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Harry Potter: Phenomenal Books and Films

Harry Potter : From Books to Films

When I read the first Harry Potter book in the 1990s, I thought that if the book’s author, JK Rowling, wrote it for a general audience instead of a target market – children, the book could become a classic at the level of Charles Dickens’s works.

I found the author’s coining of names for the characters, places and objects very amusing – giving the readers a game of guessing the meaning of these words. For example, the name Albus Dumbledore can have several meanings. Albus can refer to Albion, the Arthurian name for Britain. Albus also means white and Dumbledore was a type of hat popular in London in the late 19th century. In film language, White Hat means The Good Guy.

In 2001, the inevitable film version came out amid great media hype. For those who read the book, they can only like the film as it was quite faithful to the source. The screenplay by Steven Kloves included quite a number of lines taken verbatim from the novel. The child actors – Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson and Rupert Grint were cute and loveable. But they were unknowns. To support them, Warner Brothers got great British actors Richard Harris, Dame Maggie Smith, Alan Rickman, and Robbie Coltrane. And for good measure, British stars John Cleese, John Hurt and Julie Walters had cameo roles.

The American director, Chris Columbus, who made Mrs. Doubtfire, Home Alone, and Bicentennial Man, is quite adept at working with child actors. The film turned out to be not only humorous but also magical.

Last August, I was having lunch with relatives and friends. I witnessed an animated conversation between two women about the just-released book, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, Rowling’s latest volume in the Harry Potter series. One was a relative who is in her 40’s, a mother of four and a UP graduate while the other is an American in her 30’s and is pursuing her PhD degree in chemistry. It was strange listening to two adults excitedly talking about a “children’s book”.

While surfing the ‘net, I found several e-groups on Harry Potter. But these e-groups admit only adults – 18 and above. Apparently, the Potter books and movies have now spawned cults even among adults in their 30s and 40s.

If Rowling only wrote one or two Harry Potter books, they probably would be simply “children’s books”. But the series of Harry Potter books – all taken as one text – gives Rowling’s work a quantum leap – from a children’s book to a book for all ages. The books’ content and style, like the characters in them, change with increasing maturity and complexity.

The Harry Potter movies on the other hand, have lives of their own – separate from Rowling’s books.

The first two movies were quite faithful to the books. The American director Chris Columbus gave the two Harry Potter films the distinguishing mark of Hollywood classics – good, clean fun movies.

The third film, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, veered away from the path created by the first two films. Mexican director Alfonso Cuaron of the Y Tu Mama Tambien fame directed the third film.

Cuaron created a different Hogwarts, Harry Potter’s school. Hogwarts became dark and gothic. The well-manicured lawn of the school became rocky and unkempt. Some of the changes seemed appropriate because Rowling has introduced seemingly dark characters named Sirius Black and Remus Lupin. From their names, one can tell that Sirius is somehow a black dog and Lupin is a wolf. (Sirius is the Dog Star constellation; Lupin comes from the Latin word for wolf). And of course, there are the Dementors, the soul-sucking skeletal entities that guard the Azkababan, the prison for wizard-criminals.

I liked the Time Travel sequence. But I found the replacement for the late Richard Harris wanting. In the books, Dumbledore is described as: "He was tall, thin, and very old, judging by the silver of his hair and beard, which were both long enough to tuck into his belt…He was often described as the greatest wizard of the age, but that wasn't why Harry respected him. You couldn't help trusting Albus Dumbledore...”

Michael Gambon, the new Dumbledore is short, fat and not very old. He also does not look trustworthy, especially if one has seen him in his other movies like The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover. The credibility of Hogwarts rests on its headmaster. Gambon simply does not have the presence of the great actor that was Richard Harris. Peter O’Toole (Goodbye Mr. Chips) would have been perfect as Dumbledore.

From mid-November 2005, cinema houses in many parts of the globe began showing Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, the fourth installment in Rowling’s 7-part series.

The Goblet of Fire is a turning point in the Harry Potter saga. The three kids – Harry, Ron and Hermione – reached puberty in the Azkabani episode. In this installment, they are right smack into adolescence. Physically, they are no longer children. This is the time when “hormones” develop boys and girls into men and women. It was too bad that the sexual tension between Harry and Cho Chang, Hermione and Ron, Hermione and Viktor Krum, and Ron and Fleur Delacour was nowhere to be seen. Instead, Newell gives the impression that it is a Harry-Hermione love team all along. The movie was given a PG-13 rating in England and elsewhere because of its supposedly violent content.

