“Even a man who is pure in heart

And says his prayers by night

May become a wolf when the wolfbane blooms

And the autumn moon is bright”

Among Europe’s most popular legends are the Strigoi, known as the tortured souls that rise from the dead with the ability to transform themselves into animals, drain energy from their victims and make themselves invisible. Some scholars argue that they can be living beings with supernatural instincts instilled with the power to move objects, control the passage of time and possess special insight to foretell the future.

There are many stories about what lurks in the forests of Europe where the Strigoi dwell as human sized predatory creatures with unusual speed. A ripe subject for literature, cinema and television. They tell the common tale of chronic dissatisfaction with life, cursed while trapped within a fear of change. The only other way to attain immortality is by seeing though the illusion of life’s addiction and ascend, aware only of movement since direction is subjective. But even to do that, one still has to suffer as does the tortured souls most feared in myths in an ironic twist of fate.

Although he never refers to the undead, Woody Allen has included some witty dialogue about chronic dissatisfaction in his 2008 film, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, “Life is short, life is dull and full of pain and this is a chance for something special.” Some of the directors words also seem to explain why love stories between humans and the Strigoi are so compelling, “Only unfulfilled love can be romantic,”  as images of Edward and Bella, Angel and Buffy are evoked.

Most of the claims about the Strigoi have been dismissed as hallucinations, fables usually attributed to a curse using breadcrumbs to lure an audience as a common ploy of witches who live in candy houses somewhere in the woods of the Carpathian mountains where beasts prey upon lost souls who only know what they don’t want, effectively becoming yet another victim of chronic dissatisfaction.

Sixty years earlier the film Abbott And Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948) took a comical look at the undead. A respected horror film that is considered by the American Film Institute (AFI) among the top 100 films of American cinema. The plot is set in Florida and surrounds four different kind of Strigoi as Dracula and Frankenstein’s monster are smuggled out of eastern Europe as wax dummies pursued by the man who turns into the werewolf while the invisible man makes a cameo appearance at the end of the film. Even though he cannot be seen a voice is heard, “allow me to introduce myself, I’m the invisible man.”

Although none of them appear in a Woody Allen film, all of them were effected by chronic dissatisfaction and madness.

During the Roman Empire, a group of large carp like fish known as genus Barbus were domesticated in marble tanks under the bed of guests invited to lavish Roman Orgies  signifying their fascination with underwater life that led to aquariums. But, it wasn’t known until much later that goldfish like others in the Carp family are social animals who frequently become bored with their environment when left alone without other fish to interact. For them, a stark, un-embellished bowl of water just wont do because their inclination when happy is to be curious. In fact this quality is believed to have encouraged the development of elaborate fish tank rock formations, miniature sunken ships and the R2 Fish Training Kit. which made Albert the goldfish pictured above a member of the Guinness Book Of Records as the fish with the largest repertoire of tricks of any aquatic vertebrate with scales.

According to historical records, The concept of fish school, not to be confused with a school of fish was first founded by Dean and Kyle Pomerleau in 2004. Kyle who was seven years old at the time won two common goldfish at a school fair spending hours watching them for several weeks. He suspected that there was more going on in their brains then most people were willing to give them credit for. On a whim, he and his father decided to see if it was possible to train fish to do tricks using techniques frequently associated with  training dogs, cats, and circus animals.

In an attempt to give fish their just due as responsive pets rather than some kind of decoration at risk for being flushed down the toilet or eaten by a house cat, their scientific investigation led to the Fish School Training Manual, initially written in French. The basic principles set forth in the pamphlet are positive reinforcement and shaping which uses the fish’s innate curiosity to encourage behavior modification. After all, Kyle  claimed,  “Fish have often been served in various cultures as religious symbols, deities and the subject of art, books and films such as The Incredible Mr. Limpit,” a 1964 live action/animated film by Warner Brothers about a human who mysteriously turns into a talking fish and helps the US Navy defeat the Nazis using his “thrum,” an intense  noise that disrupts underwater  instruments and weapons long before Finding Nemo won the Oscar as best animated feature in 2005.

In Hinduism, Avatar is a  Sanskrit word referring to the conscious descent of a deity from heaven to earth often translated into English as “incarnation,” but a  more appropriate term is “manifestation.” Its meaning is the basis of James Cameron’s visual epic that took fourteen years to complete depicting native life of Pandora, a planet that takes several years to reach in suspended animation. The film is an artistically stunning adventure in 3D worth seeing  even if the story, written in two weeks, is a bit derivative with a  screenplay that borrows heavily from some of the directors previous work and brings to mind too many similarities to Dances With Wolves.

