I don't want to rain on the Whedonites' weekend, because lord knows those poor miserable people have been through enough. (They cancelled Firefly! In 2002!!) But I'm just not on board with Dr. Horrible. Did no one else find it... kinda humdrum? There's a self-congratulatory air about the proceedings with this one, which I hope does not extend to Dollhouse, but probably could. Yes, the whole project is sorta adorable and there are songs and Doogie Howser has a death ray. But if this were made by a college kid - aside from the fact that we'd all be gawping at the fact that he somehow found fifty billion dollars for his budget - would we really be calling it all the great things it's been called this week? The story is flat, the genre innovations are a no-show, and the technical craft is bottom-drawer. There isn't a single note here that wasn't done better in any of the other superhero inversions of the past five years, and there's no ending. Honestly, I've come to expect more. Captain Napalm: strike!

Anyhoo. Rough weekend. I ate several grilled cheese sandwiches. Well, to be fair, one cannot really call what I grew up with as "grilled cheese" truly "grilled cheese," as there is no grilling involved whatsoever. It's more like "broiled cheese sandwiches." To whit:

1. Toast two pieces of white bread
2. Butter one side of each piece with the yellowest margarine you can find
3. Pre-heat oven on broil
4. Place both pieces of toast on a baking sheet, one with butttered side up, one with buttered side down. On the one with buttered side down, place two pieces of thin Kraft cheese singles, the ones that are not made out of actual cheese.
5. Put in the oven and heat until cheese is gooey and other piece of toast is notably browning
6. Take out of oven, put un-cheesed toast on the cheesed toast, flip the whole sandiwch, and re-broil until other side is as brown as the first side was
7. Serve and enjoy.

Comfort food is lovely, but I may panic soon and need to watch the entirety of The Lord of the Rings. It's a scale of escalation.

So, I am likely not going to be living in my dream home at College and Yonge come September first. This means I am shortly to join Toronto's homeless population. As predicted on this blog 18 months ago, my homeless personality shall be Captain Jack Sparrow - me and that Jedi guy outside the Scotiamount are gonna have a fight. Look for me - my hair is nearly long enough for dreadlocks already. Shiesh! How do people stand having hair in the summer?

Happy Potteaster! On this day in 2007, Harry Potter died for our sins and was reborn a complete franchise. Praise Potteresus.

Posted by tederick at 9:40 AM in foodin' & h-pot & joss
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It's official...

Posted by tederick at 8:12 PM in h-pot
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I got promoted at the Starbucks this morning. They said, "instead of calling you Pirate Matt from now on we're going to call you Captain Matt." Then they gave me free cookies. I know what you're thinking: there's no way my life is this excellent. But it is.

Ewoks are shrinking. If you put my Romba next to my Teebo it looks fucking odd, to say nothing of the fact that Wicket looks like he could consume Chief Chirpa whole. It is for reasons like this more than any other that I think my enjoyment of action figures has come to an end. They're not even playing by the rules any more. The rules are: all toys must be able to play with all other toys. You know how Shatner is like a head shorter than Picard over in the Star Trek line? That is fucking bullshit, man.

Speaking of Shatner, the man's a pimp.

I was reading the last couple hundred pages of Deathly Hallows this morning while the storm raged outside the Starbucks, and was quite comfortable all stuffed into a comfy chair and wondering if Voldy ever knew that people like Snape could conceal all their duplicities inside a tiny bubble of perfect, selfless love for the long-dead witch with the green eyes. Boy, it all just comes up to a whole new level in that book, doesn't it? You'd almost think JKR planned it all out.

Posted by tederick at 2:16 PM in galaxy far & h-pot & pirates & toys!
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If this is true, it's the only thing since the announcement that PJ/F/Ph wouldn't be writing/directing that made me feel like that movie could actually be up to the standard. Of course, this would preclude Guillermo directing the 2 Deathly Hallows films (to be separately titled Harry Potter And, and The Deathly Hallows). Which sucks. I spent rather a lot of time on Friday fantasizing about that particular possibility. But still, this'll do just fine. And if it puts Cauron back in the h-pot director's chair, so much the better.

Media advisory: I will be neither hosting nor attending any Lost parties this Thursday. Catch up with y'all in the coming weeks.

Still feel like awful. Have had the most excruciating headache of my life for most of the last 36 hours, and painkillers don't even dent it. Wheeeeee!

Posted by tederick at 3:33 PM in 4-8-15-16-23-42 & h-pot & pj's playground
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"Perhaps it was the light on your face, but I thought I recognised you from somewhere a long way down, somewhere at the bottom of the sea." - Lighthousekeeping

Did I get sent to work today with a Lazer Tag lunch box filled with a lunch that my girl made for me, and little notes and instructions that say things like "eat the carrots - you need vegetables"? Yes. Yes I did. And yet, she had me at "let's watch Pirates 1 and 3 but not 2." Sooner than that, even. Oh dusty world.

The TTC delay at Vic Park this morning (curses!!) got me thorugh the rest of Lighthousekeeping and out the other side, which is always a horrible feeling - "why didn't I bring more books???" I am now swinging back to H-pot for another Deathly Hallows re-read... this is, what? My fourth? It's in my head a lot these days, in near-Blu-Ray sharpness. I'm also reading a book about e.simulation design! Because I'm a nerd.

Here are some things I called my friend Erin while we were at lunch yesterday:"Gigantor," "Godzilla," "Monster Woman," "genetic disaster from a horror movie," and "something from out of the Deep." Isn't it nice when I express myself?

Now I'm listening to Return of the King and rather enjoying the look and feel of the day. My extended-hours cram session last night got me well ahead on a few things and I'm tackling a few more even as I type. Fabulous multi-screen multi-program multi-brain-lobe multi-tasking! I could teach a class.

