Last Saturday afternoon, we went to a screening at Pixar Studios in Emeryville of "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 1," and returned over the soon-to-be-replaced Bay Bridge in time for a corker of a sunset.
Splitting up the final book into two films was a good decision, since they didn't need to cram an overabundance of narrative into a two-and-a-half hour film, and there was actually time for character development among our three nearly adult hero(in)es.
In her seven Harry Potter novels, J.K. Rowling seemed to be the only storyteller in popular culture who seriously tapped into the malevolence of the Bush/Cheney/Blair administrations and their legions of Deatheaters while they were actually running amok over the last decade. She also taught generations of children not to trust their elders when they say one thing and do another.
Something similar seems to be happening with the late Swedish novelist Stieg Larsson's "Millenium" trio of thrillers. The Julian Assange and Wikileaks story is straight out of one of those "The Girl Who...Kicked Butt" novels, even down to the trumped-up rape charges against Assange in Stockholm. Let's hope reality mirrors fiction and justice triumphs in this particular case.
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