ok, real smut filter now: FRIENDS RESPOND PLEASE

i understand the need for SFW of the officebound in our midst, but i weary of limiting my icon choices and/or photo embedding for certain entries. i'm therefore going to create a NSFW filter and i need to know if you want on it. (for the record I already know, my dear vicar, that you do not :) i don't remember who else said "WHOA DOGGY!" last time i totally violate SFW space... but i'll assume you wish to remain chaste unless you otherwise advise.

And another thing!

Suddenly there are all these characters out of the friggin' blue and they're given an average of 37 seconds of screen time each and we're supposed to know about them and their histories and blah blah blah... folks like Nymphomania Thongs on the "good" side and Beatrix LeStrained-Pun, who, one hopes, will end up marrying Harry and writing about rabbits and foxes and suchlike. Harry's in his usual first-reel trouble with both sus tíos muglatos and the Ministry of Orwellian Menace, and who shows up to rescue him but the SuperFriends! Only they're, like, weird lookin'. I felt like I was watching this episode of Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law and all these secondhand Hanna-Barbera superheros were showing up expecting folks to remember them.

And has Helena Bottomed Carter really determined she will never again in her lifetime play another rôle? Somehow between her being caught in the monstrously evil Tim Burton's Rasputine spell and Fight Club and this, she's gotten herself stuck in the same wild-haired twitching performance we first glimpsed when her Ophelia said it with flowers in Zeffirelli's Mel-ifluous Cliff Notes version of Hamlet (1990).

Plus! How can Cornelius Fudge... wait, now I think of it: How can Cornelius Fudge (a) have been deemed an acceptable name to the ever more tiresome JoKe Rowling? and (b) be construed throughout the movie as anything but the willing puppet of Lord Vole-of-death? That the viciousness with which he and Imelda pursue and attempt to destroy two of the most highly renowned wizards in the world—one who's basically an elder of unquestioned wisdom and power, the other The Boy Who Lived—turns out to be borne merely of an overactive skepticism is the single most dunderheaded move yet in the series' plotline and is an insult to those of us who cultivate perfectly sensible skepticisms. I dunno how the book plays this (and I aim ne'er t'), but Fudge's climactic exclamation "He's back!"—as if he's never even entertained the notion, even after all the Death-Eater activity and portents last term—is the stuff a 9-year-old child would look at and groan with disbelief. Nobody's that friggin' stupid. Unless it's the author that needs him so to be.

We all concluded at a certain point that Glinda's refusal to inform Dorothy of the way home back in Munchkinland had at least some measure of malice in it. "You had to learn the lesson yourself," indeed: Bitch, I'mon click my heels three times on yo motherfuckin' FACE. Ditto Oz hisself, sending Do and her organ-deficient friends off to lay them doun and dee, just to get them out of his thinning hair. Of course, the 9-year-olds in us want to be beguiled by the elaborately affable man behind the curtain (whose actions indicate the opposite of "a very good man... just a very bad wizard"), once he fesses up and starts meting out the trinkets and inspiring, among other psychosomatic easements, some scary-bad math from the Scarecrow (which at least the Chinese and Indian 9-year-olds must cringe at).

Yet this Cornelius Fudge hasn't a tenth of the charm of Frank Morgan in TWoO. How can we forgive him his trespasses? How can we think his insistence that Harry's a liar—tantamount to exposing Harry to Ralph Fiennes's wickedest of witches, new, improved, and unmeltable—is innocently misguided? Is this meant to be a dramatic mislead? The movie nudges us toward expecting collusion, with an early scene of Fudge and Lucifer Badfaith whispering in the hallway before Harry's trial commences. But what's the point of making us think the good guy's a bad guy when he's not? In a series that's played out like round after round of "spot the villain," that only works if there IS a villain, as in the Severus* and Sirius misleads in I and III, respectively. Is Rowling's innovation here that there is none except the Big Bad we already met at the end of IV (and some new assorted minions presented in passing)? If so, how fucking STUPID is that?

(Disclaimer: I've read only the first and third books. If in the remaining two stories it turns out Fudge really is a collabo, I'll understand and forgive this picture a skosh more.)

*Edit: One happy note for the whole franchise: Alan Rickman is a force of nature as Severus Snape. Even the backstory we're given in V enriches rather than diminishes his wondrous, complicated presence, his surface malevolence clashing with his fierce loyalty and quiet pragmatism. Rickman rocks, which is another reason Perfume sucked baby diarrhea through a straw without a chaser.