Harry Potter Madness!

A little late to the game, but why not… like most of the free world, I’ve been crazy for Harry Potter the last couple of weeks. The Kate and I started our Potter journey by watching a movie a night leading up to the release of the 5th movie.

We saw the Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix in Imax 3D and enjoyed it immensely – the film that is… the IMAX presentation left surprisingly much to be desired. It was clear that the movie was shot in 35mm as the larger 70mm IMAX presentation exhibited a LOT of grain, especially during the darker scenes. The 3D presentation was simply atrocious for a $13 entrance fee. The projectors used perpendicular linear polarized light, which means you could not tilt your head without seeing cross talk between the two images. With this level of presentation, they really should have used circularly polarized light like most of the new 3D digital projectors use. Also, the 3D content itself was very disappointing. It was clear from the flat characters at different depths that the movie was shot in standard 2D and converted to 3D using some algorithms. Not terribly effective. Anyway, if you haven’t seen the movie yet, don’t bother seeing it in IMAX. Tons of fun for the Potter fan, but lame in IMAX. Boo.

We caught up with the 6th book by reading Wikipedia. Yay, Wikipedia… only spoilers from the 7th book had already made their way onto the pages, so we got a bit more spoiled than we would have liked. There was an awful lot that I didn’t remember from the 6th book as it was released on my wedding day two years ago. Kate and I read it while traveling back to Boston then but the cramped 90 square foot dorm room we were sharing was not conductive to long term Harry Potter memory retention.

We got to the 7th book the day it was released and *boys turn off eyes for silly cuteness description* took turns reading the book to each other. I’ve been working on voices reading Kate some comics at night so it was lots of fun. Kate took a few voices as well – boy, that girl does a mean Kreacher! *boys, it’s safe again* We finally finished the book a couple days ago and I heartily enjoyed it. There were lots of small twists to characters that exceeded my expectations with what Rowling would do. The first half of the book dragged a little bit, but otherwise we were completely hooked the entire way through. It was a great book and a really nice way to end the series. Kudos all around.

That’s it for now. Kate’s home in Iowa for the week, so I’ll be making me some more frequent blog posts to stem my loneliness Hope the week is starting off well for everybody,

-Mr. Bobbo J. Bobberson III, esquire