sabato 4 dicembre 2021

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by J.K. Rowling

Time ago, the Riddle family was found dead, the two parents and their son Tom, no wound visible. Nobody liked them. Gardener Frank was believed guilty, but couldn’t be convicted without cause of death. He stayed to take care of the place. Frank said he had seen a teenage boy that night, but nobody believed him.

Now in August, old Frank sees some lights and goes check and sees Voldemort and Wormtail, talking. Wormtail would like to do whatever they plan to do with a random wizard instead of Harry Potter. Nagini sees Frank and Voldemort kills him. 

Harry sees it in a vision-dream. (long recap of who he is)

He writes to Sirius to talk about his scar hurting.

Molly writes to his house to ask the Dursley to let him go to them for the two weeks before school, so they can go to the quidditch world cup. Ron writes to him too, with his tiny owl. Harry is excited.

The Weasley arrive by floo and take him to the Burrow. Dudley’s tongue goes very long after he ate a toffee George let drop, knowing he was on a diet and would eat it.

There are Bill and Charlie too. Bill wears modern stuff, is tall and has long hair, an earring and is very cool, with dragonhide boots. 

Their parents are angry at the twins for their Weasley’ wizard wheezes. The twins’s OWLs last year were not great, and they don’t want to work at the ministry but open a joke shop.

Percy works at the ministry under Mr Crouch. Ginny named the little owl Pigwidgeon. 

The Weasley take a portkey with Amos and Cedric Diggory. Bill, Charlie and Percy will apparate later.

They use a tent, magically enlarged in the inside. One for the boys, one for the girls.

They meet Seamus with his mother and with his best friend Dean.

Oliver Wood, he signed to play professional. Ernie McMillan and Cho Chang.

It’s Ireland against Bulgaria

They talk bets with Ludo Bagman, Barty Crouch arrives and calls Percy Wetherby… (but he’s talking to Arthur…) 

Ron is a big fan of Krum. 

They finally go to their seats. 

The Malfoys arrive later, all three, guests of Fudge, the minister. Lucius insults Arthur on being poor.

The Bulgarian show is Veelas dancing, affecting all the men present. Leprechauns giving money is the show for Ireland.

Harry loves the game and is in awe of Krum flying. After a while the game turns dirty, and then the Veelas and the Leprechauns start fighting - and the veelas don’t look so attractive anymore.

Krum got his nose broken but he caught the snitch anyway. It ends Bulgaria160-Ireland170 . Ireland wins.

The trio all admire Krum. The twins won the bet with Bagman, since Ireland won but Krum got the snitch.

They go in the tent to sleep, but are woken up when Death Eaters fly everywhere, cruelly playing with a muggle family. Arthur goes to help the ministry while the kids stick together. When Ron falls down Draco mocks him, perfectly calm, and calls Hermione a mudblood again, implying that being a muggle herself she should hide.

Hermione starts complaining about house-elves being treated like slaves, but Ron argues that that’s how they like it, how they live.

The first time Harry saw the veelas, he wanted to impress them too, but now while other men shout lies to appear important, he just laughs and pushes Ron away.

Harry imagines if Arthur were to catch Lucius, and Ron comments that it would wipe the smirk off of “Draco”’s face. Then someone mutters a spell and a huge skull appears in the sky. Harry doesn’t recognise it, but Hermione does and tells him it’s the dark mark.

The ministry attacks them with stupefy and they duck because he has no wand, but Arthur stops them. They think the trio conjured the mark. Crouch is the most suspicious. 

Amos finds Crouch’s house-elf Winky stupefied on the ground. 

There’s a wand in the elf’s hand, Harry’s wand, but the trio says it was a human’s voice they heard.

(control and regulation of magical creatures)

Amos checks the wand and yes, it was the wand that conjured the dark mark. Amos accuses the elf, but Arthur and Crouch don’t agree. Winky says she found the wand right there on the grass.

Winky cries and begs, but Crouch swears to deal with her himself and will punish her… but then it turns out he threatens her with clothes. Hermione is outraged at how the elf was treated.

The dark mark hadn’t been seen for thirteen years.

Rita Skeeter writes a nasty article in the Prophet. Molly was very scared. Harry tells Ron and Hermione about his scar hurting. 

Molly already bought all their books for them while they were away.  Also dress robes, and Ron’s are horrible because they’re second hand robes. Ron’s very upset about it.