Posted by tederick at 10:50 AM in books & h-pot & j-o-b & jedi antics
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I've been handing out Man of the Year here on the ol' blog since way back in 2000, when this utterly inconsequential no-prize was awarded to the conceptual godfather of the whole deal, Richard Hatch. At the time I was proud - yes, proud! - that no non-dude would ever win the entirely uncoveted "of the year" title here on the site, but from the very early goings in 2007, I was fairly aware that the ship was about to capsize. Men are just so uncompelling these days! And if we're trying to note the person who had the biggest effect on the Tederick.comverse for the calendar year of the award, cast your eyes no further than the little category we like to call h-pot: did anything else in 2007 even come close?

There was a whole lot of Potter prattle over the summer, but I think the entry called Dumbledore's Army does the best job of getting into exactly why this all mattered so much to me. Rowling created a book series; Rowling's book series created a culture. That culture is, beyond compare, the warmest, kindest, most inclusive, most exclusive fan base I've ever had privilege to be even remotely associated with, and it brought the big hugs n' happy for the majority of my year. That's really something.

Doesn't hurt that the book was the best I've read in a long, long time, either.

J.K. Rowling is the very first winner of Tederick.com's Woman of the Year. Previous recipients of the now-defunct Man of the Year include the authors of Civil War, Matty Price, Woogie, Peter Jackson, Master Yoda, Mark, and Richard Hatch.

Posted by tederick at 11:04 AM in books & h-pot & tederickdotcomdotcom
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OK I know I'm the last man to the party on this thing, but holy fucking CHRIST this is the funniest thing I've seen in a year:

Me and Bex just watched H-Pot 5 in Blu-Ray. She showed me this video. It's snowing. I have a party to go to. And I have a Johnny Depp hand.

Posted by tederick at 7:43 PM in h-pot & shinybludisks & youtubery
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The events of the weekend did one thing rather brilliantly: they completely erased my memory of seeing The Golden Compass. Like, on Monday morning I saw the poster on the way to work and was like, "oh yeah, that movie." Now I'm (finally) reading Lyra's Oxford again, which is a dessert course that should not have been preceeded by the stew, but whatever, it's still lovely, if far too short. You know, someday someone should do all of these things film-wise. Three features, and however many shorts Pullman ends up writing (there's one about Lee and Iorek coming out in the spring), plus the apocrypha and the lantern slides. That would make one hell of a DVD.

(At this point I'm presuming that New Line will never in a million years bankroll Knife and Spyglass after the pantsing Compass took at the box office this weekend. If we ever get around to a Mamo, I might explain more. Meantime, here's a good bit about the scripts, including the Hollywood bullshit line of the year: “The aim is to put in the elements we need to make this movie a hit, so that we can be much less compromising in how the second and third books are shot" - way to go Chris!)

There is now a floating theory that I am in fact from a parallel reality. This replaces the previous theory that Daniel is the central hub of a web of alternate worlds that only he can interact with, because now not only does Daniel not remember seeing Antenna with me, but I have no memory of seeing Spider-Man 2 with Chris. Since I am clearly the common element in these divergent histories, I must be the one who tumbled in from an alterna-cosmos. Which is fine, but I do miss our old morning ritual of eating cake before breakfast while wearing knit caps. It's the little things that make a home a home, y'know?

It is dead terrific to be out of DVD bankruptcy, internets. Still feels a bit strange though, like I was doing something naughty yesterday when I bought Lost. I also picked up some shiny blu Harry Potter 5, which looks fan-frickin'-tastic. Looking forward to watching that again and seeing whether I actually liked it, or just liked it because it wasn't as godawful as Goblet.

For my next trick, I shall write an entire instructional design plan in just north of 150 minutes. SHAZAAAM!!!

Posted by tederick at 9:06 AM in books & h-pot & movies & shinybludisks & shinydisks
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Well, it's the next-to-last mail day before the party, and the crowning element of my Hallowe'en costume has yet to arrive. Which is pretty disappointing. But of all the elements of this thing to have to improvise, this is the one I've got covered off regardless, so I guess there are worse things. Still - !! You would not believe how cool this one particular thing was going to be. (I will show you next week, whether it arrives or not.) Oh well. I guess it could still arrive tomorrow.

Otherwise, I bench-tested the rest of the motherfucker just now, and god damn. As I think I've said before, there is absolutely no one who is going to be impressed by what I've done here, other than me. But I am so fucking proud of this deal. And I've got the strut down cold.

What else happened today? Well, we shot Daniel's second and last segment of VCR: The Ninth Gate for one thing, and Daniel taught me a new word: defenestration. Oh, I love it. I think it is one of the loveliest words I have ever heard. I wish I had known of this word from the moment we first conceived of this VCR decalogue; it might have been the title for the whole deal. At the very least, I'm going to have to slip it into the credits for VCR10y. And possibly every other thing I ever write for the rest of ever.

After giving it some more thought, I realized vis a vis the Dumbledore situation that I agree with this guy, at least on the macro scale: there is something morally cowardly about what went on here, and not just the after-the-last-minute outing. But after even more thought on the subject, I also realized that for all my desire to have Dumbledore be the perfect queer icon that the fantasy universe deserves to have, the pieces don't really fit. I didn't give one passing thought to Dumbledore's entire lack of a sexual or romantic life when he was (de facto) heterosexual; I don't see why the sex life of a 115-year-old man should suddenly need to be foregrounded when that sex life involves other men instead of women. This is all part of a very complicated idea, but at least part of this idea bears the veneer of reverse homophobia. So I think a) we had better leave this alone now, and b) Rowling shouldn't have bothered in the first place. Putting this on the table just showed how desperate the table is. It would be nice if any one thing could ever just mean one thing, but that'll never happen. Forcing mandates upon icons just makes them fall down. And good lord, Michael Gambon must be getting weary of his picture being the very meaning of "THIS MAN IS GAY!" this week.

