Return to trevor

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, Emma Watson

JK Rowling, that hussy, is a provocateur. How dare she? Trying to indoctrinate our kids. It is one thing teaching our little crumb crunchers the black arts of Satan and the occult. God knows that since the first book in her series came out, I cannot even get to work without witnessing some little boy turning his friend into a toad and pledging his soul to Old Scratch. Enough is enough. She needs to stop undermining family values. How dare she put a big old queen in charge of the young wizard’s school. Those little Satanists in training need a positive role model, not a Judy Garland singing, musical going, night club going, lisping, swishy walking, fancy Dan. They need a straight male who is willing to measure out discipline with a switch on the youngsters’ naked soft buttocks. If you have not heard, Dumbledoor is gay. Now you would think that he would have better grooming habits, maybe have hit the gym a time or two every week, in order to give us unsuspecting readers a clue, even a YMCA/Village People reference would have helped. But no, Rowling had to reveal that old Dumbledoor was closer to a fairy than a wizard in a question and answer session where a young reader asked if the headmaster ever found love in his life. In her mind, even though she never gave one clue on the printed page, he was a homosexual. An unmarried elderly man, with no wisp of a romantic relationship ever in his life, gay? No way. Thank God, cultural warrior Bill O’Reilly was there to put Rowling in her place. He rightly berated her for “dropping the gay bomb” and chastised her for “preaching tolerance.” The Fox News icon rightly noted that parents “don't want indoctrination. Do you want your child reading ‘Heather has two mommies?’” All I can say is thank God we have a real American like Bill O’Reilly protecting us. Rowling should have family values like Bill’s. You don’t parade homosexuality in the open. You do it behind your long suffering wife’s back.

I am at the point where I just want Harry Potter to just go away. It was cute at first and who could not root for J.K. Rowling and her rags-to-riches story. I could tolerate watching adults walk around with, and stand in long lines at bookstores for, books that were meant for children, c-h-i-l-d-r-e-n, you know, little kids, the thing that once you hit adulthood and go to college you no longer are. That was fine, at least they were reading, but my god, the nuts on the other side made the franchise unbearable for me. I am talking about the crazies who have rubbed their hands together in their churches about it, and tried to get it banned from their school and community libraries. If you think Harry Potter is a Satanic influence, sit down. How do I say this? We live in a universe governed by scientific laws. Magic, not real. There is no school for wizards called Hogwarts, no hocus-pocus spells that really work, or I would be on my yacht rubbing suntan oil on the back of my wife, Jennifer Connelly, right now. Just like the fact that Mickey Mouse talks, but real mice, not so much, because old Mick is fantasy, so is Harry and witches. When it seemed that all that Looney Tunes nuttiness had run its course along came the gay thing and if anything scares the far right more than three pimply-faced wizards, it is a homosexual, or maybe Hillary Clinton. Larry Craig did not catch it from a toilet seat and neither can you or your children if you, or they, are straight. It does not rub off. A person is pretty much born that way. No matter how positive a role model Dumbledoor is in the story, no boy who has a crush on little Sally is going to wake up the next morning and hope that it is raining men. Leave the gays alone. Let them be happy, get married, and be productive members of society, because without them we would have no Broadway or fashion sense, and the leadership of the Republican Party would be a lot smaller. What is next? Hermione is really a hermaphrodite? The creepy looking oriental girl that Harry kisses is really Tokyo Rose? Harry Potter is really part of a sleeper cell of literary terrorists who are just waiting until the right moment to firebomb our imagination?

I want to care less about Harry Potter. Harry Potter-mania has gotten on my nerves. Fans of the books already know the plot of this movie. Gone is Dolores Umbridge. Gone is Sirius Black. Gone is all the filler so Rowling could stretch the series out to seven books and films. Minister of Magic Cornelius Fudge has resigned and been replaced by Rufus Scrimgeour. Things are finally starting to heat up in Potter-ville. The Death Eaters are causing chaos throughout Britain. Severus Snape has sworn an unbreakable vow to protect Draco throughout his task assigned by the Dark Lord and to complete it if he should fail. Voldemort is tightening control over both the Muggle and wizard worlds of England. Dumbledore knows that a final battle is approaching and recruits an old friend Horace Slughorn to help. Add a bunch of teenage hormones going wild and tragedy is in the air.

The Harry Potter franchise is one of the few series that get it right. No matter who the director is, they roll out right on time every year and they keep their ethos as close to the novels as possible and have a legion of rabid fans waiting on pins and needles for the next one. Unheard of in a serial, there has been almost no drop off in quality. The movies have become ATM machines for the Warner Brothers. While there is almost no such thing as a sure thing, Harry films are as close as cinema is ever going to do. The first five films in the franchise have netted an unbelievable $1.4 billion in the US or an average of $282,224,197 per film. Muggles are willing to put down their hard earned cash to watch these movies.

So it is little wonder that Warner Brothers is going to milk this puppy as long as possible. With 2010 looming as the date for the last movie, surprise, surprise, executives decided to make it into two films out of the last book instead of a single adventure. So, the eighth movie is coming out in 2011 because these Ivy League milque toast executives realized that if they are going to keep their hot tub filled with two chicks willing to live out some Bill O’Reilly values, they are going to need a little Harry Potter magic.

Verdict: On Par With The Previous Five Films