Harry Potter: The Deathly Hollows, Part 1 (3:30 AM - Friday morning)

What a fun movie! Fun for me, more than most adults, perhaps... it was well worth staying up until 3:30 AM on a night before work.

Xenophilius Lovegood was very well acted and his scene was well directed. Rhys Ifans rocks and I hear he is going to be a bad guy in the next Spider Man movie.

In HP7, they actually took out all of the objections I expressed on my site xenophilius.org, plus another I was thinking but didn't say: I'm glad they didn't make Xeno make the perfect "O" of recognition with his mouth as written in the book when he first sees Harry, Ron and Hermione at his door. Besides looking really weird, I thought that first meeting conflicted with Luna having large portraits of her three friends upstairs in her room.  That was another thing that got cut: They didn't show the three going up into Luna's room which also avoided that point.  It was too bad they left out the cleverness with Hermione getting them all out and also protecting Xeno at the end by making sure they were seen, but that would have been hard to explain.

I liked that they downplayed the betrayal and left it a bit mysterious in some ways.  I would have liked to have seen more of the struggle where he is deciding to turn the three in vs asking for their help in getting Luna back. I still don't exactly understand why he lacked faith in person this time when he had faith in Harry in writing and also at the wedding.  I guess the war going badly and all the people dying as well as his daughter Luna being taken explains it.

Oh, and I was also glad they didn't give him the one weird eye that points inward as written in the book.

Xeno