journal features

movie review - Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-seven years and one million words

Toronto, 2011.08.14

At last, we have a good Harry Potter movie. I've lost count as to which this is, the fourth or fifth, perhaps?

Anyway, it's a good deal more sophisticated this time out and between the writing and a superb effort by the supporting cast member who plays a visiting bureaucrat like a British-flavored Soviet "Political Officer", it feels high-stakes and grounded in some sort of normalcy. The tone is unusually steady for these movies, and the plot is more or less consistent.

Recommended.

rand()m quote

Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.

—Michael Crichton