I thought that Newell, the first British director in the Potter series, would bring in his Cambridge background, as he did in Four Weddings and a Funeral, to give Hogwarts a more English outlook, if that is possible. Instead, he made it almost like a Hammer Films production. (Hammer Films produced many Dracula films in the 50s and 60s with Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing.)

Goblet is NOT a stand-alone film. For those who have not read the books or seen the previous episodes, Goblet would not be comprehensible.

Rowling takes care that all the Harry Potter books are stand-alone books. One can read any volume in any order and still would understand the story. In Newell’s film, characters come in and out from nowhere. Any newcomer to Harry Potter would feel lost in The Goblet.
The Goblet of Fire is a finely-crafted book which not only clarified many things from the previous volumes but also introduced new and exciting episodes like the World Quidditch Cup, the Triwizard Tournament and Harry’s first love interest.

Because of the book’s size, the producers wanted to make a 2-part Goblet film but Newell convinced them otherwise. Perhaps Newell did not realize that the Goblet is a part of a series. The Azkaban movie already cut off many parts in the book. The Goblet film contains just more than half of the book. If this trend continues, people who have not read the books might not understand at all the next Potter films – The Order of the Phoenix, the Half-Blood Prince and the still-to-be-written final volume – even if they had seen all the Potter movies.

Cuaron, who is Mexican, said he had not read or seen the Potter series before Azkaban was offered to him to direct. Newell, at 62, mis-read Goblet. He announced that Goblet is basically a thriller and that was what he set out to do. Newell couldn’t be more wrong. Goblet and all the Harry Potter books are basically a fantasy. If Voldemort couldn’t kill Harry the infant, how could he kill Harry the adolescent wizard? Goblet is another excuse to enter the fantastic world of magic – of dragons, mermaids, leprechauns, flying broomsticks, spells, curses and magic wands.

But there is hope for the next Potter film. The new director David Yates is 42 and British. The odds that he has read/seen and understood the Potter books/movies are great.
The issue here is not fidelity to the book or innovativeness of the filmmaker but simply the film’s intelligibility. A good film or book needs to answer the whys and wherefores of its characters and events.

After all is said and done, what makes Harry Potter click? I guess that for one thing, this is the first popular book/film that presents Magic in the contemporary world where anybody can learn to use the forces of nature to manifest one’s desires. Unlike in Bewitched or Charmed, one does not have to belong to a supernatural race of witches and warlocks to do magic. Magic is open to everyone who cares to study it. This is the essence of New Age.

In many parts of the world, including the Philippines, one can go to places like the Monroe Institute in the States to learn how to do astral travel, or attend seminars on how to maximize one’s ESP or even how to do magic. Or one can read books and magazines like Mr. & Ms. to learn more about the Body, Mind and Spirit.
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Published in Mr. & Ms. Magazine January 2006

DON'T USE BLOGGER. BLOGGER SUCKS!

For some reasons, I cannot view this site anymore. I don't know if anybody can. But I could still open the dashboard, edit and write new posts. 

Blogger has just deleted my other blog. Now they appear to be doing the same for this blog. This is from my previous post: My other blogspot blog -- m-reality.blogspot.com -- is now lost. Years of effort gone to naught. 

A week ago, I couldn't go to my post because it was blocked by google saying it has malware. I went to Google help. There were several with the same problems. But no solutions. The blog owners are supposed to remove whatever malware was put in there because of the hackers or third party gadgets like Bloglinker. But the problem is that the owners could not even access the blogs. 

Blogger, without due consideration to the blog owners who spent years in maintaining the blogs, simply and I would say maliciously deleted the blogs. . 

It's truly horrible. This is what we get for using freebies. Hope those who put in the malware will soon get their karma!

Some of the Film Reviews / Critiques that I did:

FILM REVIEWS

• SPIDERMAN 3 (2007)
• SUPERMAN Returns (2006)
• Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth, a Climate Change advocacy
• Eragon and The Fountain
• Open Water
• Romantic Movies - with a Spiritual/New Age Twist
• Deconstructing the Da Vinci Code
• SALAM: ABS-CBN and KNOWLEDGE CHANNEL’S mini series
• Lady In the Water
• Docus: The Gospel of Judas and Origins of the Da Vinci code
• Goodnight and GoodLuck
• Seeing Treason - Palace documentary justifies PP 1017
• V for Vendetta:The Movie to watch in Big Sister’s Philippines
• Utang ni Tatang:Bakhtinian Carnivalesque in a Pinoy Film
• Harry Potter : From Books to Films
• When “The Exorcist” meets “The Practice”
• What The Bleep Do We Know?