The military look of the film is so reminiscent of  Aliens that it distracted me from  becoming immersed in the film. Aliens is the 1986 classic that Cameron directed about the bugs that gestate in the chest of its living host and have acid for blood. As in Aliens, the company or corporation features prominently as the prime antagonist of evil instigating  the invasion force that plans to drain Pandora’s natural resources for the benefit of Earth. Our planet is now an ecologically depleted waste land, a victim of economic greed that Weavers character, Dr. Grace Augustine, a Bio-Anthropologist opposes as passionately as she did as Ellen Ripley in Aliens.

The feel of the film’s technology including a cargo loader machine similar to the one Ripley uses to defeat the queen bug at the end of Aliens is featured in facsimile in a major battle scene at the end of Avatar. This similarity is an annoying element of this new film which was written, directed and produced by Cameron with a running time of 2 hours and 40 minutes.

Although the 3D nature of the films construction is groundbreaking, the plot is predictable and the characters are too two dimensional drawing  heavily from other science fiction/ fantasy films. The premise that all living things emanate a common energy also known as “the force”  fills everything in the universe is perhaps a reference to the  Star Wars universe , not that there is anything wrong with imitation, but even the forests of Pandora,  a magical place  with luminescent creatures and large revered trees  evokes the image of Lothlorien the mystical home  of the elves of Middle Earth. Add to all this the notion of cloning a personal avatar and a neural link, then  Alien Resurrection and The Matrix comes  to mind. But despite all its flaws, Avatar is worth seeing if only to make one realize that Star Trek (2009) is a much better film.

Although The Nutritional Aspects Of Expanding Populations sounds like a worthy subject for serious study in Biochemistry and Nutrition especially when considering the impact of the large spike in population growth during the post war period and its sociological implications on the  baby boom generation, it became the basis for a landmark 1955 cinematic classic  about the development of a growth serum and how it could be used to solve the problem of overpopulation and world hunger, a neglected subject in the mid fifties.

The elixir depicted in this film adaptation is so potent its promise is in providing the complete nutritional needs of any growing organism, a claim overshadowed only by the myopic scientific experimentation focused solely on animal rather than plant life which could have made it more palatable for vegetarians and provide a sound basis for reducing cardio-vascular disease when coupled by increased exercise and the cessation of smoking.

The film is titled Tarantula and was directed by Jack Arnold and stars John Agar,  Leo J. Carroll and Mara Corday with an uncredited appearance of twenty-five year old Clint Eastwood as a jet pilot dropping napalm at the films’ climax. Arnold went on to direct The Incredible Shrinking Man two years later in 1957 considered by many as his masterpiece and  Eastwood became a multiple Oscar winning director.

In this scenario,  Professor Gerald Deemer  is a scientist with a just motive, a hero trying to avert food shortages which are predicted as a result of the world’s expanding population of two billion in 1955, a role passionately played by veteran character actor Leo J Carroll. This is the premise that sets it apart from most giant bug movies featuring  mutations caused by either nuclear weapons or a demented scientist. In this case its a result of noble intentions gone wrong with a sound display of scientific methodology and  multi layered sub plots such as a budding love story and a rare medical condition known as acromegaly artistically shot in black and white featuring an arid desert with whistling tumbleweeds. It is here Professor Deemer invents a special nutrient on which animals can exclusively thrive causing them to enlarge many times their normal size to serve as a source of food.

Harvested in the professors’ home laboratory are several over-sized rodents and a tarantula that escapes somewhere  in the California, Nevada area, hungry and lurking for prey, growing and yet undetected despite  leaving pools of arachnid venom and skeletal remains whenever it fed.  Why spiders and rodents were used to experiment on instead of cattle or sheep is left unexplained, but  perhaps it  suggests that Deemer thought there may be a time when a high protein diet would be defined by how many legs are on the plate.

Unthinkable imagery created by very sophisticated  visual effects and score, the film has a sharp   witty script written by Robert Fresco and  Martin Berkele based on a story by Ray Bradbury, yet its science fiction basis never diminishes the credibility that advancing bio technology may one day lead to the discovery of such a nutrient with unanticipated consequences.

When a very bored hotel concierge  asks Corday, a 1954 Playboy centerfold who  arrives in town as a biology student working on her Masters dissertation, The Nutritional Aspects Of Expanding Populations and Agar who plays the town doctor, “Well ain’t you going to introduce yourselves?” as they leave the hotel for a ride in his car.

