Subjective Morality

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I saw 9 on Saturday, and I wasn’t too excited about it. I didn’t look it up on Wikipedia or anything, so I went into it not knowing anything about it. It was produced by Tim Burton, so I figured it couldn’t be horrible.

I went to see Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince yesterday. It wasn’t good.

In the theater, I was feeling really carsick and I sat in between a bastard demon-child and a pedophile who laughed at inappropriate moments, so excuse me if this isn’t the best review I could write.¹

I’m not going to bother with a spoiler warning² because 90% of the people who go to see the Harry Potter movies have read the books and know what’s going to happen, and if you’re one of those few who haven’t read them, well, you’re a loser and I don’t care if I spoil it for you.

One of the biggest things that bothered me was how the plot of the book was completely fucked with. Scenes aren’t in their proper places³ and a lot of stuff is left out. I know an adaptation can’t be expected to include everything from the book, but this one just leaves so much out. I feel like I’ve been cheated.

In the beginning of the movie, Harry is seen reading an article in the Daily Prophet⁴ proclaiming him as the Chosen One while a foxy waitress watches him. The waitress comes up to him and they flirt. This scene was not in the book, and it annoys me, but I suppose it serves its function: it shows that Harry is, indeed, not that squeeky little kid from the first movie, and that he is the Chosen One, a fact he’ll have to get used to. The waitress tells him she gets off at 11. Sadly for Harry though, that buxom waitress will be disappointed, as Dumbledore shows up and drags Harry away to get an old professor back . . .

Crap. I seem to be turning this into a review where I tell the entire story again⁵, so I’m going to stop that shit right now and just get on with my bitching:

Fenrir Greyback looked weird and he served no real purpose.

In one scene, the dialogue made me say “What the fuck?”⁶

What the fuck is up with the scene where the Weasleys’ house is burned down? That sure wasn’t in the book.

The pensieve was changed. A little consistency would’ve been nice, Mr. Yates.

Death Eaters should not be able to fly. If wizards could fly, why the fuck would they need brooms?⁷

Yates seems to have an annoying fascination with mood and weather change. Weather reflecting mood isn’t a bad thing when used in moderation, but Yates uses it way too much.

Too much with the “Oh yeah, these kids are teenagers now, so they can like date and stuff!” You get beat over the head with it.

There’s too much⁸ attention on Malfoy. There should have been at least some ambiguity as to who was trying to kill Dumbledore, and Malfoy’s plan was pretty much transparent from the beginning. All the scenes where he’s trying to fix the vanishing cabinet shouldn’t have been there⁹. It’s called mystery, Yates, have you heard of it?

After I read Dumbledore die, I cried¹⁰. After I saw Dumbledore die, I didn’t really give a damn. The emotional impact of Dumbledore’s death was almost nonexistent.

After Dumbledore is killed¹¹, the band of Death Eaters run from the castle, wreaking havoc on their way. The Great Hall is destroyed and Hagrid’s hut is set ablaze. But there should have been more. In the book, there was an epic battle inside of Hogwarts between the teachers and the Death Eaters. I would have rather seen this than Harry flirting with some chick. And what happened to Hagrid? His house was destroyed. Was he in it? Is he dead? Those who read the book know he isn’t, those that didn’t are left in the dark.

One of the first scenes in the movie was when a gang of Death Eaters destroy a bridge. In the book, the bridge’s destruction was only mentioned, but in the movie it was actually shown. This exemplifies the problem with the movie: it relies more on fancy, expensive CGI effects rather than good dialogue.

The one great part in this movie was in the cavern when all the zombies (or inferi) are being barbecued in a giant inferno set loose by Dumbledore. That part was pretty neat, but there was a problem with it. It was pretty reckless of Dumbledore to fill the entire cavern with fire while the kid whose blood, as Dumbledore says himself, is much more valuable than his own is being drowned.

Anyone who hasn’t read the books will be baffled by the movie. There are many things that they won’t understand completely until they read the books. That’s one of the problems with the recent Harry Potter movies: there’s no effort to make the movie stand on its own. It’s laziness; they know they don’t have to make it a good adaptation to make millions of dollars off it. Like Stephen Spielberg said: “I purposely didn’t do the Harry Potter movie because for me, that was shooting ducks in a barrel. It’s just a slam dunk. It’s just like withdrawing a billion dollars and putting it into your personal bank account. There’s no challenge.”

I once had this Harry Potter piggy bank. It was based off the tunnels at Gringotts Wizarding Bank. You put a coin in the slot and it rolled down three levels or “tunnels” until it plopped into a container at the bottom. It was pretty nifty, but the only reason it was made was to make money. That’s what this movie feels like; it’s more of an accessory than an adaptation.

Footnotes (for those who give a damn):

The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho is the story of a shepherd who travels the countryside of Spain in search of adventure, his dreams, and love (kinda).