 

(UPDATE: For some reasons, Blogger returned this blog to normal. I can now view this. But I still mourn for my lost blog, which has lots of readers, and ranked quite OK in Google Rank. The url  m-reality.blogspot.com is being used by an empty blog.)

WARNING TO BLOGGER USERS

My other blogspot blog -- m-reality.blogspot.com -- is now lost. Years of effort gone to naught.

A week ago, I couldn't go to my post because it was blocked by google saying it has malware. I went to Google help. There were several with the same problems. But no solutions.

The blogowners are supposed to remove whatever malware was put in there because of the hackers or third party gadgets like Bloglinker. But the problem is that the owners could not even access the blogs.

Blogger, without due consideration to the blog owners who spent years in maintaining the blogs, simply and I would say maliciously deleted the blogs. .

It's truly horrible.

This is what we get for using freebies.

Hope those who put in the malware will soon get their karma!

The Midheaven and Your Career Path

It is Graduation time again in the Philippines. Young graduates are now about to be thrown into the real world, a world where people work for money, for fulfillment or even for just killing time.

As a guide to the graduates, I am posting here an article I wrote for Mr. Ms. magazine, May 2006:

“Whatever is born or done this moment
has the qualities of this moment in time.”
-- Carl G. Jung

Pioneering psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961) studied about a thousand horoscopes and made the conclusion that causality does not have to be A causes B. A and B can happen at the same time. He called this phenomenon synchronicity. In astrology, this means that the characteristics of the heavenly bodies have a synchronous effect on the birth of a person or any other event on Earth. Thus, when a person is born, a map of the heavens (natal chart) would give a fair indication of the characteristics of that person’s life.

In Astrology, it is very important to know at least three things: the positions of the Sun, the Moon and the Ascendant at the exact moment of one’s birth. The Ascendant is the zodiac sign on the eastern horizon at the time of birth. The Eastern horizon is where the sun “rises”. Thus, the Ascendant sign is popularly called the Rising Sign.

Popular astrology is mostly concerned with the Sun sign. The Sun sign represents one’s core personality. But humans are not one-dimensional beings. We have a complex nature.

The Moon sign represents the emotions. This involves the “murkier” side of things which popular astrology does not want to delve into so much. On the other hand, the Ascendant sign is the personality one projects to other people. Thus, if somebody tells you that you do not look like a Leo or a Scorpio, that means that what he/she is seeing is not your Sun sign but your Rising Sign.


Think of the Whole YOU

If you ask other people for advice on your career choice, their advice might be based on your Ascendant, the personality that you project. Thus, they might tell you to go to banking or Real Estate (Taurus) when what you actually want to become is a Secret Agent like James Bond (the quintessential Scorpio).

Or your heart may be telling you to become an actress (Moon Leo) but your talent actually lies elsewhere. If you consult a newspaper or magazine, it probably would be based on your Sun Sign alone.

Your Sun, Moon and Rising Signs can be compared to your Ego, Id and Superego. Or, if you were a house, your Ascendant would be your gate, courtyard and main door. Your Sun Sign would be your living and dining rooms while your Moon Sign would be your bedrooms.

When choosing or changing jobs, it is very important to analyze not just your Sun Sign but also your Moon and Rising Signs. But most importantly, look at your Midheaven.


The MIDHEAVEN


The Mediun Coeli (MC) or Midheaven is the “highest point” of the natal chart; It is the point of the noonday sun at one’s date of birth. Technically, it is the point where the ecliptic (apparent path of the Sun across the sky) crosses the meridian (line of longitude) which passes through the birth or event in question

The Midheaven indicates one’s career, life goals and public reputation. This is the key to your success – professionally and emotionally. In esoteric (spiritual) astrology, this represents what you want to do and be acknowledged for in this lifetime.

Our Sun, Moon and Rising signs are personal to us. Perhaps we allow a few friends and relatives to take a peek at our emotional or personal selves. But for the world at large, we want to be known by our Midheaven Sign. This is the kind of person we want the world and posterity to know.