“No” they respond in unison, as the hotel manager scratches his head and  mutters,   “Yep, it can be an awfully fast world.”

Disaster films are most engaging when they convey the immediacy of an unexpected catastrophe that is about to happen at the moment its first perceived. No way out and little time to think, absorbed more with the survival struggle of the main characters, usually portrayed by an array of high profile actors unwilling to accept their fate.

The threat, if caused by something from outer space is relegated to science fiction, possible but not probable when scientific evidence to think creatively is obscured by disbelief - a meteor hitting Earth, or a rogue planet out of orbit as portrayed in When Worlds Collide, a 1933 science fiction novel. A story about two planets, one on a collision course with Earth, the other coming close enough to be a haven for survivors if a rocket ship could be built in time to shuttle to the new planet. The continuity of humanity depends on constructing this ark to transport two of every species to a place that may not even have the climate to support Earth’s biodiversity.  A tale filled with uncertainty and biblical drama as portrayed in the 1951 film of the same name. An end of the world scenario inspiring a string of disaster films with a cast of billions and numerous sub plots. The survival of each character depends on luck and the ability to minimize shock, control fear and be able to act quickly while experiencing catastrophic events. But wait, doesn’t this   sound like 2012, the movie?

The fourth cycle of the Mayan Calender culminates at 11:11 am GMT on December 21, 2012 . An anthropological examination of other cultures and their belief systems independently mark this day for some impending change. As the date approaches, prognostications from many sources will become increasingly quoted from the Hopi, I Ching, and Nostradamus to name a few. What will really happen on this date if anything is unclear. Here is where science can speculate on the possibilities of a sudden planetary event such as the reversing of Poles which would cause a ripple in gravity effecting the very atmosphere of Earth.

The basis of Mayan belief is that time is linear and cyclical simultaneously. They looked towards the sky for architectural landmarks which lies at the heart of the structures they built and their cosmological science expressed in surviving records. The sophicated mathematics of its calender are universally recognized for predicting eclipses thousands of years before they occurred. The ancient texts described knowledge of sudden shifts in the climate and references to the dark center of the Galaxy referred to as the cosmic womb identified long before telescopes found evidence for a black hole as the core of The Milky Way.

Many legendary prophecies continue to be credible as long as they remain generic and open to interpretation. Then if something happens it can neatly fit withing the guidelines of what was foretold, but they can also contain ironic twists associated with understanding their meaning in the context of contemporary thought. Some of the great oracles in history such as the one at Delphi went into trances and gave readings in cave dwellings usually connected to fault lines that exposed gases such as ethylene known to have hallucinogenic effects. The one’s that have some basis in science and mathematics, are not as easy to dismiss even after the anointed interval surrounding the date passes because the factors involved that could make the events happen are noticeably present such as global warming and global dimming.

What is agreed upon is that The Sun, Earth and the other planets of the solar system will be at the center of the milky way in an alignment that only happens once in 25,800 years on the winter solastice of 2012. An increase of solar and magnetic energy from the sun is anticipated, but how all this will impact on the crust of Earth, volcanic activity, movement of the oceans and shifting of the continental plates is hard to assess.

Predicting a great change doesn’t necessarily mean annihilation, and all the remaining records of Mayan civilization indicates is that the end of a cycle will occur on that date. The fact that they associate great disaster and upheaval with the transition between one cycle to another is where all the doom and gloom theories are emanating, and yet no one really knows what will occur at 11:11 am GMT on December 21, 2012.

The Academy Of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has announced that it will be awarding an honorary Oscar to Roger Corman, the director/producer with a vast array of low budget horror films including The Attack Of The Crab Monsters (1957) and Not Of This Earth (1957). Also among his long list of achievements are loose interpretations of many Edgar Allen Poe’s novella’s as The Pit And The Pendulum (1957) and macabre poems such as The Raven (1963). The films were often over the top and frequently starred the late Vincent Price as the demented protagonist.

So many of Corman’s films are considered B- classics, produced on a low budget, shot in several days and elevating exploitation to an art form that it’s easy to forget the list of distinguished directors and actors who were mentored by him such as Martin Scorsese, Frances Ford Coppola, Ron Howard, Peter Bogdanovich, Jonathan Demme , John Sayles,  James Cameron, Jack Nicholson, Robert DeNiro, David Carradine, Peter Fonda, Talia Shire, Dennis Hopper and so many more. These filmmakers got their first break as members of the elite Roger Corman School of Film Making. All genres owe a debt of gratitude to his visionary form of schlock.