Moving over to the next franchise, I read the end of The Golden Compass today and am now into The Subtle Knife; whoever hypno-whammied Phillip Pullman into supporting the excision of the last three chapters of Compass from the film that shall shortly bear its name should be cast off the highest cliff on all of Svalbard. The bear fight is not the climax of Lyra's arc in the first book. Good fucking lord. Basic screenwriting, people.

Anyways, based on how much finishing Compass got to me today, I am going to be a snivelly, weepy mess when Spyglass dwindles down, a few hundred pages from here. Doing this in the fall might have been a grand, beautiful mistake.

Posted by tederick at 10:36 PM in books & h-pot & movies & pirates & sex (theoretical) & tederick films
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Hey, Dumbledore's gay! Really don't know what to make of that one. I guess it's all right. When a character is so utterly sexless as Dumbledore is, I suppose it's reasonably easy to make him gay... especially months after the fact, huh? Boy, the slash community is going to go fucking crazy on this one. Might as well reveal that Snape is actually a woman named Sheila while we're at it.

Much easier to enjoy on the newsfront is the revelation that Criterion will finally be dipping into the Kurosawa canon with their Eclipse series... series 7, to be exact, which will be called "Postwar Kurosawa." Interestingly they're actually calling Record of a Living Being by its original title, I Live In Fear - which is only interesting because they didn't bother to do it for High and Low or Throne of Blood.

I expect there still has to be an "Early Kurosawa" box out there to be made, containing Sanshiro Sugata 1 & 2, along with They Who Step on the Tiger's Tail. Drunken Angel is getting a spec ed release in November. But we're entering the unfortunate realm of film scholarship where, quite literally, there might be no standing prints of the early works to make DVDs out of. And we're talking about artwork of less than 65 years of age. How does anything survive anything?? We're such brutes.

I had a bunch of stuff I was looking forward to doing today. But I'm coming down with a cold and my energy level has completely vanished on me. So instead I'm attacking people on Facebook and trying to figure out if it's worth slogging to the IGA to get Kraft Dinner.

Posted by tederick at 3:42 PM in h-pot & shinydisks
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Owwwwwww ow ow - my arm hurts from Wiimote use. Which I guess goes to show you how few punches I throw in real life.

Yeah, Chris and Demetre and I took the boxing for a few rounds last night. I managed to not play the Wii for the entire time I was working at home yesterday - and then 3:30 rolled around, I turned off the laptop, turned on the Wii, fired up RESIDENT! EVIL! ...FOUR. and the next time I looked up, it was dark. In the plus column though, I cut down zombies like a thresher cuts corn. Zombies have become the perfect metaphor for my life, my pain, and the entirety of confusing human existence.

So September's here. Did you know I only saw the Harry Potter movie once this summer? I've sort of been kicking myself about that lately. The book just sort of overwhelmed everything and now I've got some serious Order cravings I can't satisfy till the DVD comes out. (Actually, till a month after the DVD comes out, on account of DVD Bankruptcy not expiring until December 4.) Plus the first screening of a Potter flick is basically useless; it all just gets burned settling up the expectations vs. reality account and creating the List of Things They Changed From the Book. I never saw the IMAX 3-D, either, and I never will. So dumb. Sorry Harry. I really do adore you.

Speaking of movies, did you know that there's actually a serious ongoing debate on the Interwebs right now about the shakycam cut style of The Bourne Ultimatum? I thought it worked brilliantly, and I saw the flick in about the sixth row of the Varsity 8, over on the left side of the theatre, so I don't think screen proximity helped me out at all. Apparently a lot of other people had serious problems interpreting the visual data, however... or even keeping themselves from being sick. David Bordwell has some pretty interesting comments on the matter over on his blog, but on issues like this I start to wonder if matters more physiological and less psychological might be at work. (And again, I rail against the concept of an objective understanding of "how film works.") We don't really know a lot about the actual physical components of how a human body interacts with a filmed image; it's possible that the ability to sift through "run and gun" filmmaking is as genetic as hair colour. I can't smoke 2 Cuban cigars back to back to save my life, but I can sit through the entire Bourne trilogy and not even develop a headache. I drilled through the complex web of visual and aural information, found the thread I needed to hang onto, and hung onto it; the rest of the frenzy merely informed that relationship, rather than negatively interfering with it. I really do believe that Greengrass was doing something significantly more intelligent with the "run and gun" approach than, say, Tony Scott does with it; that he was working on a more coherent and intelligent schematic in order to make it all work. But maybe chaos is chaos, and finding order in it is as accidental as seeing faces in wet sand. Just like, you know, life.

Posted by tederick at 1:15 PM in h-pot & miscellaneous crap & movies & wii & zombies
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Three down (?). One to go: we're at the edge of the forest.

There are few things in nature more pitiful than a dead snake. Snakes - while alive - remain my last lingering natural fear, but once dead, a snake so completely loses its essential snakeness that it becomes less than even a mean parody of its original self. A living snake is alarming because of its very nature: the way it moves, the way its body reacts to its muscles and skeleton and scales, the way its horrible snake brain processes and interprets the fundamental drives that make it, in fact, a snake. All of these things, however, evaporate immediately upon death. No other creature so completely abandons the things that make it itself when it dies as does the snake. A dead rabbit is still demonstrably a rabbit; a dead snake is like a discarded inner tube or a used condom, a depressed leaving on the road to God's toilet. Pity the dead snake: in passing, it suffers the ignominy of an utter refutation of self. And there ain't no snake heaven.

