** Royal Deceit
*** Dr. Horrible’s Singalong Blog
**** Amadeus
*** Harry Potter and the Half-blood Prince
*** Lost Season 1, eps 1-8

Royal Deceit is supposed to be a movie adaptation of the original “rougher, more viking” story that Hamlet is based on. Unfortunately, the adaptation is kind of cheap and feels silly in places. I did eventually get into it enough to finish it (E gave up on it after half an hour), but I don’t really recommend it. If you’re a particular fan of Christian Bale, Gabriel Byrne, or Helen Mirren, you might like it.

Dr. Horrible was funny, as you’d expect. Not much more to it than that, but it was a good time.

Amadeus really is as good as it’s supposed to be. I hadn’t seen it since it originally came out and really enjoyed it. I like its approach to presenting genius — most viewers (me certainly included) probably can’t really grasp what makes Mozart so good compared to his contemporaries, so having Salieri as the interpreter for all us ordinary people works well, giving us a true musician’s insight. And of course, the original brilliant step was to make this story about Salieri, not Mozart; in Salieri, we have a wonderful antihero, jealous and vile but unable to resist the music.

Harry Potter was okay entertainment, but kind of annoyed me. This book was my favorite of the series, focused as it is on Snape, one of the few complex characters in the whole story. And yet, the whole central thread of the book, the half-blood prince, was basically reduced to: “hey I found this book, it makes me great at potions, but gee the guy who wrote it seems kind of twisted!” “Yes, I was the half-blood prince all along! ha ha!” It’s incredibly stupid, like the reveal at the end of a Scooby-Doo movie. Yes we get the big journey to retrieve the horcrux and of course the omg snape kills dumbledore moment, but all the other development.. gone.

Lost.. I will go into more when I review the whole first season.