One of his most intriguing works and a personal favorite is the prophetic 1960 pre bot-ox tour de force, The Wasp Woman starring Susan Cabot in the title role as Janice Starlin, the owner and CEO of a cosmetic firm at a time when women did not mingle in the business world let alone run corporations. When sales of her beauty products began to slide as her consumer base realizes she is aging, she was motivated to become the chief patron of a scientist who had devised a method to extract enzymes from the royal jelly of the queen wasp that can reverse the aging process. Starlin agrees to fund further research provided she can serve as his human subject. Displeased with the slowness of the results, she breaks into the scientist’s laboratory after hours and injects herself with extra doses of the formula, causing an unanticipated side effect, transforming her into an angry woman with the head and arms of a wasp resulting in quite a buzz,  aggressively killing all the men on the board of trustees of Starlin Enterprises, sacrificing everything for a youthful appearance. A perfect character study for aging actors and actresses obsessed with reversing the effects of time.

Corman’s last directorial achievement for American International Pictures was Gas-s-s-s (1971), also known by the title, It Became Necessary To Destroy The World In Order To Save It. A dark comedy of a post-apocalyptic gas leak at a military installation that kills everyone on Earth over the age of 25. Look closely for the performances of Ben Vereen, Cindy Williams, and a young Talia Shire.

The noted producer/ director was once quoted as saying, “I can make a film about the fall of the Roman Empire with two extras and a sagebrush,” also appeared in minor acting roles in such films as The Silence Of The Lambs, Apollo 13 and Philadelphia and was given the title, “King Of The Bs,” a reference to over 400 films he has been associated with. The bad news is that the Academy has opted not to present any of the honorary awards during the live telecast, but will give them at the governors award dinner on November 14th. The other honorary awards being bestowed are to actress Lauren Bacall and cinematographer Gordon Willis.

For a complete list of Roger Corman’s cinematic achievements follow the Idbm link

The problem with Peter Jackson’s new film, District 9, is that you either love it or hate it. There is no in-between, as one day an alien spacecraft appears over the skies of South Africa causing much speculation by newscasters and politicians. The story is introduced as a documentary, focused through the lens of the media and portrays the government’s attempt at first contact, as they wait for something to happen.

After cutting their way into the ship, soldiers find malnourished arthropods, moving aimlessly aboard without a leader. They are brought to Earth and housed in District 9 until the government sends a bureaucrat, Wilkus Van De Merwe, to relocate 2 million Prawns, a name given them by authorities. In the process, Wilkus is exposed to some sort of black alien liquid and begins a metamorphosis into one of the insects, as the substance somehow alters his DNA, also allowing him to use the alien weapons which wont work for humans.

The film was produced by Peter Jackson and directed by Neill Blomkamp (who also wrote the screenplay) and Terri Tatchell and stars Sharlto Copley, Jason Cope and Robert Hobbs. Filmed entirely in South Africa, it is a thinly veiled social commentary on Apartheid and Xenophobia as politics and culture seep into the storyline exploring the larger questions of sequestered ghetto life, racism and morality. However the line of human depravity suggested in the film also crosses the line into cannibalism.

Science fiction at its best is an ideal format to present contemporary issues using social satire that is close enough to reality to be identifiable yet far enough away to be palatable, but to be a good and interesting film also requires it to be entertaining. District 9 does not achieve any of those objectives,  instead, it is slow moving, boring and fails to gain the audience’s sympathy for any of the characters.

For more complete information about this movie, visit the Imdb link
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1136608/

Other links:
- Top Ten Science Fiction/ Fantasy Films
- The Three Worst Science Fiction/Fantasy Films

The number 9 is the natural whole number following 8 ½ and preceding 10, also known as a Motzkin number to indicate the different ways of drawing non intersecting chords on a circle between n points. It’s ordinal adjective is ninth.

A number is evenly divisible by nine if and only if its digital root is 9. For example, adding all the digits of a number until a single digit remains, the digital root of 655,360 is 25, and the square root of 25 is 5. A nine sided polygon is called a Nonagon and a group of nine of anything is called an Annead, quite an odyssey of information.

