I saw the new Harry Potter the day it came out. I was actually surprised to see how short the line for tickets was. Then, when I got to the ticket counter I saw that every show after 6pm was sold out. I underestimated the mass hysteria surrounding this movie; I wasn’t expecting so many people to show up so many hours in advance for their tickets. Fortunately, it was 3pm and the masses had not chosen the 4pm showing Kat and I were headed to with some friends.

I finished reading The Order of the Phoenix about 2 weeks before the movie came out. Geez! That was a long book. I should say, it wasn’t my favorite of the septology either. The book seemed to drag on. And I felt encumbered by details and plot lines that I deemed unnecessary… like Grawp. On the other hand, J.K. Rowling demonstrated her mastery of storytelling with those subtle details that send me to the grocery store actually expecting someone to brandish a wand and levitate my purchases over the laser scanner zooming into a single a paper bag (which must be too small for all this stuff!).

So, the story was fresh in my mind and while I didn’t think this story was the best, I still had a clear vision of what the Ministry of Magic looked like, how Dolores Umbridge croaked “detention!” very snidely at Harry and how isolated Harry must have felt to carry around the fright of his nightmares and the Daily Prophet’s slander while trying to live a “normal” teenage life. Sitting there, front and center in an auditorium with about 300 other reavenous Potter fans, I expected to watch someone else’s vision of the same story unfold before me in an authentic and entertaining way, as with the other four movies in the series. How disappointed was I, then, to discover that Michael Goldenberg and David Yates apparently read a different book?

Maybe that goes too far. They seemed to have read the beginning, then skipped to the end (hey, it was a long book) and were content to imagine all the details in between for themselves. If you hadn’t read the book, I hear you could almost understand everything that was happening in the movie… almost. Having read the book didn’t help a whole lot with the plot holes, but it did make for a more frustrating experience as you watched one of the seven best stories of the modern world mangled and distorted by an otherwise very competent screenwriter and director.

I’ll see the new Harry Potter movie twice more over the next week as Kat and I visit family members in NJ and PA who have read the Order of the Phoenix but haven’t yet seen the movie. I wonder if I’ll have a different experience now that I have come to terms with the dramatic reinterpretation of the story? Maybe if I read Danielle Steele or some other literary dribble for the next week I can lower the bar enough to actually enjoy the story Yates and Goldenberg are trying to tell.