New Harry Potter Film Promises to Change Your Life

This week Jon (Sometimes Funny) Stewart had an amusing riff on the Palin brats in the news, dancing and otherwise, and mocked putting a gun in his mouth to end it all due to the absurdity of attention to such cultural muck as Dancing With the Stars. In the same vein, it boggles my mind that Harry Potter drivel gets coddled as much as it does, and here’s an example, a quote from film critic A.O. Scott in the NY Times, which I’m amazed he can write this stuff with a straight face:
“In this chapter their adventures have an especially somber and scary coloration, as the three friends are cast out from the protective cocoon of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry into a bleak, perilous grown-up world that tests the independence they have struggled to obtain under the not-always-benevolent eyes of their teachers. Childish things have been put away — this time there is no quidditch, no school uniforms, no schoolboy crushes or classroom pranks — and adult supervision has all but vanished. Albus Dumbledore is dead, and though Hagrid (Robbie Coltrane) and Alastor Mad-Eye Moody (Brendan Gleeson) offer some assistance early on, Harry and his companions must rely on the kindness of house elves, on their own newly mastered wizarding skills and, above all, on one another.”
He later goes on to compare the plot hijinks to that shining beacon of blather, Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, a halfbaked mystery within a thoroughly idiotic enigma, which made about as much sense as Sarah Palin’s foreign policy. I’ve actually tried to watch the film version several times, and can never make it through. I keep waiting for the moment to realize why sane people would find this at all interesting, much less to make Brown one of the highest paid writers of all time. Like the popularity of those hideous Jersey Shore mutants, it just goes to show there’s no logic to human behavior, none.