As summertime comes to a close this Labor Day weekend, and friends and family report with bittersweet satisfaction that they've finally finished The Deathly Hallows, I got a little nostalgic, myself, and thought back on what I've come to think of as the summer of Harry Potter.
Harry Potter anticipation stirred all summer long. When I ordered my Order of the Phoenix movie tickets online, there were already dozens of reviews of the film- by people who hadn't seen it, but were just so excited that they had to give it five stars. A similar phenomenon occurred on iTunes- we eagerly downloaded a five star rated Order of the Phoenix soundtrack touted as the "best of the Harry Potter soundtracks" only to find that it was by far the worst.
But the first truly exciting Harry Potter event came July 11th with the opening of the The Order of the Phoenix. We went to see the movie at Loews Lincoln Square- a short walk from the Lincoln Center of the Performing Arts in Manhattan. As we exited the theater, a man who hadn't seen the movie called out to my husband,
"Was it any good?"
Good question. The Order of the Phoenix certainly wasn't bad. It felt like a visual highlight tour of the book, which is fine for dedicated fans, but seemed a little shallow when the movie stands alone.
All the Harry Potter films suffer from the fact that the books have hundreds of pages to express the passage of time, the rhythm of the school year and the seasons, and the frustration that builds as time passes, and Harry and his friends seemingly make no progress toward their goal. That said, some Harry Potter movies have translated to film better than others.
My favorite of the six movies is The Prisoner of Azkaban. What I like about the third Harry Potter movie is the way it handles time. A huge pendulum clock and gears dominates the movie's set. A major theme of The Prisoner of Azkaban is time, and the movie makes an exciting sequence out of Harry and Hermione's challenge to go back and change the past.
The 2007 The Order of the Phoenix was the first time my throat didn't catch when William's leitmotif, "A Change of Seasons," was used to mark the passage of time. Director David Yates didn't know how to use the music- not that he had much to work with. As I said, the soundtrack wasn't so hot- it was flat, generic movie music that I wouldn't have known belonged to the Harry Potter universe without the track info.
My husband gave the expectant movie-goer outside Loews' an "above average" rating (given in his charming New Yorkese). Our questioner immediately asked:
"But I heard it was all talk, no action!"
This comment stunned us- we'd been struck by the fact that The Order of the Phoenix was an intense action experience. We heard this "all talk, no action" meme on the street, in the subway, pretty much wherever we went. Somebody had gotten the idea there was a scene between Harry and Dumbledore with too much exposition, and had cast the entire film as talking heads.
Ten days after the opening of the movie, the seventh and final volume in the Harry Potter series arrived at our door by priority mail. The USPS box containing the book had been specially printed to accommodate the huge Amazon.com Book 7 pre-order turnout.
For the seventh time, my husband and I sat down and began the Harry Potter adventure together. He probably deserves a purple heart for the damage to his vocal chords. We finished about a week after the book came to our door, at two in the morning. The ending was so intense, we wouldn't have slept if we didn't see Harry and his friends through to the end.
A lot of interesting stuff happened this summer: Live Earth Concerts for a Climate in Crisis, the release of the iPhone. But I'll always remember summer of 2007 as the Harry Potter summer, and picture the photo in The New York Daily News- a whole row of commuters on the subway, noses buried The Deathly Hallows.
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