Evada kevadra, expelliarmus, patronus somethingmus

I am writing this in the emotional recession after watching the first movie of Harry Potter: Philosopher's Stone, after my friend decided to do a rerun of the series before the last movie, which we will be seeing this Saturday. The Death Hallow(or something like that).

I've only seen the first movie once, and the disagreement with the movies combined with the bad video on a pirated CD made me avoided the movie franchise after that. I relented in 2006/2007 when I watched the Order of Phoenix, though I quite regretted that afterwards. I never liked the movie, especially reminded just now by the first movie where the cutesy little actors seemed overreacting and shouting their line as if reminded by cues, while the adults seems not much better, especially the Durleys. The movie seems to cut a lot of part when I watched it back then, though now I can see the rational in keeping all the details out to avoid burdening the movie-goers. However I do feel the first film didn't manage to catch the excitement and 'spirit' of the book, hence the reason for my disliking them.

If you are a Harry Potter fan, and you liked the movie, I apologize for getting on the wrong foot but it is nothing like unburdening your disappointment on a fellow fan. Yes, I read all the books so in a loose sense of term, I could be call a fan. It was a book that I grew up with, not because I read it occasionally, but the stories further itself as the years pass by. It was not like Narnia, Lord of The Ring, or even the Enid Byltons where you can pick up the series and read it all you want at one time. Harry Potter had to be waited upon year by year and by the time the character changes and plots drove on, so was me. If you have just discovered the series or you have read it in a bulk, I'm afraid it's quite a thing to understand but for some, it makes perfect sense. I used to say Harry Potter used to be the best book I've read, with all its characters and amazing creatures, living in a world full of magic. These would have tie me in itself on their owns, but what  is more affecting is how I could relate and sympathize with the characters. Watching the first film just now just reminds me of that, hence this emotional post.

I was introduced to the first book by my eldest sister and  began reading it in somewhere in the end of 1999, right before I began secondary school. Secondary school was a new world to me and Harry Potter seems to paint a picture of that, of how it would look like and dormitory life would be. Of course I wasn't deluded to think that magic did exist but I was, certainly was, disappointed that there wasn't a common room in the dormitories for every house, not to mention sofas with rugs and fires burning in the hearth. The lessons in schools were rarely exciting and the foods were, simply said, not that delicious treacle pudding so often described in English story books. In short, there is almost nothing like it was pictured in Harry Potter. "All right," I said to myself. So the book was nothing like the real world, and how many times I've seen that? Plus I comforted myself that the book was from the US(I thought so at the time since my sister bought it from Amazon), so it's normal if the people there are a little bit weird. Sometimes during that time I also voiced out my opinion of how the reality was different(of course it was, silly me) from the book, but always stop short as no one knew about the book. No one ever read Harry Potter. When the second book came out, my hopes was a bit high and I thought surely some one would have read it since Rowling did wrote a sequel to it.

Some one must have read it, because Rowling wouldn't write hundred of pages for nothing, so I thought.

But no one did. No one at my school did. So I read the book and kept it all to myself and after a while I stopped asking people I met whether they read Harry Potter. I think I read my favourite in the series,Goblet of Fire somewhere before my Form 4, which was some kind of supposedly the best year of a student's life in Malaysia. Goblet of Fire introduced some romantic (if you know what I mean) feel to the series and being a teenager means being such a sucker to this kind of things. The word Choo Chang always reminds me of Form Four. *haha*

By the time I was in Form Five, the franchise was famous with a few films to boast. Juniors even began bringing the books to school and no one, almost no one, didn't NOT know what Harry Potter means. They even knew how to pronounce Hermione. ( I used to pronounce it, her-me-wan)
One friend came and asked if I knew Harry Potter is from a book and have I read it, because he saw the one of the juniors reading it. I've recounted relentlessly in the years before that about Harry, which he forgotten about and there he came and asked me, simply because a GIRL likes reading Harry Potter.
I just felt like punching him in the face.

Book sixth was so famous that I remembered a friend waking up at dawn and lining up for the new book in front of the Borders in Times Square long before its opening hours. By that year, I think everyone knew about the series and either has read it or doesn't care about it. I fall into the latter after the last book, when Harry and his friends wanders around aimlessly searching to destroy some weirds trophies kept by Voldemort in his perverse collections as a hobby. One of the thing I hate about the last book is how it's story deviates from the others where there are no more(hardly) any scenes in the classrooms or dormitories. The book always reminded me to memories of my teens have broken it's routine in the last book, hence lost its spell and broken its bound on me. I strongly dislike the last book due to that, and now I am reminded of that, I wonder if I would enjoy the movie this Saturday?

I would hardly think so.
Then again, these muggles might give a surprise with their moving pictures.




Note
1. The three spells in the title are the only ones except Lumos, that I remembered directly after reading the books.Others are usually forgotten right after reading.
2. Evada Kevadra. A death spell is too cool to not be remembered, right?
3. Expelliarmus is like the most used spell in the book, and kinda counter everything else,right? cos a wizard without a wand is like a gamer without a mouse. A noob.
3. Patronus somethingmus(expecto patronum, actually)- the only spell that have a different effect depending on the wizard. I've always wondered what kind of partonum I'd imagine for myself but to this day I still think summoning a horse is kinda sissy.