Monika’s Pensieve

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is not even released yet, but we’ve already got the first photos from the set of Deathly Hallows :] They look kind of cool :) People are guessing it’s the silver doe scene, but it could be any of the camping scenes actually.

There’s some Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince news as well. The British tabloids have released info about how absolutely terrible the film is and how no Harry Potter book fans have any chance of enjoying it ;)
There are some accusations in there that don’t bother me at all - like the romance thing:

One gutted fan raged: ?The film is dominated by romance ? Ron with Lavender Brown, Ginny with Dean Thomas, Hermione?s growing love for Ron, Ron?s potion-affected desire for Romilda Vane, and ultimately Harry and Ginny.?

I mean that’s not my favourite part of the book, but I can see it working really well on film. They’ve also been quite straight with the fans from the very beginning that they’re going to concentrate on the romance and comedy, so I think that’s fine (as long as they pull off the dramatic moments right, that is).
This bit I was also totally expecting:

In the book Harry has a series of crucial ?memories?. But the film slashes these to just two.

I mean the book is full of Harry sitting around with Dumbledore and Dumbledore telling him stories about Voldemort - that is just not going to work on film and it’s hard to put the memory scenes into any other context, so I don’t see what there is to fuss about.

There are two fragments that are a bit disconcerting to me though (assuming there’s any truth to the article of course ;-P):

Meanwhile the Half-Blood Prince of the title barely features. Worse still the film was slammed as too SOPPY.

The Half-Blood Prince doesn’t feature all that much in the book either, but he’s kind of crucial, so I assumed they’d make sure his major scenes stay in *sigh* At least that’s what I was counting on :-/
And the other one:

Even the death of a major character proves to be so hamfisted it fails to make the Warner Bros movie less of a dumblebore.

One enraged fan said: ?It partially blows what may be the biggest surprise of the entire franchise.?

Another who was at the US screening moaned: ?The last third of this movie is so incredibly mishandled the death feels more like an unfortunate accident than genuine tragedy.?

I know there’s been talk for a while now that they took out the Order out of the final battle, so that there’s a lot less battling going on the Hogwarts grounds, but that didn’t bother me. I even thought it was good cause then they could just concentrate on the human bit of the tragedy and leave the special effects for the cave scene preceding it (a scene I completely detest in the book, so the film version of it might be an improvement for me ;) ). But if *beep*’s death is as hamfisted and soppy as all that then ouch cause that’s one of the scenes I was most looking forward to :-/

Oh, and also there was yet another trailer released recently, but it’s much the same as what we’ve seen already.