Arthur is called to work when Mad-eye Moody says someone tried to break into his house at night. He was a good auror once, but too paranoid now. 

They go to the station and board the train. They hear Malfoy talking about how his father wanted to send him to Durmstrang because mudbloods aren’t accepted there, and they study dark arts there, but his mom didn’t want him so far away. Then Malfoy comes to mock Ron about his robes and then talks about the great mystery Ron’s family won’t tell them about. Lucius told him all about it, but since they don’t know he mocks them and doesn’t say what it is.

Ron is furious. 

Peeves drenches them all in water, then Colin informs Harry that his brother Dennis is starting school. (I know I should be kinder towards him but he’s really annoying).

There isn’t a new Dada teacher yet. The hat sings: Gryffindor the bravest, priced far beyond the rest, Ravenclaw the cleverest, would always be the best, Hufflepuff hard-workers most worthy of admission, and power hungry Slytherin, those of great ambition.

Harry once again wonders if the children sorted in Slytherin knew that that house had the most number of dark wizards of all. Dennis is a Gryffindor like his brother.

Ron is impatient because he’s hungry. The bloody baron, the Slytherin’s ghost, luckily stopped Peeves from attending the sorting.

Hermione learns now that there are house elves here in Hogwarts, lots of them, although they never leave the kitchen, and she asks if they get paid, get holidays and sick leaves and pensions… and so she stops eating. 

Dumbledore informs them that there will be no Quidditch cup this year, because in October and throughout the year there will be something else. Moody arrives as the new Dada teacher.

Going on, Dumbledore announces the Triwizard Tournament, between Hogwarts, Beaubaton and Durmstrang, started as a friendly competition long ago… then they stopped it because of too many deaths… and he says they worked hard to guarantee there will be no deaths this year… and so only those of age, seventeen or more, will be allowed to enter their name. (So basically only seventh years, or can kids repeat a year in Hogswarts too?) 

Neville says his grandma is always telling him how he should honour the family name…

Post arrives, Draco gets his usual sweets from home. Care of magical creatures is once again with Hagrid and the Slytherins. Draco criticises the lesson and choice of creature, and honestly everyone agrees but they don’t want to say it. Trelawney is once again foreseeing difficult times for Harry.

Draco reads aloud to everyone an article by Rita Skeeter about Mr Weasley, a bad article.

Harry reacts insulting him and his mother but before Malfoy can hex him, Moody arrives to defend Harry and transforms Draco into a white ferret, squeaking terrified. He makes it fly up and down, bouncing and squealing in pain, hitting the stone floor. McGonagall stops him, turning him back to human, then Moody takes him to Snape. 

Ron enjoyed it very much. Hermione spends all her time in the library for a personal project. 

The twins are excited after their first lesson with Moody.

Neville melts his cauldron again getting detention. Moody teaches them the unforgivable curses. He takes three large black spiders and uses imperius on one, and cruciatus on another, and the killing curse on the last one. Moody reminds them that only Harry ever survived it. 

Some students thought of it as some kind of show, but Neville was sort of traumatised, and Harry and Hermione didn’t like it either. Moody comes to take him to his office, and gives him a book on herbology. Hermione comes to show them her badges of s.p.e.w., the society for the promotion of elfish welfare, that she just started. 

Sirius writes that he’s coming back, and Harry is worried he’ll get caught and wishes he said nothing about his scar hurting.

Harry writes to Sirius that he’s alright and there’s no need to come. Moody tries the imperious curse on them to teach them how to react to it. Only Harry manages to stop it.

Every teacher gives them lots of work. Hermione goes on and on about elves, and George tells her that he met them and they are happy, but she doesn’t listen.

Beaubaton and Durmstrang delegations arrive, from the sky and the lake - pretty much like in the movie, Beaubatons has both boys and girls though.

(Madame Maxime seems bigger than Hagrid, and yet Dumbledore has to bend to kiss her? What?)

Ron is jealous that Durmstrang sat at the Slytherin table. A Beaubaton girl looks like a veela, many boys turn to look, but Harry looks at Cho instead. Crouch and Bagman join the teachers. 

All the Durmstrang boys put their name in. Angelina just turned seventeen so she tries too. 

Hagrid refuses S.p.e.w. as well, trying to make her see reason, and he says that Dobby was different. 

