It’s been an insane, but highly productive, writing week, so we took the family out to see Harry Potter and the Half -lood Prince tonight as a treat.  Having thoroughly enjoyed the book, I confess I wasn’t wowed with the movie.  The acting has improved, marginally, and the special effects are definitely up from the earliest movies.  It had some great moments of intense drama and wonderful comedic effect, I’ll grant you.

It just didn’t make sense.

Now, I know it’s been awhile since I read the books, and I read them quickly and close together so what happened when has blurred a bit in my mind.  So, I thought while watching it that maybe I had just mixed things up too much, or left too many pieces out.  But my dh, who never read beyond the first couple books, and my son, who has re-read the series several times, also agreed that the movie was like watching several delightful mini-stories (almost trailers) nested together with very little to get them on the same string.

Not Ms. Rowling’s fault, of course, and probably not really the fault of the directors, either.  It’s just difficult to take a book of that size and content and slice it down to even a two and a half hour movie.

So here’s what I’d like to know:  What did Ms. Rowling think of it?  Did she resign herself to watching her books become mutilated shadows of themselves upon being made into movies?  I’ve heard that’s the aproach many authors adhere to.  Is she highly pragmatic and grateful that the core sense of the book was retained in some small way?  That would be sensible, but how many of us are really all that sensible?  Or did she simply take the money and run the other way?  This might be the wisest course, but I think might prove the most difficult.  After all, she doesn’t live in a vacuum and would hear at least some tidbits of how the movie had done.

I’ll probably never have my curiousity satisfied as I haven’t any first-name friends of Ms. Rowlings at my disposal, but perhaps someday I’ll bump into her and all-unknowing (because I doubt I’d recognize her on the street) ask her what she thinks of the latest Harry Potter movie.