Over the weekend, I made a fairly significant change to Snapdragon, and then finished the first issue and sketched out the rest of the opening arc. I love it. I'm going to try to at least lay feet in cement on the second issue today; it's still a big concept and quite possibly too rude for the world, but it's fun to be writing again, and writing something where I can stitch in so many bizarre and useless details from my own bizarre and useless life. Once the first 4 issues are done, I'll share and discuss.

I finished Deathly Hallows for the second time this morning, and now get to put Potter back on the shelf for the next long while. I've been nonstop Potter since what, the beginning of June? I do dearly love that book, though. Once again I really respond to the multifold stories that come exploding out of it in the end - not just the conclusion of Harry's tale, but the scant, imaginative details that fill my brain with thoughts of Dumbledore's youth and Snape's tortured life and what it's like to be Aberforth and what Neville and the DA got up to in their seventh year and what Rose, Hugo, Lily, Albus and James might get up to at Hogwarts nineteen years from now. That's something I got a lot of in Pirates 3, too, ironically; I liked the fact that when the story was done, it nonetheless suggested a half dozen other stories that might yet happen but are left entirely under my own governance to work out for myself in a summer daydream. That's good writing. It's no longer a question of density: just one of setting a few gears in motion, and hoping your readers are creative enough to go to their own places with them. Trusting our ability to keep the worlds alive ourselves, rather than having to be told.

Posted by tederick at 11:04 AM in h-pot & the process
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Less than six months after her tenth birthday, Buffy turns fifteen today. Oh media.

A certain individual who saved the entire magical and non-magical world from enslavement and death was also born today.

6:46 in the morning? What the hell is wrong with every molecule of me???

Posted by tederick at 6:46 AM in h-pot & joss
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Rebecca Wood, that is.

More news from the front:

Over here, you can read about Daniel Radcliffe reading Deathly Hallows. Oddly, he and I were listening to the exact same music when the book ended. Coincidence? Obviously.

Ye olde info re: Angel Season 6 be here.

And from the Joss panel: Ripper looks like a definite maybe, More Fray Coming, Drew "God" Goddard writes Buffy after BKV, and that crazy son'bitch Joss is writing a fucking ballet for Summer Glau. What?

Posted by tederick at 9:04 PM in comix & h-pot & joss
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You know that thing where I said if you didn't want to be spoiled for Deathly Hallows, you shouldn't come to the blog for 4 or 5 days? Turns out it's going to be a lot longer than that. By my reckoning the statute of limitations on spoilers runs out on Monday anyway so you can deal with it as you see fit; last night Amelia and I got shushed at a restaurant because we were talking too loudly about what happens to Neville. (Good natured shushing, mind you, and happily accepted.) And I'm pretty sure Jeff was ready to take a swing at Stacey and me at soccer last week because we just couldn't stop talking about it. You ever seen a pissed off Szpirglas? It's a wonder to behold.

Today we're going to be talking about two of my very favourite aspects of the final book: the redemption(s) of Kreacher and Severus Snape. These are both interesting because I basically thought they were impossible. I mean, I knew she'd make some token effort to redeem Snape in Book Seven and I thought I'd be all like, "OK, whatever" about it, but there is no denying that when she gets done with ol' Sev, she has actually succeeded in completely reversing every single thing you thought you knew about the character. Ditto for Kreacher, a redemption I didn't even see coming... I seem to discount House Elves from the character dynamics scale for some reason (it never even occured to me that she could kill Dobby) which is just faulty reasoning on my part. End of Book Five, I pretty much hated that guy as much as I've ever hated any character in the saga (short of Umbridge). Now, I'm all about Kreacher. I want a Kreacher of my very own. I derive enormous satisfaction from the fact that in the years following Hallows, Kreacher got to live out his remaining time on this earth taking care of Harry Potter and his family. That is a beautiful thing.

Snape's turn, too, is a beautiful thing. More of a tragic thing than Kreacher's, obviously, because every single bad thing that happens to Snape, he brought upon himself. In both his and Kreacher's case, the turn for the readers seems to rely on showing the pitiable state in which the characters find themselves - in Kreacher's case, we literally watch him getting tug-of-warred by the various requirements of the House Elf's enslavement; in Snape's, we see how he slowly and meticulously drove his one true love out of his life, and then had to not only suffer the ignominy of watching her marry and procreate with the living emblem of everything Snape hated/wished he could be, but die for it (at least partially through Snape's actions). There's no magical curse on Snape, but he's as fucked as they come. He's a dead man walking from the moment he turns to Dumbledore before the attack in Godric's Hollow, and yet every single nasty, horrible thing he had to do over the next 16 years is coloured completely differently when you realize he was doing it all for Lily. Good googly moogly, how god fuck awful it is to finally be empathizing with Severus Snape.

These turnarounds lead to two of the most affecting images in the book and possibly the entire saga - Kreacher slaving over a steak and kidney pie that Harry will never return home to eat; and Snape wanting to die looking into Harry's/Lily's eyes. Once you put the pieces together on that, tell me you haven't completely come around on every single thing you ever thought about both of those despicable wretches. It's all so masterfully done.

Posted by tederick at 9:30 AM in h-pot
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Holy sweet magical crap, JKR spilled the beans. Everything that happened after: the long version!

Surprisingly, the info about Luna was what I was craving the most, with Hermione's career choice falling a close second.

Fuck, I want this. Stupid exclusives stupid stupid.

Posted by tederick at 4:02 PM in h-pot
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OK, I went to the white place for a minute there.

