the magic ends

Rating: 8/10 (4 October 2012)

I am no big fan of Harry Potter. J.K. Rowling's novels are a combination of two literary genres that I am not fond off – the teenager adventures which I somehow left behind after reading Jules Verne when I was a teenager myself and the magic adventures stories which never really charmed me. Blame my scientific formation.
Not having read any of the books I had to watch the films to get an idea what Harry Potter is about, and here again I did not fall in love. I liked the characters at many moments but I was not fascinated by them. The permanent gallery of good and bad witches with professorial robes fighting each other until and sometimes beyond death ended by confusing me and I stopped watching them carefully from a point on. If there is something that I really liked those were the computerized characters that seem to be benevolent, yet very ugly and very funny at the same time. Do not ask me their names.
And now the end came. In two series spread over two years. I have seen them both in one evening, five hours of magic cinema thanks to the Jewish holidays. Again I could not help but admiring the impeccable camera work, the endless imaginary of the settings with a cool look, cool as they look very good and cool as in frozen as most of the action happens in winter. I also sensed the much darker treatment of the characters, after all round-spectacled kids grow up into round-spectacled teenagers and young men with a different problems, and of course little cued girls grow up into cued young women, and the process can be painful, as we know from our own experiences, or some of us even as parents. The good performances of Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint and Emma Watson made me by the end care about this gang.
I less cared about the apocalyptic battles in this last film in the series, and not even Ralph Fiennes' performance as the super bad guy could convince me that the end can be anything else but the sympathetic heroes wining the war and living happily together in one combination or another. The tendency of the big series from the TV 'Lost' to 'The Lord of the Rings' and now Harry Potter to fight the end of world again each time becomes a little obsessional. The spectacular effects may be the ones attracting the audiences in the cinema theaters, they are not what the viewers remain with a day, a month, a year or a decade after they saw the film. It's the round spectacles and the first exchange of looks between a boy and a girl (be they magician apprentices) that will survive better.