For example, Queen Elizabeth II would certainly not want the world to look at her as friendly, willing, a reforming sprit, rebellious or eccentric (Aquarius rising). She would rather be known as determined, powerful, disciplined and with a sense of purpose (Scorpio midheaven). Scorpio midheaven needs emotional involvement in one’s career and the British queen’s involvement in her career is the prime reason that the English monarchy is still functioning.

In the olden days, the midheaven sign was not given much thought because kings begot kings while farmers begot farmers. But in this age of social mobility where janitors can become tycoons and heiresses can become paupers, the midheaven sign looms vital. For many astrologers, this is the destiny or karmic sign. The Midheaven Sign is what you want to do and are supposed to do in this lifetime.

In order to get a feel of what is the best job for you, analyze your Sun, Moon and Rising Signs and then try to see which is most compatible with your Midheaven Sign.


Job Clusters of ARIES MIDHEAVEN SIGN

Keywords: Pioneering, Physical body, Competition, Immediacy, Independent action, Controversy, Vigor. Example.: Jane Fonda and Pablo Picasso

With an Aries Midheaven Sign, the following is a partial list of jobs that go well with the respective. Sun/Moon/Rising Sign:

ARIES: residential / institutional architect, war correspondent, muckraker, soldier, commodities trader, pro athlete, neurosurgeon, no-desk jobs.
TAURUS: landscape architect, animal husbandry, ENT doctor
GEMINI: sports or crime reporter, PR for architectural firm, advertising sales
CANCER: obstetrician, gynecologist, interior designer, commodities analyst
LEO: stage actor, trial lawyer, chief of surgery or administrator of surgical services, venture capitalist, athletic coach in high school
VIRGO: civil engineer, records supervisor, draftsman, health and safety inspector
LIBRA: labor relations, PR for medical firms, insurance claims adjuster, cosmetic surgeon,
SCORPIO: crime investigator, trial lawyer, reconstructive or exploratory surgeon, institutional architecture
SAGITTARIUS: college athletics coach, architect or engineer for international firm, foreign correspondent, trainer of race horse
CAPRICORN: Corporate lawyer, financial officer for manufacturing or engineering firm, investment analyst for insurance firm
AQUARIUS: civil rights litigator, professor of social psychology, head of R&D in engineering firm
PISCES: Dancer, fine artist, medic or chaplain in the military.

Midheaven Sign as Guide


From the above example, one can see that with your Sun/Moon/Rising signs taken together with your Midheaven sign, you can fine-tune your job description, For example, if you would like to be a reporter and your midheaven sign is Aries, you can have a choice on what kind of reporter to become depending on your other signs. If your Sun sign is Aries, then you might want to become a war correspondent. But if you are a Gemini, then you might rather be a sports reporter. Or if you are a Sagittarian, you might want to become a foreign correspondent

If you want to be a lawyer, and your midheaven is in Aries, then you can choose which sort of law you would like to specialize in – litigation (Leo), corporate (Capricorn) or civil rights (Aquarius).

To continue, here are the other Midheaven signs:

Taurus Midheaven: Needs steady career path. Outdoors preferred. Construction, beauty, sports, horticulture or agriculture, financial management, food industry, fashion, banking, singing, physiotherapy, nursing, counseling (children). Example: Marilyn Monroe

Gemini Midheaven: Communication is key. Also variety and stimulation.. Sales, the media, writing, advertising, retailing, youth work, the hotel industry, interpreting / translation, teaching. Walt Disney

Cancer Midheaven: Requires some continuity in career. Money not the prime consideration. Nursing and the 'caring' professions, social work, restaurant trade, historian, architecture, child care industry, personnel work. Albert Schweitzer and JFK

Leo Midheaven: Likes to be in the spotlight Ambitious and financially motivated.. Acting (specially stage), any artistic work, luxury trades, banking, fashion industry, medical profession, politics or local government, work with animals. Jacqueline Kennedy and Adolf Hitler

Virgo Midheaven: Work best as an 'assistant' rather than a 'leader'. Power behind the throne, secretary, personal assistant, literary/publishing industry, administration or management of any kind, health club/leisure centre management, journalism, copywriting, psychology, the police, librarian, civil servant, animal care and breeding. Eleanor Roosevelt

Libra Midheaven: Needs comfortable working place and good pay.. Peacemaker of the office. Fashion and beauty industry, soft furnishing or interior design, antiques, diplomatic corps, the legal profession, language work, modeling. Mickey Rooney and US Chief Justice Earl Warren

