My Harry Potter Journey

Okay, so I’m roughly ten or so years late with this journey. Hopefully you die-hard HP fans won’t find that off-putting. But as a single woman in my—shall we say no longer in my twenties— and without children, it never much seemed a priority to me to read the books. When the first film came out, it was the evening feature on a Royal Caribbean cruise I took and I did attend. But I only made it about twenty minutes in before falling asleep. I’m sure that had more to do with the day’s activities in the sun than with the film itself, but I just never made it back to the first one. Each subsequent one seemed pointless without the first. Ergo my journey may be quite overdue, but it’s my journey and I just don’t have a problem with that. I hope you don’t either.

In fact, I hope many of you haven’t taken your journeys yet either and mine can provide a shortcut for you. What, you may be wondering, after all these years has finally convinced me to hop on board the wizardry bandwagon? I’ll tell you what it was. It was kick-arse trailer for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2! It's everywhere so you've probably seen it by now, but here it is just in case:

The last installment of the films looks so beautiful, dangerous and tremendously heart-wrenching that I can’t stand the thought of missing it. I also can’t stand the thought of going to it without the proper background to the story. Tonight, I am watching the first movie again in hopes of catching up before the last film hits theaters.

Now, I know what a lot of you are going to say. I should read the books. They’re better. Of course they’re better. They’re books. They have no time constraints and they don't have to fit everything through the space of a lens. But A) I’m on a time crunch and B) I’m FlickChick, not BookChick. (Though I do love curling up with a great one!)

Sometime tomorrow, I’ll be posting the summary/review of the first Harry Potter movie. It WILL contain spoilers, as all of these postings will. I usually work quite hard to avoid spoilers in any film review or discussion, but the point of this series is to provide the Cliff’s Notes on the movies before it’s time to see the last one so spoilers are pretty much necessary.

And to the next obvious point of criticism--why I waited so long. Well, that point's a little stickier. My mom is sick. Like sick for real. Check my blog The Mean Reds for the deets on that. So I may not get all the previous ones in before the new film opens. But never fear, I expect this one to be in theaters for a good long while. And mom seems to be in a high place between the valleys right now, so it's a good time for me to hop in to something fun! I do expect this quick little journey to be a fun one and I hope you muggles will enjoy it too! See you at the movies!