Nine is also a musical adaptation based on Italian director Federico Fellini’s autobiographical cinematic masterpiece, 8 ½ (Otto e mezzo). The movie was awarded the Best Foreign Film of 1963. His choice of the number as the title of film is said to represent the six feature films, two shorts and the one film Fellini co-directed up to that point. Add music to 8 ½ and you have 9. The film version is currently in production somewhere in Rome and stars Daniel Day-Lewis as Guido Contini and Sophia Loren as Mama in a sweeping epic of creative and sexual reflection set for release November 2009.

links:
- Federico Fellini
- Sophia Loren
- Daniel Day Lewis
- 8 ½
- Motzkin number

September 20th also markes the 75 birthday of Sophia Loren, who has gifted the world with her charm, wit,  grace and elegant beauty. We wish her , her children and grandchildren the very best on this day and for the future.

Happy Birthday Sofia Loren, may you have many more .

Love stories portrayed in literature and film are usually but not always centered around attractive people. In the highly anticipated comedy, Julie And Julia, written and directed by Nora Ephron , the subject of this love story is the marriage of the late Julia Child, the apostle of cooking who died in 2004, two days before her 92nd birthday. In her autobiography, My Life In France, published posthumously in 2006, she chronicles her time in Paris during the post war period before becoming the icon of French cooking popularized in her landmark book, Mastering The Art of French Cooking (1961) which helped make French cuisine accessible to the American public. She first appeared on television as The French Chef in 1963, long before the food network or cable TV was ever conceived. Sometimes, while trying to flip something in the pan, she missed the mark and dropped it on the counter, or floor, smiling as she mumbled, “whose to see?” then picked it up and put it back in the pan.

Child, at 6′2″, a large woman with a shrill husky voice and a somewhat matronly bovine appearance, is flawlessly channeled by Meryl Streep in an astonishing performance revealing a new side to the cooking icon who had a passion for life coupled with a surprisingly sexually charged relationship with her husband Paul Child, who declares his love at a St. Valentine’s dinner party: “Julia, you are the butter to my bread and the breath of my life,” a poetic line, beautifully delivered by Stanley Tucci in a brilliant performance as Julia’s husband, a quiet understated Renaissance man and career diplomat who is her rock of Gibraltar,  proving that uncommon people can be as romantically appealing as Romeo and Juliette.

When she is unsure what to do with the rest of her life, Paul asks “What do you really like to do?” as they sit in a French restaurant.
“Well, I do like to eat.” she responds.
“And you’re so good at it too.”, he says.
“Yes, yes,” both laughing uncontrollably, “and I’m growing right in front of you as we speak,” as she feeds on some fillet of sole.

The movie is constructed like The Hours, a 2002 film based on the Virginia Woolf novel Mrs. Dalloway that won an Oscar for Nicole Kidman as Best Actress. In a similar way, separate story lines are connected through time by a book. In this case, Mastering The Art Of French Cooking, used by Julie Powell, a Queens housewife in 2002, living a drab, uninteresting life surrounded by friends who have made it, not knowing what to do with herself until she decides to cook all 534 recipes from Child’s cookbook in one year, then writing about it in a blog: The Julie And Julia Project. Unfortunately, the Julie Powell scenes, played adequately by Amy Adams, are far less interesting than the captivating love story of Julia and Paul Child. The film would have been much better served on a buffet tray had it focused solely on Streep and Tucci’s characters which with all that food on display makes one irresistibly hungry for more by the time it’s over. This adaptation also has some wonderfully colorful scenes of the streets and markets of Paris with a running time of 2 hours and 4 minutes. Never the less, it’s a good film worth seeing before having dinner, perhaps at a French Restaurant.

Meryl Streep proves once again that she is the foremost American actress of her generation and is sure to get a sixteenth Oscar nomination come January 2010.Tucci is outstanding as Paul Child and conveys much with gestures, expressions and eye contact. Julie And Julia is an unusually touching love story between two uncommon people.

For a full list of credits see the Idbm database.

Further references:
Mastering The Art Of French Cooking
My Life In France
Julia Child -
Meryl Streep
Stanley Tucci
Nora Ephron
The French Chef

Although Harry Potter And The Half-Blood Prince, the sixth cinematic installment based on J. K. Rowlings’ magical vision of an alternate reality, has received good reviews, it is the most disappointing of the series.  This adaptation, directed by David Yates, written by Steve Kloves and starring Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson and Rupert Grint as the famed trio of gifted wizards, spends a lot of time portraying the actors’ struggle with teenage angst as all the kids of Hogwarts are no longer children, yet it’s hard to believe that the student body has matured so much in the three weeks from the end of the story line in the previous film, The Order Of The Phoenix, unless Hermione Granger secretly slipped into Professor Snape’s magical apothecary using Harry’s cloak of invisibility and concocted “the instant post puberty potion.”

