let me see you stripped down to the bone

It's not a pervy subject line, promise. Although I suspect that young Cormac McLaggen might strip down quite nicely, thank you, it would be a crying shame to remove Draco's Brooding Byronic Monochrome Suit of Svelte Young Brooding Doom, it was so admirably adapted to Byronic Posing. Besides, if they're in any way faithful to Deathly Hallows the next couple of movies have to strip Daniel Radcliff at least twice, one of them in multiple versions. Jack Sparrow Also Ran.

Anyway. I was, in fact, agreeably surprised by Half-Blood Prince, to which I finally dragged my long-suffering mother last night. (She was surprisingly up for it, having once nursed Emma Watson through a 'flu attack on a school trip to France, and thus having a certain interest in her subsequent activities. Apparently Emma's a nice child). Half of the Internets seem to have hated the movie, citing insufficient Horcrux action, insufficient attention paid to the Big Damn Death, weird wand mix-ups and suchlike. I say, cheerfully and without malice, that Someone Is Wrong On The Internet. It was a very watchable movie, its slightly multiple-personalitied Cute and Dark components actually nicely balanced, and above all it was stripped of all that Rowlingified extraneous detail, plot point multiplication and general amusing inessentialness which makes her writing, on the whole, the antithesis of elegant.

( Further spoilery musings inescapably follow. You could escape by not clicking. )

I'm slightly fascinated by the disparity of responses to the film - equal amounts of love and hate. Is this the particular emotional baggage of the death at the ending, perhaps? I'm also wondering if the hate-bits will abate a tad when the next film comes out, if my sense of the narrative decisions they've made is accurate and the next film makes the logic more obvious by filling in gaps?