The chosen names are Victor Krum, Fleur Delacour, the veela girl with silvery blond hair, and Cedric Diggory, to Ron’s disapproval and the Hufflepuff cheerfulness. Another name comes out, Harry Potter. 

Everyone is astonished, Harry more than anyone. Bagman tells him that he has no choice but to do his best, he’s bound to see the tournament to its end. Moody suggests someone put Harry’s name under another school’s name to make sure he was chosen for sure (well, that explains how they could be sure, yes, although the goblet then didn’t know it was a TRIwizard tournament…)

All the Gryffindors cheer him when he goes back, not listening to his words that he didn’t put his name in. He thinks only Hermione and Ron will believe him, but Ron doesn’t believe him at all, and is jealous. 

Luckily Hermione believes him. After her suggestion, he writes to Sirius about it. Hagrid believes him, to his relief, but the rest of the school students doesn’t. Harry feels very alone; Cedric seems much more the champion than he does, so handsome and all, just like Krum (…)

Students start to wear “support Cedric Diggory, the real Hogwarts champion” badges, and the message can change to “Potter stinks”. The Slytherins laugh a lot. Malfoy calls Hermione a Mudblood again and Harry loses it, and the two of them fight each other. He hits Goyle, Malfoy hits Hermione and her teeth grow making her look like a beaver. Snape sends Goyle to the hospital wing, but says “I see no difference” to her. Harry is taken out of Potions by the annoying Creevey because he has to go to the photoshoot, where he gets taken to a broom cupboard by Rita Skeeter - closed door, both in darkness. The horrible woman writes lots of rubbish and doesn’t listen to a word he says.

Sirius writes that they must speak face to face.

The article was awful, it was all about Harry and also a lot of rubbish, lies and inventions. Of course Malfoy mocks him a lot about it. 

Without Ron, Harry spends a lot of time in the library with Hermione. Krum is there a lot too, and she finds it annoying because a lot of giggling girls follow him. Harry also goes to Hogsmead, under his invisibility cloak, with Hermione. Hagrid asks him to meet him at midnight under the cloak, and he sees the four dragons that are the first task. Charlie is there to care for the dragons.

He runs to the common room to talk to Sirius, and his face appears in the fire. He tells him everything, and Sirius tells him Karkaroff was a death-eater but was released because he made a deal. Then Harry has a word fight with Ron and goes to sleep.

Since Cedric will be the only one not knowing about the dragons, Harry plots to meet him alone and tells him that the first task will be dragons. Moody calls him and talks to him about facing the dragons, to concentrate on what he’s good at - flying - and a simple spell… so he runs to Hermione and she helps him with his Accio spell. After many tries he finally manages the spell.

When the task starts, he successfully summons his broom and is not scared anymore, and gets the egg as if it was a snitch. Ron congratulates him along with Hermione, and they are ok again now, friends. Three months before the next task.

The Gryffindors have a party to celebrate Harry’s win - he’s now in first place with Krum. When Harry and other Gryffindors help Hagrid with his Skrewts, Malfoy hides in his cabin with others. Hermione drags Harry and Ron to the kitchens to see that Dobby and Winky, freed by Crouch, are now working at Hogwarts. Dobby is happy to be free, but the others do not agree with him, and Winky can’t stop crying. Dobby likes the idea of being free and being paid, but refused the amount of money Dumbledore wanted to pay him, 10 galleons a week, and only accepted 1, because he likes work. Hermione hopes that seeing Dobby happy the other elves will start to think like him…

McGonagall informs them that there will be a Yule Ball, and that Harry will open the dance with all the champions. A 3rd year girl, then a 2nd year and even a taller 5th year ask him, but he says no, then he gathers up courage and finally asks Cho Chang, but she’s very sorry to tell him that Cedric already invited her. Ron asked Fleur in a bout of insanity, then Ginny tells them that Neville invited Hermione but she said she’s already going with someone else, but Ron doesn’t believe it. Ginny also refuses to go with Harry (when Ron tells her) because then Neville invited her, and she accepted because as a third year she can’t go without a date. When Hermione arrives, Ron goes ‘Neville is right, you’re a girl’, and tells her to go with them, but she insists she’s already been invited. She was already upset because he previously said he’d rather go with a pretty girl than a nice one. After that, Harry asks Parvati and she accepts, but Lavender is going with Seamus, so Harry asks her who could go with Ron and Parvati suggests her Ravenclaw sister Padma.

