The Mike Haddad Show: This is relevant to my interests.

Friday night I went out with some of the AE crew to see Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. I'm lukewarm on the whole movie right now. The cinematics were great, but the movie strayed far away from how the book worked. So while I suggest you all go out and see the latest piece in the Harry Potter legacy, I'd like to take the chance to point out some issues that bothered me with the movie.

First of all, the movie was two and a half hours long. It's hard to squeeze a book as big as the Goblet of Fire into a movie that's only two and a half hours long, yet it was still long enough to make people who aren't Harry Potter fans (Adam) antsy throughout the movie. So in the two and a half hours they made some changes to the story.

Winky and Dobby, who were key characters in the book, do not appear in the movie. In the book, Winky is responsible for sending up the dark mark at the beginning of the movie. Rather, Winky gets blamed for sending up the dark mark at the beginning of the movie when it was in reality Barty Crouch Jr., who was supposed to be under the Imperius Curse and an Invisibility Cloak being watched by Winky in the top box at the World Quidditch Championship.

Since they cut Winky out, they completely rearranged where the Weasley's were sitting. They were in the worst possible seats, instead of in the top box with the Malfoys. Annoying, but they made it work - although this could be because the Quidditch World Cup lasted all of 1 minute on screen. Dobby being cut out wasn't so much of a big deal. Instead, Neville gave Harry the Gillyweed which was Barty Crouch's hope in the beginning of the story.

Before the first task, Ron never saw the dragons in the book. They fudged this up in the movie. While Ron claimed to be the reason that Hagrid told Harry, Barty Crouch Jr. still yelled out that Hagrid would never had told Harry had it not been for him at the end of the movie. Aside from that, the creative license used on the tasks was in my opinion fair and justified, despite what some others think. Creative license that I didn't agree with: Portraying the other triwizarding schools as all-girl and all-boy.

A lot of the side nonsense was cut out of the movie, but my biggest beef was with the way the Yule Ball was done. The Yule Ball is the turning point in the Ron and Hermione love story. The only person who was really shocked by how Hermione looked was Miss. Patil. Otherwise, there was no really big deal made about it which was a little disappointing.

On the whole though the movie was definitely worth the $10.50 that I paid for it. My next beef is going to be with the movie companies for charging that outrageous price for a student ticket.