Harry Potter in Egypt

I saw Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows in a Cairo movie theater the other week, and let me start right now by saying, I loved every minute of that movie. It may be cover for another way to stretch out the cash cow that is the Harry Potter franchise, but it also allowed them to actually do justice to what I have always thought was a really perfect end to my generation's defining book series.* [At this point in my first writing of this this post it turned into me waxing adoring about the movie and the series, which I moved to the bottom of the post in favor of getting to the point of the post: the weirdness of Egyptian movie theaters.] That being said, seeing HP7.1 in a Cairo movie theater full of irreverent Egyptians was much less than ideal.

Perhaps the Egyptians in the audience didn't feel the need to stay quiet because there were Arabic subtitles. Maybe they all really needed to have their phones on because they were waiting for important calls from their mothers/bosses/Ahmad who they are going out with later. And they definitely needed to answer in the middle of the movie. Sure those Egyptian 6-year olds probably had no idea what was going on, so they needed to shriek and talk to each other to occupy themselves. Fine. I'm just saying, when I went to see a stupid slapstick Egyptian comedy about an old guy with Alzheimer's (pronounced "al-Zuhaymer") whose kids try to take his money, the audience was a lot quieter.

One thing both movie experiences had in common though, was the 5-minute intermission. The theater with the Egyptian movie had a quaint little slide with that western-style, old-timey lettering declaring it was Intermission, and it lasted about 15 minutes. As soon as the lights came up for the intermission, some of the Egyptians in the audience bolted for a smoking break. Harry Potter's intermission started abruptly and ended without warning after only about 3 minutes--so fast that I hadn't gotten back from the bathroom before it started back up again. I'm not even sure what the point of it was. The real point is...um...Egyptians do not quite appreciate Harry Potter like us Americans do.

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Ok now Harry Potter rant:
Basically, I thought it was pretty much a perfect rendering of the book--quite a relief after the disappointingly truncated 6th one. So much less was cut or changed from the books than in the other movies, plus somewhere along the way Daniel Radcliffe finally learned to be quite a good actor. The same holds true for Rupert Grint and Emma Watson (yes, I do think she is a good actress, and no, not just because she is also very pretty), and the supporting cast has always been quite well cast from the beginning (re: Alan Rickman as Snape). The one really noticeable change, having Harry and Hermione specifically not use pollyjuice potion when they visit Harry's parents' house, made sense in order to actually have the faces of Harry and Hermione, rather than of some random old people they impersonate in the book, on screen for two such pivotal scenes. On that note, so many of the scenes were absolutely pitch-perfect, how I had imagined them in my head. Perhaps the descriptions of Nagini's house in Godrick's Hollow and Bill and Fleur's Shell Cottage on the cliffs of the English seaside (to name just a few of the really fitting scenes) were so detailed in the books that they left little room for variation in both my imagination and the movie's execution, but either way the end result was that this movie reinforced my mind's depictions of the story I love so much.

Finally, the movie did a really perfect job handling the section when Harry, Ron and Hermione are left only wander about day by day without a clue what to do. When reading this part in the book, I vividly remember feeling--really feeling--their despair and their restlessness, and the movie captured that aptly. All in all, I had a great time with this movie, and can't wait for the next one to come out. Even with the less-than-perfect viewing setting, I loved it.