For starters: Harry Potter. Yes. I won't bore everyone with my analysis on what they could've done better or where the special effects felt unrealistic or how I would've cast someone with BLUE EYES THANKYOUVERYMUCH as the younger Lily Potter--but what I will say is that I cried. Hard.
~SPOILERS~
I cried at all the usual parts, of course--Fred Weasley, Snape, Tonks and Lupin, Harry's walk into the forest--but somehow it was so much different from reading the seventh book, because none of the deaths--no, not even Snape's--made me cry when I read it. Somehow, I think, there's just something about seeing it. Seeing Fred and George take one last moment before the battle, saying "I'm all right, are you all right?" and ready to die defending their school and their friends. Seeing Tonks and Lupin stretching their hands towards one another, going in for the kill together, ready to protect each other. Seeing Voldemort's total lack of regret for killing who he thinks to be his best servant, unaware that he is killing a man who spent most of his life working against him.
I remember reading Deathly Hallows and crying when Harry walks into the forest, ready to face Voldemort alone. In the movie--forget it. I was drying my eyes on my cloak the entire damn time. (Yes, of course I dressed up...I'll explain that later.) Seeing it--seeing his determination, his willingness--seeing that he will do absolutely anything to protect those he loves--made me love Harry Potter more than ever. Remember what I said in the last blog post, about how these people seem real to me? In the movie this is so much more pronounced; everyone doesn't just seem real, they are real.
You can't possibly understand the intense fervor surrounding the release of this movie unless you are a Harry Potter fan. I don't care how many fans you know--you will only understand this if you are a fan; just knowing one simply will not cut it.
Rewind the clock about nine and a half years, back to December 2001.
Picture a shrimp of a girl (or perhaps "leprechaun" would be more appropriate in describing her size) with the wildest, curliest dark-blonde hair you've ever seen, clinging to her parents for all she's worth. She has never seen the inside of a movie theater. She has only just finished reading Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. In one hand she clutches a Hermione Granger action figure; her father is holding her other hand. She has never been this excited in her whole life. Not when she had her first dance recital. Not when she went to an ice show for the first time. Not even when she unwrapped that Hermione Granger action figure on the morning of her ninth birthday. Never, ever, ever.
She loves Hermione Granger more than she loves the Harry Potter series itself. She sees herself in this frizzy-haired bookworm, the girl who covers up her insecurities by being smart, the girl who has isolated herself (for different reasons, of course; while Hermione has chosen not to "run with the crowd," her real-life counterpart has been kept out of the loop by others, protected from the dangers of a conventional school). Now she is going to see her new heroine on-screen for the first time--and she can't wait.
She covers her eyes during the scariest parts--the troll on Halloween, the first appearance of Fluffy, the moment with the dead unicorn in the Forbidden Forest--and even has to briefly leave the theater when Voldemort shows himself for the first time. But when the movie is over she is still so, so excited, absolutely ecstatic, because of her new favorite movie characters--Harry, Ron, and most of all, Hermione.
(And I think it goes without saying that she is, at this point, part of the small, naive group who really thought that Hermione and Harry would make a good couple.)
Fast-forward to July 14th, 2011.
That same girl is now eighteen years old and has sat through movies much, much more frightening than Harry Potter. But she still holds her father's hand as they get in line at ten-thirty PM, waiting for the midnight showing of the very last film.
She has dressed up, too--one of the few who bothered--as, who else, Hermione Granger, wearing her Interlochen uniform, a wizard's cape, and her father's red-and-gold tie. The Hermione action figure is long gone, but the enthusiasm is still there.
Along with Hermione, there is Severus Snape, a handful of generic Gryffindors, multiple Harry Potters, one brave Dobby doppelganger, quite a few generic "wizards" or "Hogwarts teachers" and a few hipster Slytherins...and, for some strange reason, Transformers. Well over a hundred people are in line for the midnight premiere. These people are for real, and you don't want to mess with them--and yes, that does include saying, "You know Harry Potter isn't a REAL PERSON, right?" These fans are impatient--they can't wait to see if the movie is true to their beloved books--but at the same time they relish the experience of waiting in line. It is, after all, the very last time they will get to see a midnight premiere of a Harry Potter movie.