Harry Potter 6 casting rumours: not true. For my part I'm well into casting 7 in my head; I want Daniel Craig for Yaxley and I want to get Peter O'Toole in there as either old Grindelwald or Elphias Doge, as a tip of the hat to the one true Dumbledore (Richard Harris). And clearly we gotta get Bob Hoskins in there somewhere (Xenophilius Lovegood?) or he's gonna cry.

Michael, row your boat ashore. Hallelujah.

Hey guess what: in addition to getting the Indy license (shah!), Sideshow also picked up the import license for Hot Toys' Pirates 3 line. Including this very swank Captain Swann. Those suckers run a damn fortune but them's the breaks.

Enjoyed Buffy #5 a lot but I think I need to read it again cuz the structure sorta threw me. Enjoyed Mighty Avengers a whole lot more, which has been happening with uncanny regularity lately. That is some mighty, mighty Avengers.

Posted by tederick at 10:53 PM in 4-8-15-16-23-42 & comix & h-pot & toys!
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Hangover. Harry Potter hangover. While I could not help but remark, last night, how nice it was to be reading anything that wasn't Harry Potter - there are other stories and characters and events in the world, oh my! - after my short respite I am now starting my second read on Deathly Hallows. Because otherwise, y'know, the DTs. Nonetheless I am feeling downright funky all over. It's like having the same dream two nights in a row. Plus I'm inexplicably exhausted. I think I'm not eating well enough or getting enough exercise or something. I felt so completely wiped and exhausted this afternoon that I came home from work early. It's not as much fun as it used to be, now that looking at porn has lost its appeal. Instead I'm cruising celebrity blogs, because I needed more reasons why I am better than Zach Braff.

Here are the recent non-Potter bullet points:

• Serenity Rose: gloriously healed!
• Mamo #90: the death of my headset!
• New Firefox tab handler: pissing me off.
• One minute movie shoot on Saturday: sunburny but excellent. I can still make it up as I go along, like a champ.
• Cottage plans for the weekend: trembling mightily.
• Yellow Wall: dominating first half of season; second half absences threaten the record.
• Urge to blog: virtually nonexistent. Additionally my blogTO contributions have all but dried up. Have I lost my perspicacity?

Posted by tederick at 4:16 PM in h-pot & podcastery & scars & sockey & tederick films
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I can't believe Voldemort was living inside Ginny the whole time! I can't believe he decided to take the concept of the Horcrux one step further with the creation of the Morcrux, wherein a little bit of his soul lives inside every single person Harry has ever touched with his mouth! Mental, that.

I WARNED YOU.

I have made intimations along these lines previously but I wanted to say it once more, clearly and for the record: I am so damned grateful to every single Harry Potter fan whose life has crossed mine in the past month. I have traveled with many fanbases, so I can safely say that Harry Potter fans are the best in the world. Unfortunately due to the random and usually unfamiliar nature of these encounters, I can more easily thank the wind than thank them in person. But as I think I've said before, I've had more conversations - sometimes shockingly heartfelt, personal, emotionally supportive conversations - with total strangers in the past month than I ever have in my entire life. Most recently on Friday night at the Indigo where we got our books, where I was temporarily inducted into a small cadre of Potterphiles who had never met me before and will likely not meet me again, where yet another utter stranger joined our midst for the duration from outside and then melted away into the night to do what we've all just spent the last two days doing. We are all of us united. Or like the Coke ad says, "you give a little love, and it all comes back to you."

Love being, of course, the prevailing theme anyway. We won, gang. We won.

What I Liked (being a presumptuous list of excellences)

The greening of Dudley. The motherfucking X-wing dogfight (for all intents and purposes) in the sky over Privet Drive. The death of Hedwig, first soldier down. (I mean that's not a good thing, but damn howdy, it was effective. Cry my eyes out, part 1.) Second soldier down. The kiss. The wedding. Kreacher, now quite possibly my second-favourite character ever. Umbridge's eyeball and what came after. Indiana Jonesin' around the British countryside. The One Ri... er, locket. I can live with the sister thing. Boy-huggin'. Luna's bedroom (cry my eyes out, part 2). The Hallows, whatever they are, and wherever they're from. The death of Dobby. (See above re: Hedwig.) Riding the dragon (oh YEAH). Aberforth, in his entirety, vying with Kreacher for my eternal affections. The Ariana story. Minerva McGonagall. Neville Longbottom, Resistance Leader. The Children's Crusade. The suits of armour. "Is this the moment?" "Oi, there's a war going on here!" Continued magical interestingness (the Gringotts boobytraps; Crabbe's Big Mistake). The Battle of Hogwarts, part 1. Percy. McGonagall vs. Snape. Ron punching Malfoy ("and that's the second time we've saved your life tonight, you two-faced bastard!"). Snape and Lily and Petunia on the playground. Snape and Lily later. Looking into "Lily's" eyes as he died. Grawp vs. giants. Harry walking to his death (cry my eyes out, part 3). The Galadrielesque conversation in King's Cross. Neville beheading the snake. The Battle of Hogwarts, part 2. Buckbeak and the Thestrals. Kreacher and the elves. "NOT MY DAUGHTER, YOU BITCH!" The final duel. The portrait applause. The unremitting sense of joy of the thing, from about page 450 onward, even in the face of what must have then seemed certain doom.

What I Did Not So Much Like (being a list of quibbles that I will otherwise not give a fuck about ten minutes from now)

No Regulus, not really anyway. That damn mirror (that's two I owe ya, G). The strong Trio focus reducing the rest of the cast to cameo roles. All the frickin' Polyjuice. Harry Potter, Frequently Unconscious. Overuse of Rita Skeeter's various doings. Ron flippin' and runnin', again. The ghosts of Harry's family showing up, again. (We get it already.) Remus and Tonks - seems arbitrary and pointless. The explain-it-all convenientness of the apparent states of death. (If we could always just ask the portraits for advice, why didn't we do that from the frickin' get-go?) Knowing the future careers and lifestyles of literally everybody except the three people we care about most.

