The Boy Who Lived...in Saudi Arabia

So I realize that it's been a while since my last blog posts...I've been delinquent for the last week or so.  There's a reason for this!  Mike and I made a commitment to watch all of the Harry Potter movies, in order, one every night, for eight days.  This has sucked up all our evening time, but it has turned out to be really fun.  Here's the (long) back story:  (I am only going into all this because it has been our whole life for a week now, and I am totally subsumed into HarryPotterville at the moment.)

I saw Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone in graduate school.  I was dragged there by a friend who swore that I needed to see it.  I had never heard of Harry Potter before that, and I was skeptical.  She was using all these words I didn't know, like quidditch and muggle.  ("You have to see the quidditch scene!" she insisted.)  Turned out that I thought the movie was great!  I was really pulled into the story.  And music by John Williams, no less!  I went right out and bought the book.  And I thought the book was great, too.  So great that I bought the next book, and the next.  I think I was on the fourth book when the second movie came out.  It was ok, but not exactly like I imagined.  And they left out a lot of details from the book.  I went ahead and read the fifth book, but when the third movie came out, I knew it was a mistake.  I was disliking the movies because I had read the books first, and I already had a mental image of what the scenes looked like when I walked into the theater.  My general complaints were, "That's not how I imagined it at all."  and "They left out so many things."  I decided that I liked the first movie and book because I experienced them in that order - movie first, then book.  That way, the scenes didn't appear wrong because I had never imagined them before, and when I went back and read the book, I was happily enlightened to even more details than I had learned in the movie.  So I quit reading and began waiting for movie releases.

Movies take a long time to make and to release.  I have been waiting for a long time.  So long, that I gave up waiting and just decided that one day, after the last movie was out, I would go back and watch all the movies in order from start to finish.  That way, I was not hanging in suspense for years on end while I waited for the last movie to come out.  Unfortunately, by the time the last movie came out this past summer, it had been more than a decade since the first movie and our lives had changed so much that it made it hard to actually GO to the movies.  Instead of a free and independent graduate student, I had a full time job and a husband and two small kids and I was deathly sick from bring pregnant with the third.  So my plan went unfulfilled and the last movie came and went without us even noticing much. 

Then for Valentine's Day, Mike suggested that we watch them all now, and that we make time to do it.  So that's what we've been doing.  We have no TV, so we watched them on our laptop.  It was a small screen, but it was really fun!  And I did like the movies, right up to the last three minutes. Then it all fell apart. 

NOTE:  The following is commentary on the plot!  I think I am the only person on Earth who didn't know what happened to Harry Potter in the end, but just in case you also do not know the end of the story, do not read any farther!

The last three minutes - WHAT THE HECK?!?!  OK, so we spend all this time and energy working to defeat Voldemort.  At last, Harry has his epic battle that we have all been waiting for.  And there are NO witnesses, NO swelling of music, NO sigh of relief, and NOBODY seems to notice??  Not to mention nearly everyone of importance is already dead, a la X-Men.  Harry defeats Voldemort in the courtyard by himself, walks inside to the Great Hall, and everyone is having tea and chatting.  He doesn't tell anyone what just happened.  No one seems to know or care.  He gets a cursory hug from Hagrid (I was expecting more since Hagrid just bore his dead body back to the castle), and then he stands outside with Ron and Hermione.  This is where we needed John Williams back!!  Where is the emotional musical theme that overwhelms the viewer with pride and a sense of accomplishment and memory of the journey over seven long books?  And then it's 19 years later  - he married Ginny and Ron married Hermione (oh, please!!!  Life is not that neat and tidy.  ugh!) And it's over.  Harry Potter saved the wizarding world, did what no other wizard could do, was braver and truer than anyone, was famous the world over, and he end up as some regular middle man accountant pushing beans at the Ministry??  What??  It's all just too FLAT for me.  All that emotional investment.  And temporal investment, too!  We all knew that Harry would win, but I think it still deserves notice from those around him.  What a cruddy ending.  Come on, J.K. Rowling - this is a seven-book SAGA.  Give it a proper saga ending.

Ok, enough.  One more Harry Potter thought, though.  About two weeks ago (before we started watching the movies), Mike came home for lunch one day and said "Well, it happened again."  He told the story about how he was in some meeting with people at work, and somebody was there from another department.  When he got introduced, the extra person said "Benchich.....how long have you been here?"  When the answer was two months, they said "I know that name...Larry Benchich!  Are you related to Larry Benchich?"  Of course, that was Mike's dad who used to work here for 20 years.  Then they usually proceed to ask about his family members by name and tell stories about his dad.  This happens all the time.  "So good to have you back, Mr. Benchich" and "I remember your father, Mr. Benchich" and "You'll do great things, Mr. Benchich."  Sound familiar?  Mike noticed at lunch that day that you could scratch Benchich and put in Potter.  Forget Aladdin - Mike is really our own Harry Potter, "the boy who returned." Or better, "the boy who lived...in Saudi Arabia."

Hopefully the ending to OUR saga will have a really great soundtrack.