Scorpio Midheaven: requires emotional involvement in the career. Money not a big factor. Needs “security of tenure”. Military, police, detective or forensic science work, investigative journalism, mining, self employment, research of any kind, medical profession, funeral industry, psychotherapist, politics. Mao Ze Dong, Ben Gurion, Paul Newman and Billie Jean king

Sagittarius Midheaven: Needs to be challenged, not very good with routine. Lawyer, outdoor sports, veterinary profession, travel industry, export industry, university lecturer, town planning, space industry, airline industry, the church, writing, international finance. Hitchcock and Solzhenitsyn

Capricorn Midheaven: Very ambitious for status, rather than necessarily for money. Quintessential self-made businessman. Self employment, politics, estate agency, farming, orthopaedics, homeopathy, engineering, exploration industry, dentistry, sculpting, civil service, stock brokerage. MacArthur and Elizabeth Arden

Aquarius Midheaven: Need absolute freedom in their career, and need, above all, to be able to be innovative. Not particularly motivated by money. Cutting edge technology, space industry, airline industry, IT industry, optician, conservation, television work, photography, cartooning, humanitarian work, publishing, the legal profession, telecommunications. Kissinger and GB Shaw

Pisces Midheaven: Often to be found working tirelessly in the background. Exceptional counseling abilities. Needs variety. Dealing effectively with intangibles. The caring professions, work with the disadvantaged and the minorities, the wine trade, the sea or fishing industries, plumbing, the church, the navy, faith and alternative healing, the occult and anything artistic – fiction, poetry, films. Van Gogh, Christian Barnard, Pope Paul VI, Glenn Miller, Albert Einstein, and Bill Gates.

Happy 2009!

2009 is another year when Jupiter sojourns in the Sign of Aquarius. This means "Let's Party!" and expect some revolutionary changes in ourselves and in society.

Happy New Year!

How to be a Ladies’ Man or a Femme Fatale

Have you ever dreamed of becoming a Ladies’ Man or a Rudolph Valentino, gathering swarms of adoring girls wherever you go? Or if you are a woman, have you dreamed of being a femme fatale such that when you walk into a room, all the guys turn their heads to admire you? Fret no more, because you can be the macho guy or sexy girl whom everybody adores.

First you have to meditate; i.e., go to the alpha or theta level of consciousness. If you are adept at meditation, you know that alpha and theta levels are states of deep relaxation.

If you are not very good at meditation, you can listen to a CD that induces alpha or theta level state of consciousness. Or, if you have a computer program or an audio recording / editing software, you can generate tones with a frequency of 8 to 14 Hertz (alpha level) or 4 to 8 Hertz (theta level frequency).

In terms of magic, the alpha and theta levels are very powerful states to be in.

Sit down, close your eyes and relax. Meditate or listen to the CD or the computer-generated tones using stereo headphones.

It would take a minimum of five minutes for your brain to go down to the desired brainwave frequency level. You would know you are in alpha when you feel very relaxed and are quite oblivious to your surroundings. Theta is even a deeper state of relaxation. You cannot feel your body or your surrounding anymore. You feel like you are floating. When you reach this stage, visualize.

See yourself or imagine yourself walking in a roomful of people or in a beach. You are exuding charm and confidence. Ladies (or gentlemen) see you, and swarm over you. They are all attracted to you. Provide the details – the greater the details, the better. Take note of the admiring faces and adoring smiles.

Energize yourself. Feel your body hair standing on end. See the other peoples’ eyes filled with desire for you. Your emotion must be real and intense.

Feel that you are a Human Magnet who attracts the opposite sex like moths to a fire or bees to a flower. When you are at the height of the experience, touch your thumb with your middle finger and exclaim a word, any word such as "Charm" or "Magnet". This will be your Trigger Word.

Repeat this process at least 8 times more so your mind will match the trigger word with your visualization.

Next time you are in a party or a beach with many girls or guys, touch your thumb with your middle finger and say the Trigger Word.

When you say the trigger word, the energy you have created during visualization would burst forth and immediately affect people around you.

Constant use of this technique is beneficial to your health because every time you say the Trigger Word, your brain would produce “happy chemicals” such as endorphins.

And since like attracts like, you would soon be attracting sexually responsive people to your circle.

But remember, being a Valentino or a Femme Fatale can have its drawbacks. You wouldn’t want to attract somebody like the Glenn Close character in Fatal Attraction.