Ron keeps trying to find out who Hermione will go to the ball with, but she won’t tell. Malfoy can’t believe someone invited “that”, insulting as always, but she tricks him into believing Moody is there and he’s afraid, so they go away laughing. After her teeth were cursed by Malfoy to grow, she magicked them shorter. Ron notices they’re ‘the normal size’, and Hermione says Pomfrey shortened them, and Hermione let her go on a little bit more, to shorten them a bit more compare to how they were before. 

Harry still isn’t working on his next clue, knowing there’s lots of time still.

At Christmas, Dobby shows up with a present for Harry, (socks he made himself), and Harry gives him a pair of old socks he had in his trunk. Harry wears the socks. The Dursley gave him something absurd I don’t remember, but as horrible as it may seem, I wonder why they send anything at all, that sounds so weird to me.

Ron did a sewing charm or something on his dress robe to make them look less like a dress, but he’s not very good. (Why didn’t mom do it? Come on…)

Ron and Parvati look very pretty, but Ron barely looks at Padma. He’s looking for Hermione.

Malfoy has Pansy hanging on his arm. Crabbe and Goyle have no partners. Krum was with a pretty girl in a blue dress. When the champions wait to go in, Harry finally recognises Hermione, but she looks different, in her dress and pretty hair and with no books. Even Malfoy finds nothing insulting to say. Harry sits beside Percy, who has been promoted as Crouch’s personal assistant.

Krum and Hermione eat and talk a lot.

Fleur spends her time criticising everything, but her date keeps staring at her and doesn’t listen to a single word. 

The champions open the dances, then the others join. Ginny is with Neville. Moody with Sinistra. The Weird Sisters are playing, but Harry stops dancing as soon as he can, to Parvati’s disappointment. Ron isn’t dancing either, glaring at Hermione.

Parvati is asked by a boy from Beaubaton to dance and she doesn’t return. Hermione dances with Krum and stops when he goes to get drinks. Ron starts fighting with her, saying she’s “fraternising with the enemy”, forgetting he used to idolise Krum. He says Krum asked her only to find information on Harry, and keeps being nasty, until she storms off, clearly hurt.

Padma joins her sister, and the boy dancing with her summons quickly another boy for her.

Dumbledore is dancing with Sprout, Bagman with McGonagall, Maxine with Hagrid. Krum looks for Hermione. 

Ron and Harry catch Hagrid talking to Maxime and calling her a half-giant like him, but she stomps away looking insulted.

They didn’t know Hagrid had a Giant mother. Hermione is dancing with Krum again. Ron says Giants aren’t nice. After the ball, Cedric stops Harry and tells him to take a bath with the egg. 

When he reaches the common room, Hermione and Ron are fighting loudly and she yells that he should have asked her before someone else could and not as a last resort before she stomps away angrily. 

Hermione admits she used a lot of Sleekeasy hair potion for the ball, but now it’s bushy again. She and Ron speak ignoring their fight, but are quite formal.

Harry keeps shaking and hitting the egg, he doesn’t want to follow Cedric’s suggestion because he’s jealous of him and Cho. Prof Grubbly Plank teaches Cares for magical creatures because Hagrid is indisposed… it’s Draco that explains what happens when he says he’ll be hiding because of a newspaper article that he promptly shows them: it reads that Dumbledore made the mistake of hiring a half-giant who terrorises the students (there’s a quote from Draco saying “they all” hate him but are too scared of him…), and it reveals that his mother was a giantess. Harry is furious (doesn’t take much, does it?). Draco enjoys taunting him every time there is a prof on the horizon so Harry can’t retaliate. 

Hogsmead visit: Harry wants to go, and tells Hermione that he figured out the dragon’s egg clue to the next task, and she’s glad, “well done!” she says, and doesn’t ask him questions about it.

They go to have a butterbeer and see Bagman talking to some goblins. Bagman talks to him privately, tells him that Barty Crouch has been missing for many days, and then tries to offer him his help for the tournament. Harry doesn’t like it, it’s in the rules that they can’t be helped, and also he asks if he offered the same help to Cedric and the answer was no, so Harry refuses, he doesn’t want to cheat. Then Rita Skeeter enters, and Harry is furious with her for what she wrote, and Hermione is furious too, but drags the boys out before they give her stuff for more articles, and she drags them back to Hagrid’s cabin, having had enough of it all, and yelling for him to open the door. Dumbledore opens, he was there to comfort Hagrid, just like them, and they do it. Hagrid is full of praise for that great man that Dumbledore is, saying he gives people a second chance, and is open to anyone. Hagrid tells them of his human father, who died when he was in second year. Never be ashamed of who you are, or what you are, his dad always said (or something). Anyway, Hagrid tells him to win and show them all, so Harry lies again saying he figured out what to do, and it bothers him that he lied and Hagrid believed him and smiled all happy, so he decides to try Cedric’s hint.