The one thing I was right about that I most specifically wish I was wrong about:

Fred.

The only "I Told You So" I shall utter:

Harry, the Horcrux. It's on page 568 spelled out in those exact words. To every single person who has declaimed to me with righteous defiance over the past two years that Harry couldn't possibly be a Horcrux, look it the fuck up.

Good shit from out and about:

"Speaking of people who are Like Jesus, In a Way, can I just say that it was like the fucking Beatles came out of those packing boxes when they opened at 12:01? I've never heard screaming like that in my life." - Cleolinda

"As the conflict with Voldemort comes to a head, Ron Weasley is suddenly and shockingly killed. Hermione responds with steely determination, joined by Luna Lovegood, who turns out to be a rare witch who has super-powerful martial arts skills." - If Joss Whedon Wrote Deathly Hallows

Adorable pictures.

"It's one of the key differences between Rowling and her great literary forebears. Rowling has been careful to build Harry up from boy to man, student to leader, but she has been equally attentive to the task of breaking Dumbledore down, from a divine father-figure to a mere human. Her insistence on this point is a reflection of the cosmology of the Potterverse: there are no higher powers in residence there. The attic and the basement are empty. There may be an afterlife, and ghosts, but there is certainly no God, and no devil. There are also no immortal, all-wise elves, as in Tolkien... there is certainly no benevolent, paternal Aslan to turn up late in the book and fight the Big Bad. The essential problem in Rowling's books is how to love in the face of death, and her characters must arrive at the solution all on their own, hand-to-hand, at street level, with bleeding knuckles and gritted teeth, and then sweep up the rubble afterwards." - Time Magazine

"Of course it happened inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?" - Albus Dumbledore

Beyond the veil

One other thing worth quoting from that Time article, by the way: "We did something very rare for Harry Potter: we lost our cool." Boy did we. In this miserable age when irony has eclipsed sense, the entire world went blushingly gaga over the goodhearted adventures of a boy wizard and his friends. I suppose it can't truly be argued that Rowling's work is particularly supple or ingenious in the way that Tolkien and Pullman will forever be; the reason that none of that matters, the reason that all of this happened, is her nearly uncanny knack for characters. We loved them. We loved each and every one of them like (as I quipped in my Phoenix review) blood. There is a dexterity and dimensionality to the inhabitants of this gormlessly cheery alternaverse that leaves them like shadows on the wind long after the storm has ceased to rage. The storm is over, all right, but they're still glimmering behind our eyes, and my strong suspicion is that their mark will be with us forever.

Posted by tederick at 9:53 PM in h-pot
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THAT. WAS. SO. GOD. DAMNED. SATISFYING.

I don't know how much of the epilogue I absorbed. The words were sort of swimming before my eyes.

Posted by tederick at 1:09 PM in h-pot
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Don't visit the blog for the next five or six days if you don't want to be spoiled for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Additionally, comments will not be moderated, e-mails will not be replied to, and the web will not be surfed. I am going into the hole.

In the meantime, here be my predictions:

Is Harry going to die?

No. I do not believe that the series we have been reading for the past six books has been the tale of a person coming to the end of his life. This, like largely any other fantasy series for young people, has been a story of how to be a moral person in a complex universe. I do firmly believe that Harry will get a "Frodo" ending - i.e. as with most heroes, he will see and do things in saving the world that will make him unable to return to a normal, happy lifestyle after whatever fates await him in DH - but I do not personally believe he will die.

I have, of course, been wrong before. I had no sooner come up with my "this is not a tale of a person coming to the end of his life" theory than I realized that, well, it kinda is. Death has shaped every single major decision and distinction that Harry has come to in these past six years. His nemesis, Voldemort (true translation TBD), fears death above all other things and seeks to overcome it, meaning that Harry's true quest should be to accept the inevitable reality of human mortality. So... yeah. I still believe paragraph a), but must admit that paragraph b) has solid foundations.

Is Hermione going to die?

Why the FUCK does everyone keep saying that???

Honestly, and these aren't just my prejudices talking: if Hermione was going to die, she would have died in Book 5. At this point I'd actually say that Hermione is the safest character in the series. If there is one Potter character that I would lay good odds on having a nice, fat "what happened to her after Hogwarts" paragraph in the final chapter of the book, it's Hermione Granger. (Future Minister for Magic.)

Well then...?

If Rowling kills a trio member (and I hold that chance at slightly less than 50/50), she's killing Ron. I'd love to think she could do away with Hagrid but I'm not that lucky. Ginny's in solid jeopardy (see above re: Frodo ending). Snape, clearly, is doomed, regardless of whatever deal he worked out with Dumbledore in advance of the murder; Malfoy should be killed (there is no redemption for what he did in Phoenix), but won't be. All of the other Weasleys are obvious fodder, and I remain firm in my belief that killing a twin (but not the other twin) is pretty hefty on the drama scale. Killing a Dursley would also have phenomenal dramatic power; McGonagall's probably all right but some of the other teachers (and former teachers: Lupin, Moody) will probably be going down. It's a war, after all. For some reason I'm pretty sure Tonks is gonna make it. And let's not forget that if "two major characters" are indeed going down, old Voldy is about as major as it gets.

Is Harry a Horcrux?

