harry potter

This has got to be the stoopidest marketing maneuver in the history of anything…

The folks at Warner Bros. are planning to remove all the Harry Potter movies from store shelves come December 29th. After that date, your only chance of getting Harry Potter on the shelves of your personal library (legally ‘course) is to buy it secondary market a’la eBay.

Apparently Warners thinks that Disney’s “Vault” model is the way to go with a film series that has already generated $12.1 billion. That should be enough money for anyone, right?

I haven’t watched a Harry Potter movie since the fifth one, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, came out in theaters. Guess I could be honest and say that I’ve just been… waiting for the right time to revisit that film franchise (for a number of reasons). If that time comes in the near future, ...

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This past weekend was the fall Showcase of the Arthur Murray Dance Studio at the Hotel Roanoke (in umm… Roanoke. Virginia. I think…). It went on most of the day and well into the night and it was a blast! I saw ballroom dancing that boggled my gray matter bigtime.

Here are two of them for your viewing pleasure. The first is none other than my girlfriend Kristen, in what the announcer describes as her “really sexy little tiny costume”, performing a Mambo…

Now this next one, I really regret that I didn’t get the first part of it because I was… well, confused about what they were doing initially. And then the first notes of “Harry’s Wondrous World” from John Williams’ score for Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone began playing.

What followed was a Viennese Waltz perhaps unlike any other, performed by Beth Craighead and Mohammed Taher ...

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Hmmm… not too jazzed by this one. Maybe it has to do with it being that I’ve yet to see the movie version of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince? More likely the fact that as much as I love the Harry Potter books, I’ve grown weary of the film adaptations. They’ve diverted so much from the original novels that I for one would welcome a new attempt to make a movie franchise of this series ten or so years from now (ideally one movie a year for seven years, with the same cast). ‘Twould definitely benefit from being produced in hindsight.

Anyways, there’s yer first teaser poster for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the first part of which is due out later this year....

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This landed in my e-mail and thought I’d pass it along for y’all to laugh at also…

Leaked deleted harry potter chapter

Harry Potter to me
6:44 AM (1 hour ago)

Thought you might like to see this. It’s a leaked champter
which the editor removed from the last Harry Potter book.

You won’t believe what was in it. I saw it in the news today and found it online, but I don’t know how long it’ll last. Getit while you can!

(LINK REMOVED)

Use regular download, not premium. That way you don’t have to pay anything.

I didn’t have to do a search on Google News to know this one was phony as they come. The idea of J.K. Rowling writing a chapter that her editors wouldn’t think appropriate for the best-selling fictional series of all time is hilarious!...

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So today is opening day for the eagerly-awaited film adaptation of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. I haven’t seen it yet but advance word from friends who have is that it’s a pretty good movie. I’ll probably go check it out this afternoon (and write a review for this blog ‘course).

Something that I have found rather intriguing about the Harry Potter phenomenon over the last few years: Where the heck has all the “Christian” opposition to these books gone to? I mean, I remember when the movie of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone was coming out, and the local TV news showed these overly-righteous “Bible-beating” types marching outside of a nearby theater about how the Harry Potter books were “evil”, “witchcraft” and “leading children astray”. I’ll never forget this one particularly stern-faced young woman in an outfit like something out of Old Salem (or perhaps olden ...

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Here it is, courtesy of Ain’t It Cool News.

It sounds terrible.

How terrible? According to this person, who saw an advance screening in Chicago over the weekend, the funeral scene is not in the film (yeah there were two funerals in the book but if you’ve read Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince you know which one I’m talking about). It also has the Death Eaters attacking the Weasley house at Christmas (?!?) and apparently makes several other significant deviations from the novel.

Not jazzed at all about this movie now. I’m tempted to say that the Hogwarts Express has jumped the track on this one.

Maybe Warners should just wait a few years and “reboot” the film franchise with a clean start, now that we know where the story is going and how it ends, instead of mucking it up with the current series....

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Warner Bros. is pushing back the release of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince from it’s originally scheduled date of this November… to July 17th, 2009!

Why? Officially the word is that the writers strike several months ago means that there will be a dearth of “tentpole movies” next summer and Warners wants to make up for it somehow.

It also means that by the time the adaptation of Half-Blood Prince comes out that there will have been two years since its release and the previous movie in the series, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. And it’ll be two years still after that before the series finally wraps up with Part Two of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

I’d hate to be the poor lady who’s answering the phone at Warner Bros. when more people start hearing about this later this morning…...

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I’ve been so busy with other things, I didn’t catch at all that Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling is suing the webmaster of a popular website based on her books. For the past several years Steven Vander Ark has run The Harry Potter Lexicon, an “online encyclopedia” of sorts devoted to the Harry Potter novels. Which otherwise wouldn’t be a problem: for fans to pay homage to such an acclaimed property is something the Internet has long been used to.

Except that Vander Ark has been set to publish – as in “printed volumes” – his website as a hard-copy edition to sell for personal profit.

Big no-no there, Steve. And you and your publishing company should have known better.

So now Rowling is suing Vander Ark and RDR Books for copyright infringement. I don’t blame her. Vader Ark’s website is a nice, succinct resource for Harry Potter facts. ...

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In a move that will have many thinking back to how Quentin Tarantino handled Kill Bill, word is that the film adaptation of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows will be told across two full-length movies.

And no, making more money out of this final chapter of the Harry Potter saga is said to have nothing to do with it. The problem is something that most fans of the books have noticed in the film series: that with each new chapter in the movie version of the story, whole chunks of pertinent details from the books are getting cut out. This was especially a problem with this past summer’s movie of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. Not to mention the fact that Deathly Hallows is an incredibly dense book that ties up every thread that’s been left dangling across the previous six books. There’s ...

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