Awkward sexuality and buds’ first bloom are as much apart of this film as it is in the book, however the visuals and humor would have been better served by a less juvenile score, composed for this film by Nicholas Hooper.  A subtle musical backdrop to match the post pubescent awakening would have been an improvement since magic is featured less prominently in this installment, unless love potions and memory vials are considered magic. In fact, hardly a wand is exposed until the very end of this long, two hour and thirty three minute film.  The dialogue is so fast moving and rushed at times that it took about a half hour before I could follow the heavy British accents, a problem I did not have with the previous films. Perhaps English subtitles would have been helpful.

As thunder and lightning suggest in the opening sequence of dark clouds, the approaching storm is nearing. Voldermort and his death-eaters are openly attacking the Muggles’ world. Bridges are collapsing with explosions all over London, but the CGI effects do not impress the dire nature of what was happening.

The movement of the plot is erratic and distracting, never keeping up with the tempo of this chapter of the epic seven-book novel which involves discovering the secret of  Voldermort’s indestructibility and how it is connected to Horace Slughorn - brilliantly played by British thespian Jim Broadbent as the professor hiding a dark secret, while in a state of denial. Broadbent, who won an Oscar in 2001, gives a well-crafted  performance and the best of all the characters in Rowlings ‘ world.  It’s Harry’s job to get close to the teacher and discover what lies beneath the dark Lord’s power which we learn is the “horcrux,” an object imbued with part of the soul of its creator, consciously splintered using dark magic. All of the seven horcruxes created by Voldermort must be found and destroyed before he can be defeated. Therein begins the quest that lay before Harry, Hermione and Ron.

The notion that the way Voldermort could attain immortality by fragmenting his soul and placing parts of it in objects through the use of the dark arts is a very mystical concept. That the fear of death would be so overpowering to motivate him, or anyone else, and to accomplish it by tampering with the very essence of their soul, is quite alarming. We know that objects can and do have the “vibrations” of their owners. Heirlooms are always special for this reason when they are passed down from one generation to the next. This is not exactly the same as a horcrux, but it is along those lines.

Rupert Grint does a good job acting in some very comical scenes while enchanted under the influence of a love potion while Emma Watson is convincing with a crush on Ron, frustrated by his deftness. On the other hand, Daniel Radcliffe seems distracted, unfocused and a bit bored in this installment and the film suffers for it, missing the magical chemistry between them that is so striking in the earlier films as Hogwarts is no longer a central character and the rest of the supporting cast, such as Maggie Smith as ProfessorMcGonagall, are rarely seen.

The film also fails to address Dumbledore’s burned hand, presented in the beginning of the film without explanation, appearing throughout the sequence of events that seem to drag on. His damaged appendage also changes from right to left and it’s hard to tell whether this is intentional or an oversight; a minor detail, but never-the-less noticeable. The other question that keeps popping up is why Harry never suggests that Dumbledore go to a physician to have himself looked at, or a pharmacy to  get some gauze and antimicrobial ointment to cover his wound. Instead,Dumbledore walks around in the film with one hand charred black.

My biggest problem with the film is that the attack on Hogwarts by the death eaters, so important to the climax of the book, is completely diluted in the film. The battle was extensive in written form as the impenetrable Hogwarts, protected from outside evil by charms and spells, is invaded. An important symbol in the story, although one could argue that the film was already too long to have included this in any more detail. Another explanation is that they filmed these scenes but decided to put them in the last film which involves the final face-to-face confrontation at Hogwarts between Harry andVoldermort.

In spite of all the good write-ups, which are puzzling, Harry Potter And The Half-Blood Prince coasts on the momentum built up from the previous films without sustaining the unfolding mystery or telling the story as well as it unveiled in the previous cinematic adaptations. I went into this film as a fan of the novel and the films, wanting to like it but left the quiet theater disappointed by all the outstanding problems. Let’s hope that the Harry Potter and The Deathly Harrows, reportedly being shot simultaneously in two parts, will be done with a bit more thought and care. The strength of these films is less about what happens as it is with the way the plot and visuals unfold since the outcome is already known.

For a full list of the cast of actors see the IMDb link below.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1395738/
Harry Potter and the order of the Phoenix