Yes, I think he is. We do not actually know what curse Voldemort performed on Harry that rebounded and formed the scar. We have always assumed it was Avada Kedavra, but it may not have been; like that drink on the Enterprise so long ago, we only know that it was green. Voldemort had just killed two people to get to Harry, providing ample soul-shredding potential. The opportunity to create a living Horcrux out of the person marked to destroy him would have been quite appealing to young master Riddle. Harry being a Horcrux explains why he dreams Voldemort's dreams, why he sees through Nagini's eyes (another Horcrux) when she attacks Mr. Weasley, and why Snape has been so damn freaked out by H-pot since day one.

But if Harry's a Horcrux, then doesn't he have to die in order to destroy Voldemort?

Who am I, Noam fucking Chomsky? Figure it out for yourself!

A few final words:

Serpentsortia. Murtlap. Millicent Bullstrode's no pixie.

Posted by tederick at 9:17 AM in h-pot
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Well, it took six years but I've finally got an idea for a piece of Harry Potter slash fiction. It involves Crabbe and Goyle, Polyjuice potion, and whatever Slytherin first-years they were duping into giving them bits of themselves when C&G had to guard the Room of Requirement for Malfoy. Bex is right, the Room of Requirement is the slash fiction location. It's positively fraught.

Serenity Rose: currently moulting.

I really like Book Six. I tend to underestimate it every time I go into it, on account of there being no story. But I enjoy the Voldemort Godfather II stuff more and more each time I read it - it's just so well-authored and evocative. Plus it really makes me look forward to what they could do with it in the movie, particularly if they can work some digital whamma jamma to slowly move from Christian Coulson to Ralph Fiennes over the course of the film. Besides, the present-day stuff in HBP is just so unremittingly fun. I kinda respect that about old JK: after the sheer psychological punishment of Book Five, she stepped it back a notch and let us have one last good time before what is sure to be the sheer psychological punishment of Book Seven. Lo, shall we look back upon these days with fondness.

Potterfied Mamo be here.

DH minus 177. Slightly ahead of where I wanted to be, but there are worse things.

Posted by tederick at 9:25 AM in h-pot & podcastery
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Guest-hosted moviesTO over the weekend... ignore the bit about the Sunshine tickets (that got all screwed up), but enjoy the rest!

Voila.

Posted by tederick at 6:51 PM in h-pot & podcastery
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Restless, unfocused dreams last night - at one point I was trying Indiana Jones' hat on over and over again; at another, I was about to sit my OWLs at Hogwarts and was flying into a panic because I couldn't remember Wingardium Leviosa - which even I knew was ridiculous, given that it was the first thing we learned in first year. Then Cripps showed up and it all went to hell, possibly as a result of certain soccer-related conversations from the subway home last night. Oh patterns.

Which is all by way of saying, I don't think my brain (or this blog) is going to be much good this week. I'm about a 65% walking Harry Potter repository right now. I'm going to be abjectly useless at work, for sure, and the blog skein might be a tad specific for the next whiles. So unless you're all keyed up to read about my latest Potter thoughts - which will be occasionally broken up by tattoo gushing or the virginity thing I'm writing for tomorrow - this is gonna be a dull week on the blog.

Hey, tattoo: going well, although Sera now resembles nothing so much as a dirty great hunk of scabby scabness. She's itchy, too. Damn itchy. Vitamin E barely keeping ahead of the irritation factor. But I am still very, very happy. Having now gone ahead and done this, I suppose I oughta provide a little information on the whys, but we'll save that for later.

Meantime, meet Serenity Rose.

We creamed the opposition in soccer last night, thanks once again to our substitute goaltender and some fine offensive player from... well... everyone. The only downside to the game (aside from tattoo concerns) was the Bug Storm. Yes, we played in a Bug Storm. We played in some kind of mass migration of tiny gnats that proceeded uninterrupted through the entirety of the first half of the game; literally millions of the damn things were all headed north in a languid, unbroken cavalcade across the flats. By halftime they were stuck to my arm like flypaper and getting under my contacts and god knows what all else. It was most discomfiting. But as for the Yellow Wall - which may soon have to be renamed Yellow Domination - we've got a hell of a team there, folks. It's nice to be in charge when everything's going well.

Posted by tederick at 8:46 AM in dreams & h-pot & scars & sockey
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That thing where every British actor has already been in a Harry Potter movie isn't exactly true. Here's who should be put in the next flick according to me, Supreme Mugwump:

Rufus Scrimgeour: Derek Jacobi

Narcissa Malfoy: Tilda Swinton (despite Narnia conflict)

Horace Slughorn: Brian Blessed

Merope Gaunt: I would have said Shirley Henderson, but they've already used her. I'm going to go to the bullpen and grab Kelly MacDonald, not least because I enjoy looking at her. Kate Beckinsale wouldn't suck either.

Morfin Gaunt: Jason Flemyng

Marvolo Gaunt: Ian Holm (conflict again, but why not?)

Tom Riddle Sr.: Toby Stephens

Fenrir Greyback: Bill Nighy

Regulus Black: Only one person alive can play Gary Oldman's badass kid brother, and that man is Johnny Depp.

Posted by tederick at 11:10 AM in h-pot
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As it turns out, doing yoga with a scab the size of a baked potato on your left arm is a study in compromise. Yeah.

I am very nearly done Order of the Phoenix. That means I'm a day behind, but Teen Girl Squad had my Half-Blood Prince until just now so there's not much I could have done about it. Stupid girls and their poisonous reading habits! Marrr. But anyways, I just read page 698, which serves as the basis for the story I use whenever asked how obsessed I am with Harry Potter. Goes like this:

Cast your mind back to the summer of 2003, when Phoenix came out. After a marathon weekend reading session that had got me into the climax at the Department of Mysteries, and in no fit state to deal with whatever "main character death" Rowling had been advertising for months, I happened upon the following passage on page 698:

"But the Death Eater Hermione had just struck dumb made a sudden slashing movement with his wand; a streak of what looked like purple flame passed right across Hermione's chest. She gave a tiny 'Oh!' as though of surprise and crumpled on to the floor, where she lay motionless."