The first sentence in the book is “The boy’s name was Santiago.” Coelho then proceeds to never use his name again, simply referring to him as “the boy” or “he”. The boy’s parents had wanted him to be a priest, making him attend a seminary until he was 16. He doesn’t want to be one, however. He tells his father that he wants to travel; to see the world, and the only people who travel in his village are the shepherds, so he decides to become one. His father basically says “OK!” and gives the boy three Spanish coins to buy his sheep. So this wonderful father sends his adolescent kid off with no training, no supplies, and three silver coins to herd a bunch of sheep across the Spanish countryside alone. What great parenting.

The first scene is that of him settling in with his sheep to spend the night in a dilapidated church with a sycamore growing out of it, in a way foreshadowing the ending. The boy has a dream in the church about going to Egypt and finding a hidden treasure:

I dreamed that I was in a field with my sheep, when a child appeared and began to play with the animals. The child went on playing with my sheep for quite awhile. And suddenly, the child took me by both hands and transported me to the Egyptian pyramids. Then at the Egyptian pyramids, the child said to me, ‘If you come here, you will find a hidden treasure.’ And, just as she was about to show me the exact location, I woke up.

Once, when the boy was bargaining to sell his sheep, he meets this merchant’s daughter, who marvels at his ability to read, and is instantly enamored.

Maybe we’re all that way, the boy mused. Even me—I haven’t thought of another woman since I met the merchant’s daughter. Looking at the sun, he calculated he would reach Tarifa before midday. There, he could exchange his book for a thicker one, fill his wine bottle, shave, and have a haircut; he had to prepare himself for his meeting with the girl, and he didn’t want to think about the possibility that some other shepherd, with a bigger flock of sheep, had arrived there before him and asked for her hand.

It’s the possibility of having a dream come true that makes life interesting, he thought, as he looked again at the position of the sun, and hurried his pace. He had suddenly remembered that, in Tarifa, there was an old woman who interpreted dreams.

I think the ‘bigger flock of sheep’ thing is a veiled penis reference, but no matter. The boy arrives at Tarifa and asks a gypsy to interpret his dreams for him. Why didn’t he visit the merchant first? We’ll never know. The gypsy doesn’t tell him anything ground-breaking: there’s supposedly a hidden treasure at the pyramids and he must go and find it. Simple.

The boy does the rest of his errands in Tarifa, trading his book, shaving, refilling his wine, etc. and goes to the city plaza to drink some wine and read his new book. He isn’t thinking about the book though, he’s thinking about sheering his sheep in front the merchant’s daughter so she could see that “he was capable of doing difficult things”:

He had already imagined the scene many times; every time, the girl became fascinated when he explained that the sheep had to be sheared from back to front.

While he’s in the middle of his erotic sheep-shearing fantasy, a creepy old man comes along and bothers him, trying to strike up a conversation. The old guy is persistent, much to the boy’s chagrin. Long story short, the guy is King Melchizedek (hereafter referred to as King Melchie) of Salem, and he’s here to teach the boy about “personal legends”, which is a fancy-shmancy word for one’s predetermined purpose in life. Now, being an existentialist, I think that’s total bullshit, but this is long enough without a rant on existential philosophy. The old man says that he’ll tell him how to find the hidden treasure in return for one-tenth of his sheep, because he wants the boy to complete his “personal legend” (I wish Coelho had picked a less-weird word for this). The boy grudgingly agrees and gives the guy his sheep. Well, guess what King Melchie’s advice is? Go to the Egyptian pyramids. Useless old bastard. He gives the boy two stones, which are supposed to be used in making decisions; one stone representing yes and the other no, and the boy chooses one randomly without looking. He only uses them once or twice in the entire book to make unimportant decisions. King Melchie’ also says a bunch of other shit, which the boy quotes almost every other page from now on. It gets annoying. Very annoying.

The boy sells the rest of his sheep for the money he’ll need to get to Egypt. He boards a ferry and crosses the Mediterranean Sea, landing in the city of Tanger. Not being familiar with the people, he trusts some guy he meets at a bar to take him to the pyramids, giving him all his money from the sheep. The dude flees the boy in a market, stealing all his money. This is one of those rare moments in the book where Coelho says something true: most humans are greedy, selfish bastards.

The boy, penniless and in a strange place, wanders around for a day looking for a job. He finds a shop that sells crystal glasses and offers to polish the glasses for the owner. The guy hires the boy, and the boy offers suggestions that would make the tiny glass shop better, such as building a display case. The shop thrives.

One day, the boy and the shop owner are having a discussion about dreams and such. The shop owner, being a muslim, believes it’s his religious duty “to visit the holy city of Mecca.” But he’s afraid to because wanting to go there is better than having been there, or something like that:

[I]t’s the thought of Mecca that keeps me alive. That’s what helps me face these days that are all the same, these mute crystals on the shelves, and lunch and dinner at that same horrible café. I’m afraid that if my dream is realized, I’ll have no reason to go on living.

