Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

Before I get to the movies I've seen in Memphis, I have to mention a few stragglers I didn't talk about from when I was in Maryland last month. Both are movies I saw at the AMC Loews at the White Flint Mall in Bethesda.

The White Flint Mall is the kind of place that reminds me of how much money has flowed into the Washington, D.C. area over the last couple days, like a giant suction pump that has vacuumed in all the wealth from much of the rest of the country and the world.

The mall is beautiful, with valet parking and and ornate design. At the front entrance is a three-story Borders Books, which I navigated to reach the theaters on the third floor.

The multiplex itself was actually very low-key, given the rest of the mall. It was very compact, with a tiny conessions stand and long thin auditoriums. I was one of about ten people there to see Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince for the weekday matinee.

I don't really know what to say about this movie, since I'm not really a huge fan of the Harry Potter series, nor do I detest them. To say that they are simply not my "thing" is more accurate.

First off, I just don't relate to the whole magical paradigm of storytelling that has emerged over the last couple decades, and which has reached its apotheosis in the Potter stories. To wit, a magical hero battles a magical villain using magical powers. To win the battle, the hero must find the right combination and use of magic to defeat his evil nemesis.

What's wrong with this? Nothing, if you do it right, but I think it ultimately over time makes for lazy storytelling. If there are no rules to reality, then you can get away with anything.

J.K. Rowling seems to take advantage of the "no holds barred" storytelling that magic in a way that strikes me as being very haphazard. The plot of the movies seems to be Dumbledore telling Harry, "Oh yes, and here's another magical person and magical power I didn't tell you about until now, but turns out to be very important." I thought the series reached its nadir in the third movie, with the whole time travel-driven plot.

This kind of stuff bores the hell out of me. I watched the first two Potter movies at the theater, but stopped after that. Last year I caught up by watching the next three in quick succession from Netflix.

When I sat down to watch this installment at White Flint, I immediately realized that I had little memory of where the story had left off, and was utterly confused by what was going on. It brought to mind something about the Potter stories that I've discovered: over the course of six movies (at present), there has been precious little actual narrative of consequence.

After five stories, we still no very little about Voldemort or what he is really doing. By this time, we should have learned a lot about what his real agenda is. But he remains a shadowy evil. Yawn.

That being said, Half Blood Prince was probably one of the better movies of the series, mainly because it finally started to cash in on some ofthe set-up from earlier movies. We still got introduced to arbitrarily new magical stuff, but there was enough momentum from the previous five movies to make me give a damn about what was happening.

It followed my general rule of enjoying the even-numbered Potter installments (2,4, and 6) better than the odd-numbered ones (1,3, and 5). It doesn't bode well for the next installment, but perhaps the series will end on a high note with Episode 8.