But when it's time to go in, and everyone--costumed, uncostumed, or just wearing their Harry Potter t-shirt--finally takes their seats, the girl dressed as Hermione almost begins to cry. Not yet, she tells herself; there is, after all, still two hours of movie that she has to get through. But it's a little like the feeling she had on her graduation day--that sense that she is moving on, that she is about to leave childhood behind forever.
And she watches her favorite scenes as intensely as she watches those she hates, cheering when Molly Weasley makes toast out of Bellatrix Lestrange, whistling when Ron FINALLY kisses Hermione (needless to say, she has switched to the legions of fans supporting Ron and Hermione as a couple now), roaring in approval when Neville beheads Nagini, crying her eyes out when Snape dies. These people are not just actors. They are her heroes. They are not just characters. They are her friends.
And when the final shot rolls around, and the score from the very first movie is playing, she cannot help but cry one final time. Again she begins to feel the way she did on graduation day--bittersweet but satisfied, sad but so proud, so happy that everything is wrapped up, knowing that while she and her (oh, all right, fictional) friends are finally grown up, they will never leave each other behind.
--------
Yes, that insane girl is me. And I mean it, too--once an obsessed Harry Potter fan, always an obsessed Harry Potter fan. You are talking to a girl who still has her photo of a thirteen-year-old Dan Radcliffe dressed as Harry Potter tacked to her bedroom wall. I still talk about the HP characters as if they're real people. You know how some people talk to themselves? I talk to Hermione, Ron, Harry, Hagrid, or Snape. (Yes, I really do.) I don't care how old I get--when I am fifty years old, I will still have my imaginary talks with my favorite Harry Potter characters, and I dream of the day that I will be able to read these books to my kids, show them the pictures and videos of Potter fans lining up outside bookstores, libraries, or movie theaters, and say to them, "Guess what? Your crazy mommy did that."
This song is my favorite at the moment, because it pretty much expresses everything I feel about Harry Potter, without the sappiness that I've invariably drenched my latest Potter rants in.
So long, Hermione. Maybe we'll hang out sometime, yeah? Keep Ron in line, would you? And keep an eye on Harry for me. Tell him I'll miss him. Tell him to hug Ginny for me. And no matter what, please, please, PLEASE keep inspiring silly, optimistic nine-year-old girls around the world--it's what you do best.
~Cue new section of blog~
So I've been writing a lot this summer. (Cue massive "DUH!" here.) I've also been doing a lot of editing and a lot of college shopping, but for the most part I've been holed up in my room, the car, or a hotel room writing my pants off. (Please do not picture that.) So, since my best friend has responded so positively to one of my stories, I thought that maybe I would post a bit of it on here, just for fun:
~~~
"Loving Cooper Finnegan" (excerpt)
December
Snow covers the ground. It’s as cold here during the winter as it is hot in D.C. during the summer. Sam and Maggie and I grab each other’s hands and run and slide, run and slide, until we collapse in a heap on the thin layer of ice that has formed on the ground.
We find Cooper near the auditorium and bring him in with us. We run around the auditorium and shout lines from our favorite movies, and sing songs from RENT and Hairspray and Sweeney Todd that we only know half the words to, and we skip and play and dance until a security guard kicks us out.
On the way back, Maggie comes up with the idea of naming our favorite constellations. The night is clear, and we look up and see every star through the tops of the trees. “Mine is Seven Sisters,” Maggie tells us, reaching up to point out the shape in the sky.
Sam thinks about it for awhile. “I think Orion is mine.”
I stop and look up, staring around until I find my favorite—the Big Dipper. “Such a cliché,” Sam teases me when I voice this opinion.
But Cooper takes my hand, and points up to the very same constellation I just named. His breath makes a perfect little cloud in the crisp night air as he says, “My favorite is the Big Dipper, too.”
~~~
There's more, but the story is still in the "revise like crazy" stage, so I don't think I'll post the rest of it just yet. But trust me. If Mishka is to be believed (and all past experience tells me that she is), this is a good story. So consider this a teaser.
On to the insanity that was the North Carolina trip! I tell you what, you have not lived until you've seen a southern small town. It is picturesque in its awkwardness. You know the stereotype of a small town? It is motherfluffing TRUE. Tiny secondhand treasure shops, neat little brick houses with tidy lawns, everything five minutes away from everything else...the works. You see, my mother now works in a hospital down there. So last week, I got to take a road trip with her and my dad, stay in a semi-unclean hotel with dodgy internet (hence, no blog post), drive twelve hours in one day, and eat Froot Loops for breakfast every single morning.