How emo. Well that’s kind of a damning philosophy, isn’t it? Dreaming of going to Mecca keeps him alive, but he has to go there at least once or he’ll burn in hell, supposedly.

After a working for over a year, the boy has enough money to get back on track for Egypt. He plans to travel with the glass shop owner’s suppliers who ride caravans through the desert. He goes to the suppliers’ corral, where he meets a pissy young Englishman know-it-all (Lawrence of Arabia?) who’s seeking an alchemist at the Al-Fayoum oasis who purportedly has the Philosopher’s Stone, you know, that thing in the first Harry Potter book. The Englishman is antisocial until the boy takes out the two stones King Melchie gave him. Upon seeing them, the Englishman exclaims; he’s seen those stones before, and takes out his own pair (another genital reference?) and asks the boy where he got his. The boy tells him about King Melchie, who seems to have also met with the Englishman. Then they start talking about how their both meeting the king is an omen. Ugh.

The caravan leaves Tanger on camelback. The boy and the Englishman continue their conversation and talk about how there’s no such things as coincidence, and blah, blah, blah. They become careful friends over their trek. A tribal war is ensuing in the desert and the caravan must be careful where it travels.

They arrive at the Al-Fayoum oasis to warm greetings from the locals, and they’re ordered to give up their weapons. The Englishman immediately starts looking for the alchemist, asking people where he is. No one tells him until they ask this girl:

Finally, a young woman approached who was not dressed in black. She had a vessel on her shoulder, and her head was covered by a veil, but her face was uncovered. The boy approached her to ask about the alchemist.

At that moment, it seemed to him like time stood still, and the Soul of the World surged within him. When he looked into her dark eyes, and saw that her lips were poised between a laugh and silence, he learned the most important part of the language that all the world spoke—the language that everyone on earth was capable of understanding in their heart. It was love.

Love at first sight. Sickening. The girl’s name is Fatima, and she seems to treat the boy as, well, a boy. She points the Englishman in the direction of the alchemist’s tent and he goes immediately like a whipped dog. Fatima leaves and the boy goes off and does whatever. The next day, the Englishman tells the boy about his encounter with the alchemist. The alchemist refuses to teach the Englishman until he turns lead into gold. While the Englishman’s trying to do that, the boy is busy flirting with Fatima, going to the well where she gets her water every day to talk to her. Coelho doesn’t do a very good job of convincing the reader these two are in love. It seems more like one of those relationships based on necessity. She wants a husband, he has a penis. Now they’re in love. Let’s celebrate.

The next couple of days, the boy has a dream that the camp will be overrun by one of the warring tribes. He goes to tell the chief of the camp, and he says that if the boy is wrong they’ll kill him, then gives all the visitors their weapons back. After leaving the chief’s tent, a man on a horse rides up to him and talks about stuff. This horse dude is the alchemist we’ve been hearing so much about. He imparts some mubo-jumbo words of wisdom and leaves.

The next day, the rival tribe attacks and the soldiers are able to thwart it because of the boy’s prediction. The chief hails the boy and asks him to become counselor of the oasis.

Later that day, the alchemist talks to the boy. The boy has doubts about what he should do next: stay with Fatima and become counselor to the oasis, or leave for Egypt then come back for her. The alchemist says some more mumbo-jumbo and they decide to leave together, following the latter plan.

On their way, the boy and the alchemist are captured by an enemy tribe. The alchemist gives the chief all of the boy’s money in exchange for their lives, exclaiming that the boy is an alchemist and could destroy the tribe’s camp by turning himself into the wind. The chief gives the boy three days to turn into the wind and destroy his camp, and if he can’t, he’d kill them both. The boy is scared shitless because he has no idea how to do this, but the alchemist, in his infinite wisdom, says, “Well, you’ll have to learn; your life depends on it.” How useful.

The three days pass, and the boy takes the chief to a cliff overlooking the camp. The boy faces the camp and then starts talking to the desert. Yes, you read that right. He talks to the mother-fucking desert. The desert asks the boy, “What is love?” (I immediately heard that stupid Haddaway song in my head) and the boy goes off talking about how the food chain somehow is love. The deserts basically says, “WTF? IDK.” The boy asks the desert to help him turn into the wind, and the desert says that it’ll give him its sands but he needs the wind as well. So the boy starts talking to the wind.

