Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows: Part 1

Bomb Rating: 

Let me tell you diehard fans what it is like to step into the Harry Potter franchise 25 years after the first movie: it's like walking into a furry convention wearing a Speedo. You don't belong there.

So until last week, I had never seen a Harry Potter movie. Never. Ever. I hadn't read any of the books, either, or bought any of the Harry Potter novelty sex toys. To me, Harry Potter was the equivalent of "Twilight," only with pre-adolescent wizards and witches instead of glittering vamps and smooth-chested werewolves. Since I'm not a 12-year old girl, I avoided the entire scene like a 40-year old man on parole.

But curiosity – or rather, a combination of pain meds and loneliness – got the best of me this month, and I ended up sitting through "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1." Apparently, as I was told by one of the 400-lbs elves waiting in line behind me, this was the 23rd movie in the Harry Potter series. As such, I prepared myself to not understand a single fucking thing that was about to happen for the next two and a half hours.

And I was right. Let me tell you diehard fans what it is like to step into the Harry Potter franchise 25 years after the first movie: it's like walking into a furry convention wearing a Speedo. You don't belong there (well, if you want to be completely truthful, no one really belongs there), and you simply don't possess the vocabulary to comprehend anything that is said to you under those circumstances. Words like Horcrux, Dumbledore, Lorax, Voldemort and Hepatitis had no meaning to me whatsoever. The characters, too, were unfamiliar to the point where I finally understood what it must be like inside a schizophrenic's brain.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I came home and IMDB told me that Ralph Fiennes was in this movie. And Helena Bonham Carter. And Alan Rickman. And Bill Nighy. You know, making movies for your kids is one thing, but making movies that involve a computer-generated wizard and witch sex scene in the middle of the forest that is apparently so arousing amongst the nerd clans that I was surrounded by boners and glistening labias for a good 45 minutes after it had left the screen is another. Have some fucking respect people.

In any case, I escaped from my Harry Potter experience with my life, and really, that seems to be all you can ask for these days when it come to pop culture phenomena. The idea of queuing up the first 22 movies on my Netflix makes me feel like I should be turning myself in to the police for some kind of crime against humanity, so I think I will skip the back story, and all future stories, and just stick to the soft-core Cinemax feed that keeps my loneliness at a tolerable level. As long as none of the actors have British teeth, I should be fine.

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