With the release of the last Harry Potter film-of-the-book this week, and it’s total domination of everything, the internet’s once again abuzz with talk of the wizarding world, despite the fact that the books were done and over with years ago. Like most everyone else, I saw the film over the weekend (Friday night, at a drive-in, which was a nice treat), and pronounce it, like I’ve pronounced most of the others, “okay.” None of the adaptations have been particularly effective translations, really – they simply all rely too much on the audience’s previous knowledge of the books. The early ones focused too much on little kids gawking at special effects and glossed over (or forgot to mention altogether) important things that affect the narrative in important ways later. The last four movies directed by David Yates were comfortingly consistent visually, which was nice (the muted blues and grays is a good look for the darker themes of the later volumes), though those films spent a lot of time tripping over little problems resulting from earlier missteps. For every great little film moment (Harry in the all night coffee shop at the beginning of HBP, Hermione erasing her existence from her parents’ minds to protect them from what’s to come), there’s a significant dangling thread sacrificed in order to get to the next set piece (Who created the Marauders’ Map, What was the deal with that piece of broken mirror) that just didn’t quite work. That said, 7.2 looked beautiful in it’s desolation, hit most of the right notes, and didn’t totally drop the ball on Matthew Lewis’s Neville Longbottom, who got his suitably badass moment after getting shafted the last couple of films. If Rowling ever goes back to the Potter well, she could do a lot worse than exploring the latter years of the series from Neville’s point of view…his adventures organizing and leading the resistance at Hogwarts is probably a more interesting story than Harry’s horcrux hunt.

In any case, I didn’t intend this post to be a review of the film; I wanted simply to point out a couple of interesting bits of writing and analysis on the series that have been cropping up. I’m sure there are plenty of others out there (if you’ve happened upon anything interesting, drop a link in the comments; I’d love to read it, I just don’t have that much time to go hunting), but this is what I’ve found interesting over the last week or so.

First and foremost, a couple of posts from pandagon, the most recent one dealing with the political elements of the series as an interesting allegory to the whole Tea Party business (unintentional, given the fact that this was all written well before that beast reared its ugly, misspelled and hand-painted head), and how Rowling manages to effectively come up with a totally realistic portrayal about how even fundamentally good folks (including both real life people and the protagonists of novels) have serious blind spots about the tribe they’re part of, and how those blind spots hold back real progress*.

Earlier in the week, Amanda also hit another interesting angle on the Potter series, pointing out that despite all the fandom and cosplay and general nerdiness associated with the series, Harry Potter’s not a geek, but a jock, which is actually kind of true, but as usual, it’s a little more complicated than that. The post and its resulting comments get into all sorts of things, including, but not limited to the archetypes that Rowling appropriates which are inherently British and kind of alien to many American fans, who latch onto different cues and draw different conclusions about what the underlying ideas are. There’s also some interesting discussion about both fandom, fanfic, and social class in the UK.

Finally, for something a little less heavy, the av club had a nice piece talking about their writers’ take on the great and not so great moments from both the films and the books. They come up with some interesting conclusions and commentary, and while you may not agree with their positions, that’s half the fun of the whole pop culture criticism thing, isn’t it?

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* –That’s actually one of the things I was fully expecting to play out in my initial reading of the books – for a long time, I was sure that the plot was leading toward Harry making using his dual nature (being a child of two worlds, both wizard and muggle) to come up with a means of defeating Voldemort that would short circuit the prophecy, and end up ushering in a new age of Wizard-Muggle cooperation that would improve the world for everyone – there are just too many ridiculous scenes of Wizards not understanding Muggle culture, I assumed it had to pay off at some point. Mostly, Hermoine got this role, and while she was effective in isolated situations, it never became a significant plot point).