Goblet of Fire

After another absolutely insane, wall-to-all kind of day at the office (thus, no posts) yesterday MrsDarwin and made a long scheduled trip out to see the latest Harry Potter movie. (Babysitting takes some getting around here.)

Overall, quite good, I thought. Patrick Boyle (composer for all Kenneth Branagh films and also for Gosford Park, among others) was a nice replacement for the traditional John Williams score. Cutting down the second longest of the books, I thought the director/screenwriter made a good choice to drop a number of entire sub-plots rather than trying to cram everything in as the first couple movies did.

As the shadows lengthen around Harry and it becomes evident that another dark time or magical civil war is descending in this and the next two books, it strikes me how lucky and unusual we are in our current time, in that we live in comparatively peaceful times. The WSJ had a review of a new biography of Siegfried Sassoon, and it struck me how much rougher a time someone had living from the 1880s to the 1960s than people born in the 60s and 70s here in the US. There's no telling what lies ahead, but despite the cultural and moral decline (and the looming threat of Islamofascism) we really do have it terribly easy, and every sign of continuing to have it so.