(Yes...I do consider this exciting. How pathetic is that?)
Here's the thing about road trips: they are templates. There is a Road Trip Template for each family. For some families, like Jake Johannsen's (go to 2:10), you MUST get up before the sun and drive to as many states as humanly possible and see the lamest roadside attractions known to mankind. For our family, here are the Rules of the Road Trip:
1. We MUST leave at least half an hour later than we originally planned to.
2. We MUST forget something/forget to do something and have to either go back or buy whatever we left at home once we get there.
3. While it's not required to use a rental car, we MUST drive the most uncomfortable car available. (The winner of this award would have to go to the Subaru Outback we drove last year--it was UNBEARABLE.)
4. One of us MUST need to use the bathroom every hour.
5. We MUST stop at McDonald's and/or Bob Evans at least twice per trip, despite the fact that we have a cooler full of food in the backseat.
6. We MUST take at least twice the amount of luggage we need. Bonus points if this happens in a car half the size of the one we'd usually drive.
7. We MUST have at least one argument over the following: a) what radio station we listen to, b) what restaurant we eat dinner at on the way there or on the way home, c) where we stop to use the bathroom, d) which hotel we'll stay at once we get there, or e) whether we should stop on the way home or "just drive straight through."
8. There MUST be at least one instance of uncooperative weather on the way there or back, whether it be rain, blinding sunlight, excessive wind, rain that turns to snow, snow that turns to sleet, or excessive cloud coverage that renders it impossibly dark once the sun goes down.
9. We MUST drive on a turnpike. Bonus points if it's the impossibly-f***ed-up Pennsylvania Turnpike.
10. We MUST stay in the hotel with the least-comfortable beds imaginable. (Worst Award for this one: hotel that I can't remember the name of in Ohio, 2006. SO. FREAKING. BAD. It was like sleeping on a rock.)
Yes. These things invariably happen on the Beatnik Belle Family Road Trips. (If that hasn't been copyrighted yet, it should--I might just make a movie about this someday.)
Speaking of movies, I have a new master plan: Instead of waiting until I graduate from college, I will write an adaptation of Twisted in the remaining weeks of summer, send this screenplay to Laurie Halse Anderson along with my portfolio of shorts, and beg her to let me make her book into a movie. Sound like a plan?
ANYWAY. Back to the road trip. So we get there--FINALLY--and check into our hotel, only to discover that while it may not have bedbugs (and that's debatable), there is always the classic problem of the sheets not staying on the freaking beds, no matter what you do. (Unless you use duct tape, which we didn't happen to have on hand--see Road Trip Rule #2.) Then we found out that while they had a (reasonably) clean pool, the carpet was about as grungy as you can imagine. Think the carpet in the Runaways' first dressing room. And on top of all this, we had a mini-fridge the size of a baby bathtub--and enough groceries to fit a regular-sized fridge.
Welcome to summer vacation.
On my first night of the vacation I saw something on TV that I found appalling and somewhat intriguing. I was watching a show called Bridezillas, a reality show that exposes the rude behavior of some brides-to-be. There was one woman who was a victim of the worst kind: Nothing was her fault, everyone was out to get her, the best man was an asshole, her bridesmaids were unreliable, her mother was a freak, the whole thing was going to pieces and it was all someone else’s fault. There was another who had such an attitude that I wondered why her friends and family were putting up with it. And then there was a girl, nineteen years old, who was about to get married to a twenty-one-year-old man who seemed to have no self-respect. How else to explain the fact that he was marrying a girl who, quite literally, had him by the balls?
This girl had no business getting married. She was a year older than me, with about one-third of my maturity level. To people who read this and know me personally: You think I’m sarcastic? You ought to see this girl in action. She was bratty, arrogant, immature, aggressive, lazy, and obnoxious. She made the Kardashian girls look like good-will ambassadors.
During the course of the show, she slapped her fiancé, called him a dick, threatened him, whined at him, called him stupid, called him retarded, told him she was much better than him and he was lucky she liked him, said she was hotter than him, demanded money from him, and when all else failed, grabbed him between the legs when she didn’t get her way.
