Harry Potter and The Half-Blood Prince

We finally got round to seeing this film today. I normally take a great delight in going to see films that have had mediocre reviews just for the fun of being able to say that they were pretty good actually, but in this instance, the critics were right.

My main gripe being - bearing in mind I've read all the books a couple of times and seen all the films a few times and found that they were usually very faithfully and imaginatively translated to the big screen - that this time, they took a fairly long and complicated book, chose a dozen scenes at random (missing out some of the most important ones and including a few irrelevant ones, including two scenes that weren't even in the book*), filmed each scene in loving (but slightly inaccurate**) detail and sort of tacked them together into a half-way bland overall hodge-podge.

The best bit is fairly early on, when Luna Lovegood admits to Harry, "I sleepwalk. That's why I wear shoes to bed". I'm not sure that was in the book either, but at least it made me laugh.

* Neither the first scene, in which dementors (?) attack the Millennium Bridge, nor the scene halfway through in which Bellatrix Lestrange and Fenrir Greyback attack the Weasley residence in the middle of winter and then run off through a corn-field** where the corn is still standing eight foot high (or maybe it was a wheatfield, either way, that stuff would have been harvested months before then), were in the book nor do they advance the plot.

** In the book, Tonks rescues Harry from the Hogwarts Express; in the film Luna Lovegood rescues him. In the book, the baddies have to fight their way down from the astronomy tower; in the film they just sneak off. The Weasley residence appears in one or two of the earlier films and is in a copse or near a wood; in this film it's in the middle of a cornfield with nary a tree in sight. Why?