I turned to page 699 to continue... and page 699 was blank.

It's not actually blank. I'm looking at it right now; there are words on it. But on that day, after reading that paragraph, my brain turned page 699 white, just in case page 699 contained the confirmation that Hermione Jane Granger was, in fact, dead.

So that's how obsessed with Harry Potter I am.

All in all I'd say seeing the Phoenix flick this week was a mistake because it totally torpedoed the last act of the book for me. As a cautionary measure I'm going to leave off seeing The Simpsons until well after I'm done Book Seven. Just don't have enough room in the brain right now. It's a shame, though, because there will be Batman.

Posted by tederick at 12:30 PM in h-pot & miss hermione granger & movies & simps
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For a series called Harry Potter, I don't think I can recall one of these movies that was so brilliantly, delightfully about its titular character. Pecs bulging and eyes steady, Daniel Radcliffe glares out from the screen with a dominance that wilfully pushes the rest of the junk clean out of the frame. Actor and character have fused at last. Radcliffe's matured chops meet Harry's Book Five angst, and the resulting potion is the film franchise's equivalent of veritaserum.

Click here to read my review.

7 days out, 700 pages to go. And FYI: it absolutely sucks to see a Harry Potter movie without Becky Jo Wood.

Posted by tederick at 4:29 PM in h-pot & reviews
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Moody and Shacklebolt ain't lackin' for charisma neither, but man howdy that is some good purple hair.

Very tired. More to come.

Posted by tederick at 9:51 AM in h-pot
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I know they make 'em different in Alberta, but Jesus, thirteen?! And what's with the 23-year-old boyfriend? That's a thing now? (Says the 30-year-old who's been chasing a 20-year-old like a puppy after a 1956 DeSoto)

Gruesome as it is, I can't help think that this story would make a hell of a film, in the Heavenly Creatures / Welcome to the Dollhouse / Ghost World mould. (That's a mould?) Though it'll probably just end up a gorramned CBC movie-of-the-week. But the subtextual possibilities are monumental.

Hey, speaking of viscera, my brother did a mockup for school last week of a waterbed called the Eviscerated Bear. He took the tauntaun concept a step further by making a bed where you actually crawl into a bear's guts (rubber tubes of heated water) and are soothed to sleep by a gently pulsing hearbeat. The kids learn about the inevitable passing of all things and stay snuggly warm. It's really something, and proof that all those year Adam spent bisecting Gonzos and building parachutes for Nini actually went somewhere productive.

I am doing my best to be productive as well, which means more time crawling forward on my meagre production slate and less time for everything else - including the film-watchin'. I really don't know when I'm seeing Harry Potter, or any other movies at all really; even the Pirates screenings have been necessarily curtailed. As one third of the popular singing sensation Mamo!, I am more than aware of the current state of theatrical distribution, thankyouverymuch. Still, I was going through the movie listings the other day and was sort of re-bummed-out about the fact that World's End, six weeks after its release, is pretty much gone from Toronto. I miss the days of longer runs. When I was a teenager - which wasn't that long ago, cheers - I made a semi-regular habit of going to see my favourite movie of the summer on the the Labour Day weekend, to close off the vacation before school started; unless my favourite movie this summer turns out to be Rush Hour 3, that shit just doesn't happen any more. It takes (for me) the last veneer of decency out of the summer movie phenomenon, because at least in the past it was possible to conjure the illusion that the movies, if dumb, were at least amiably enjoyable enough to be worth looking at again in due time. Summer movies in the 21st century are the cinematic equivalent of overworked prosties, out the door before you're even done towelling off. Sucks. This all points to a future where the blockbusters are downloaded into our brain before they're even written, sold to our hard drives before we've bought the computer, and interact with our iPhones to let us text-vote our preferred endings to the digital animation department that will, for a modest fee, create the ending we want so that we don't have to surrender our emotions to something as archaic as "authorial control."

And all this so that we can avoid the need to deal with death. Cripes, we are a backwards people.

Posted by tederick at 9:23 AM in h-pot & miscellaneous crap & movies & pirates
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"Suffice to say that we have top men working on it right now. Top men." - Hasbro re: Indiana Jones action figures. Call me a geek but that made me split a Joker grin.

(Wait, I'm only just now giving you license to "call me a geek?" Boy, I certainly hope you've felt free to do so before now. Because come on: I am a fucking geeeeeeeek [the extra e's express enthusiasm!]. Case in point: people actually come up to me now and ask how the Harry Potter reading drive is going. People I didn't know two weeks ago are checking in with me at yoga, soccer, etc. Honestly, I should have done this for charity or something. I have had more conversations with total strangers about reading Harry Potter in the past week than... a... big... number.)

Hey, nothing beats doing a bunch of tourist shit in another country just to come back to your home town and do even more. So me and Caitlin went to the Titanic exhibit on Friday. Awesome! Especially the part where the passenger name I was assigned ended up dead. That was cool. Got a wicked idea for a new script, too, which I guess I can start researching and writing as soon as I'm done researching and writing the other historical movie script idea thing I've got.

Anyways. A loooooooot of Order of the Phoenix this weekend to get back on schedule. Plus quite a bit of tidying and organizing since that's how I deal with stress. Looking forward to soccer tonight in a big way. Oh the things we do in the meantime to keep from bothering that it's the meantime.

Posted by tederick at 12:01 PM in blogTO & dr. jones & h-pot & toys!
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