I looked up the episode online and was disappointed with what I read in the comments. The worst insult that anyone had for her was “waste of skin.” In my opinion that was not nearly good enough to describe her. There was one point when she was in the car with her best friend and fiancé, and when beating up on her fiancé didn’t get her anywhere she started in on her best friend—now, if I were in that car with her, I can assure you I would not have put up with her crap. In fact, I can’t imagine for the life of me why anyone would want to marry her or be her best friend in the first place.
If this girl had been a guy, and the show had depicted a guy smacking his fiancée in the back of the head while she was driving, grabbing her by the breasts so he could get her to hold still, and backing over the cake topper she bought because it wasn’t exactly the one he wanted, you can bet that every comment box in the interwebs would be flooded with “What a bastard!” and “OMG he’s such a jerk!” and “Why the [censored] is she marrying that [censored]?!”—all of it well-deserved. Where was the criticism and judgment for this girl? Where was all the “That girl is a bitch!” and “What does he see in her?” and “If I were her mother I’d smack her!” Even my mom remarked, “If I were her mother, I wouldn’t let her go on TV—I wouldn’t want the world to see what a selfish, violent daughter I raised.”
And what did her fiancé do? Nothing. He let her control him. He made one or two half-hearted attempts to stand up to her, and after that, he gave in. He didn’t fight back when she hit him or grabbed him. He didn’t say a word when she backed over the cake topper. If he’d hit her back, he probably would have been attacked again, not just by her, but by her friends and anyone else who was shocked that he’d “hit a girl,” even if it was in self-defense.
I'm not exactly sure where I'm going with this. I just know that I found this little incident extremely interesting. It made me think: why is it, in our culture, that everything has to be taken to epic extremes? Why is it that either a man is a total wimp or an abusive pig? Why is it that people seem to think if a woman stands up for herself she is "badass" and "feminist," but if a man dares to stand up for himself he is labelled "controlling" or, heaven forbid it, "abusive?" I'm telling you, she was abusing him--had he firmly taken her hand and pulled it away from his private parts, I would not have labelled him "abusive." I would have labelled him "reasonable."
Now I know this stereotype had to start somewhere, and believe me, I am not trying to belittle all women or minimize domestic violence. It's just that this episode of Bridezillas made me think--and I'm hoping that it will make you guys think too.
One more thing before I sign off...I am not going to make fun of Amy Winehouse, however tempting it might be. (Keep in mind, I never really listened to her music, but the little bit of it that I heard I didn't really like. It's not that I don't think she had talent, because she obviously did--her stuff just wasn't my cup of tea.) What I am going to say, though, is that I find it kind of absurd that, what with everything that happened over the weekend, particularly the tragedies in Norway, all everyone can talk about is her death. Not saying that she isn't news; she clearly is. But I think it says something about our culture that we freak out when a celebrity dies, but when a true tragedy happens, few people--at least from my generation--take notice.
On that note, a shout-out to my former roommate, the wild and wonderful Elizabeth V., for making this very point on Facebook the day of Winehouse's death. YOU GO GIRL.
And now...I think you all know what comes next...
STOLEN DIALOGUE
Person one: We should go get some of "da dip."
Person two: If we do that we'll get "da s**ts."
"Harry, your panties are showing."
Person one: This is one of those places where you get everything on a paper plate with a piece of white bread.
Person two: So in other words, it's real southern cooking.
"This guy is a big d**k...but his penis is really small."
"Hey, buddy, if you don't get off my ass, I'm staying right here! I know you're in a hurry to get to Waffle House, but back off!"
"He's an old man from New Mexico, therefore he MUST have to pee."
"This guy must have Alzheimer's...he can't remember which lane he's supposed to be in."
"'Speed limit enforced by aircraft'..so, what do I do, leave my sunroof open so they can just drop the speeding ticket right into my car?"
"What's the difference between a long-ass and a short-ass? I must be a short-ass--I'm only 5'4."
"Your phone can't take one more 'f**k you,' okay, honey?"
"Hey! That bird is making fun of the Big Man!"
Person one: Hey, can we go to the China Super Buffet?
Person two: Not unless you want China Super Diarrhea.
Person one: There's Cafe Acropolis.
Person two: Cafe WHAT?
"There's a wide gulf of difference between Taco Bell and Waffle House. With Waffle House, there's only a 50-50 chance that you MIGHT throw up."