The wind pretty much says the same thing the desert did: “I don’t know what you’re talking about, dude. I can’t turn your fat ass into myself. I’ll blow for you, but why don’t you ask the sun?” The boy asks the sun, who also doesn’t know how to turn him into the wind (you’d think a flaming ball of gas would know that) and suggests he ask God. So the boy prays, turns into the wind, and appears at the destroyed camp. Yeah, God’s such an asshole that he’d destroy a bunch of shit just because a little boy asks him to:

The men were terrified of his sorcery. But there were two people who were smiling: the alchemist, because he had found his perfect disciple, and the chief, because that disciple had understood the glory of God.

The following day the general bade the boy and the alchemist farewell, and provided them with an escort party to accompany them as far as they chose.

Wasn’t he a chief just a second ago? I believe there’s a big difference between a general and a chief.

The boy and the alchemist stop at a monastery where they ask a monk if they can use his kitchen. The alchemist melts some lead in a pot on the stove, then takes out the Philosopher’s Stone and turns the lead into gold, breaks the gold into four pieces, and hands them out (can you break a chunk of gold into four pieces with your bare hands? I think not. Such is the awesomeness of the alchemist). He gives one piece to the monk, one to himself, one to the boy, and the last to the monk in case the boy comes back in need of it, saying “Everything that happens once can never happen again. But everything that happens twice will surely happen a third time.” The boy and the alchemist go their separate ways and the boy keeps heading to the Pyramids.

As he approaches, his heart tells him that he should “[b]e aware of the place where you are brought to tears. That’s where I am, and that’s where your treasure is.” Whatever. When he rounds the top of the next dune, he sees the pyramids lighted by moonlight and instantly starts crying. Pussy.

He starts digging where his tears fell. He digs and digs and digs, when two men come up behind him and take his gold (so now he’s poor again. That alchemist sure is prescient). The two men wonder what the boy is digging for, and, thinking it’s treasure, force the boy to keep digging, beating him half to death when he finds nothing. Bruised and bleeding, the boy screams that “he had twice dreamed of a treasure hidden near the pyramids of Egypt.” The two men think he’s crazy and one of them says this:

You’ll live, and you’ll learn that man shouldn’t be so stupid. Two years ago, I had a recurrent dream, too. I dreamed that I should travel to the fields of Spain and look for a ruined church where shepherds and their sheep slept. In my dream, there was a sycamore growing out of the ruins of the sacristy, and I was told that, if I dug at the roots of the sycamore, I would find a hidden treasure. But I’m not so stupid as to cross an entire desert just because of a recurrent dream.

Then the two men leave. There’s no hidden treasure at the pyramids. I think it’s obvious where this is going.

The boy goes back to the monastery, gets the gold the monk was keeping for him, and travels to Spain, back to where the church is. He digs under the roots and finds a chest full of Spanish coins. “I’m coming, Fatima,” he says at the end of the epilogue. Evidently he’d rather spend time copulating than visiting his parents who he hasn’t seen in years.

The End.

Now for the bitching.

The whole ‘I’m gonna go to Egypt and find some buried treasure!’ thing was totally fucking pointless. Why couldn’t he have just dreamed that the damn treasure was under the tree? Oh. Yes. You need a simplistic plot with a poorly executed ending that’ll make kids go “Wow!”. Mr. Coelho is definitely no O. Henry; that ending just comes off as cheesy and stupid. It would’ve been a better book if the two men had beaten the boy to death right before he found his treasure. That would be a far truer statement about life than this ‘you can do anything you want!’ bullshit. No, sometimes there are things that people just can’t do. In the untimely scripted words of Heath Ledger’s Joker, “[People] are only as good as the world allows them to be.”

In short, The Alchemist is the skeleton of a story trying desperately to be more than it is or ever could be, and in so doing, fails miserably. It’s like a starter book for bullshit new-age philosophy and I can’t help but laugh when it tries to sound mystical. The writing style is simplistic, but not in a good way. The simplicity and over-reliance on narration sucks all the emotion and depth from the story. Most scenes where the boy is supposed to express some sort of feelings are anecdotal, narrated, or lacking of any meaningful dialogue. What’s left feels cheapened and incomplete. It beats you over the head constantly with it’s meaning, which isn’t even slightly ambiguous. “Follow your dreams,” it says. “Follow your dreams. Follow your dreams! FOLLOW YOUR DREAMS GOD-DAMMIT!” A lot of the so-called “wise” statements in the book make absolutely no sense, such as the numerous references to ‘The Soul of The World’. I tried. I really tried to understand what the fuck this “Soul of the World” thing is, and I’m still scratching my head. Coelho tries to explain it in an interview: “[A]ll religions tend to follow the same light. in between the light and us, sometimes there are too many rules. The light is here and there are no rules to follow this light.” What? Nonsensical gibberish to me. Coelho has no artistic finesse in my mind, and I can’t fathom why Bill Clinton read this (as Coelho says in the introduction). At least it’s a quick read; quick and painful.

I would not recommend this book to anyone, especially children. It’ll only make them sad when they realize that their dreams will never come true, no matter how much they believe or try.