Dr. Phyllis on "Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince"

Alright my fellow Harry Potter geeks the moment you've been waiting for has come. Harry Potter has hit theaters around the globe once again in the sixth installment of the series Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince.

Harry Potter is on the threshold of his sixth year at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, but there is more than school on Mr. Potter's mind. When we last saw Harry he had just discovered a prophecy concerning him and Voldemort. He now knows it is up to him to defeat the Dark Lord, but there is a catch "neither can live while the other survives". Now Harry must prepare for the final show down with Lord Voldemort and Albus Dumbledore has agreed to assist while he can. Yet what Dumbledore will teach him is not complex spells of defence, but information that can only be found in the hazy world of memory. Yet their most important, belonging to the new potions master Professor Slughorn, has been tampered with and it is up to Harry to retreive the truth from within Slughorn's mind and thus find the key to defeating Voldemort once and for all.

However Dumbledore isn't the only help Harry has found this year. Harry has also managed to fool Professor Slughorn into thinking he is some kind of potions prodedgy by following the instructions of mysterious Half Blood Prince found in the form of scribles in an old potions book. Yet as Ginny Weasley discovered in her first year of school sometimes a book is more than a book.

There another concern weighing on Harry what Malfoy is up to. Just before leaving for school Harry, Ron, and Hermione followed Malfoy to Borgan and Burks in Nocktern and he requested Borgan keep something safe. During the year many fatal objects had made their way into innocent hands such as the cursed necklace, found by Katie Belle, and the posioned bottle of wine Ron accidently drank in Slugghorn's office intended to be a gift to Albus Dumbledore, the one man the Dark Lord ever feared. Harry believes these poor attemps to assinate Dumbledore are the work of new Death Eater, Draco Malfoy. Of course this is the book's version of events.

In the film Harry, Ron, and Hermione follow Malfoy and Malfoy's mother to Borgan and Burks which is filled with a small company of Death Eaters, Phinear Greyback among them. They witness the unvailing of a cabinate, and some of kind anisiation ceremony. The film also shows Malfoy trying to repair the cabinate in the room of requirement while in the book the reader only knows that wherever Malfoy is spending his time doesn't show up on the Marauder's Map.

Now in the book there is a lot of romance between Ron and Hermione and Harry and Ginny. In the film this quality is inhanced along with action and less time is spent on the memories Dumbledore shows Harry, which are important to the seventh and final book Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Some fudage is wasted with an added action sequence where another memory could have been introduced. The death scene also could have been done better. Perhaps I've said too much. Anyway, see this movie, but after you read the book. You'll get more out of it that way. I'll give this film an A. I know shocking.