Harry Potter And The Half Blood Prince

It’s almost two years to the day since I saw the last Harry Potter film. After that film I blogged that I didn’t feel qualified to review a Harry Potter. I hadn't read any of the books then, and I still haven’t, so I have found the films all a bit confusing. I reckon I could easily get lost in this one too.

This film though turned out to be more engaging to me than most of the Potter films have been and miles better than the last film. Book purists, and yes I’m usually one of them, will I’m sure argue that too many sub-plots and characters were left out and that even the odd scene appeared that shouldn’t have been there but, this version, stripped down it may have been, suited me better. It left you needing to know less about what had come before or even after in the series.

Most of the baffling bits came early but even I could follow the Millennium Bridge being destroyed by the Death Eaters, so it's no wonder Harry is reluctant to return to Hogwarts, where security has been tightened to keep those Death Eaters out for his sixth year and it’s not just because he’s chosen the wrong ‘A’ level subjects. That old geezer Dumbledor persuades him to go back and Harry doesn’t seem too bothered that he has to stand up the girl he’d just chatted up at the tube station. Why Harry, why? Oh yes, of course, there’s always Ginny Weasley.

The baffling bits give way to a more human story. Ron gets to become Gryffindor's number one, as in their Quidditch goalie, thanks to Harry boosting his confidence by pretending to give him a luck potion. Good job he didn’t, statutory two year ban for drug cheats these days.



Ron's success pulls the babes; well it pulls Lavender Brown. Hermione is thrilled for them, not. Meanwhile Harry continues to have the hots for Ginny. Which is hardly surprising when she meets him in her dressing gown and then when she got down on her knees in front of him we all held our breath in the cinema... and then she tied his shoelaces.



There’s perhaps too much of the plot concerned with the vagaries of young love, Oh please someone bang all their heads together, but it lightened the darkness of the rest of it. The dark parts of the film certainly were dark and moody, also just like a teenager.

I even follow the clever bit about the tampered memory of Horace Slughorn, (see I have been listening) although isn’t that something we all do, all the time. Jim Broadbent as Slughorn the potions teacher would probably have stolen the show, had it not been for the ever excellent Alan Rickman as Snape. Harry uses the tried and tested routine of getting Slughorn drunk, with the help of Hagrid to jog his memory and fill in the blankety blanks.



Of course it all lost me a bit again at the end with all this talk of Horcruxes but Wikipedia put me straight later.

So not a bad film although I notice with each one they use more and more CGI in the sets whereas I’m sure the earlier films were basically set in real castles. They’ll probably CGI the cast next, so they can keep making films beyond the last book. A CGI Helena Bonham Carter could possibly be even scarier than the real thing, and she’s pretty scary already as the mightily strange Bellatrix Lestrange.

The lack of an ending makes it obvious there’s more to come... but of course you knew that already.

Il y a longtemps que je t'aime (I loved you so long)

‘Il y a longtemps que je t'aime’ better known as ‘I loved you so long’ features Kristen Scott Thomas speaking French. She plays Juliette Fontaine, just out of prison after fifteen years inside. Juliette is taken under the wing of her younger sister Léa, who goes out of her way to make her feel part of her family. Juliette seems a bit unnerved with this unexpected goodwill and at first, barely speaks at all and never mentions her life inside or what took her there. Whatever happened seems to weigh heavy on her and everyone skirting around the subject makes it worse.

She goes through the motions with a social worker and with her parole officer. An odd chap, who is obsessed with visiting the Orinoco that is until we are told that he inexplicably put a gun in his mouth and shot himself. She tries to get a job, not easy when the employers want to know why she’d been in jail but eventually she prevails. Getting back into something else she’s taken a sabbatical from for fifteen years proves a lot easier when she gets propositioned in a bar.



Right from the start, you know that there’s some big revelation on its way but the film makers keep it under wraps until the end. Details do come out but slowly. It turns out that Juliette was in prison for killing her six year old Son. Why? Well that’s the big secret. We are told that she offered nothing in her defence during her trial and that her husband testified against her.

Being a ‘child killer’ makes her a dubious guest for her sister to have in her house. Léa trusts her, which is a tremendous leap of faith considering she has two children, both adopted from Vietnam. Léa’s husband Luc clearly does not share his wife's trust, well certainly not at first, and he understandably fears leaving his kids alone with her. As the viewer, you're not sure who to side with.



As the film progresses along Juliette slowly opens up and starts to enjoy being back in the real world again. So far, so good, it’s a strong story and well told but it starts to go awry when she discloses at a dinner party that she was in prison for murder. Almost everyone assumes it’s a joke, illustrating I suppose that the French media hadn't given her case the saturation coverage it would have got over here and that nobody has had the forethought to ‘Google’ Léa’s mysterious sister who appeared from nowhere.

I feel a little cheated at the end because having been dangling on a thread for ninety minutes, wondering what the big secret was and I have to say enjoying it... bang, the film falls down a large plot hole.

Léa finds a picture of the murdered child along with a note written on the back of his medical card. Lea gets her doctor to check out the medical card and it is revealed that the child had a fatal illness, probably from birth. It appears that somehow Juliette chose to keep this secret from her husband, her sister and her parents.

Instead, being a doctor herself, she ended his suffering by injecting him with an overdose of something and then let everyone believe that she was a child murderer. For what reason? It is suggested to punish herself. For what? Saving her son undue suffering? Whilst at the same time she punishes everyone else around her by not telling them the truth. Then there’s what her fellow prisoners would have thought of her and they would of course had tried to inflict their own justice on her. She must really like self-punishment.

After her trial her parents disowned her and told Léa to do the same. Her father took this misunderstanding to his grave, in fact it probably helped kill him, and her mother took it with her into Alzheimer’s. They will never know the truth.

Even more unlikely was the fact she managed to keep her reasons secret. It’s just not plausible. Which failed A level law student defended her? Even the prosecution would have gone digging for a motive. Didn’t they perform an autopsy? Consult doctor’s notes? It’s just like in ‘The Reader’ but more so.

This implausibility ruined an otherwise good film, which is a shame because otherwise it was excellent!