Finally!!! Harry sneaks out at night with cloak and map to go to the prefects bathroom, and luckily there is Myrtle to suggests he listens to the egg under water, so he learns that he will have one hour to swim under the lake to retrieve something he cared about from there. He sees on the map that Crouch is alone in Snape’s office and wants to go check but is trapped in a broken step or something, and Filch almost catches him, then Snape wants him to help search his office and then Moody arrives and he can see him, but he helps him when they almost find the map and he takes it first. Moody borrows the map and suggests he might consider becoming an auror.

Ron thinks again that it might be Snape’s doing, that he put in the goblet Harry’s name.

Harry asks Ron and Hermione’s help to find something that will allow him to breathe an hour under water, but they find nothing. Hagrid is back to work, and continues the lesson on unicorns. Young ones are golden, and even Pansy likes them. 

Ron and Hermione are called away by McGonagall and do not return. Harry is desperate now. Ten minutes before the task he’s still desperate. Dobby knows he has to retrieve his ‘weeasy’ from the lake, and Dobby gives him some slimy stuff, gillyweed, that will make him breathe under water. Harry takes it and runs, eats it in his mouth before going in the freezing lake. He fights off a grindylow and Myrtle points him in the right direction, so he finds Ron, Hermione, Cho and a little girl hostages of the mermaids. He frees Ron, then waits to see if the others are rescued. Cedric has a bubble around his head and frees Cho, Viktor Krum uses Harry’s rock to free Hermione, with his head that of a shark for an incomplete transfiguration on himself. Harry waits but no sign of Fleur, so he scares off the mermaids with his wand and frees the little girl too. He arrives last. Ron mocks him, saying Dumbledore wouldn’t let the hostages die, but Fleur apparently wasn’t so sure because she was crying her sister’s name, Gabrielle, and thanked him a lot for saving her sister. The judges award him bonus point for his strong moral fiber, so now he’s tied in first place, with Cedric I think. Ron has fun telling fantastical stories on his ‘abduction’, then a letter hints that Sirius is coming back to Hogswarts. Harry really wants to see him. Malfoy, Crabbe and Goyle are surrounded by Pansy and her Slytherin girls. They show Hermione a magazine with an article on Harry’s love life, about his ‘steady girlfriend’ Hermione toying him with Krum. Hermione doesn’t take it seriously, but is curious about how Skeeter could know that Krum had invited her to visit him in Bulgaria. Snape reads it out loud and then whispers angrily at him because convinced that he was the one who had broke into his office to steal supplies. Karkaroff does talk about his left arm to Snape right in class, after everyone has gone out, but Harry who hears.

In Hogsmead, they meet Sirius in dog form. He leads them to his hiding place where Buckbeak is, and asks for food first. Then they talk of what is happening, specially of Crouch’s mysterious disappearance, and tells them that his own son was caught on Voldemort’s side. He says the son went to Azkaban then died quickly. Sirius says Snape always liked the dark arts, although he was never accused of being a death eater. Ron still likes to accuse Snape of anything, while Hermione insists that Dumbledore trusts him. Ron hints that Percy is very ambitious and could even put his career before his family (… then he should be a Slytherin not a Gryffindor right?)

Winky is so sad she keeps drinking, much to Hermione’s exasperation.

Hermione receives nasty letters after the article on her toying with him. After learning that leprechaun’s gold vanishes, Ron gets all moody thinking of the one he gave Harry, thinking he had paid him off, all gloomy now hating the fact that he’s poor. Hermione is very stubborn now on learning how can Skeeter discover all secret things. Ron is quite bored and even annoyed but her efforts. Even Mrs Weasley reads Witch Weekly, and so she sent Hermione a ridiculously small easter egg. For the last task, the champions learn that they’ll have to pass a maze and the cup will be at its center. Krum wants to know from Harry what’s going on between him and Hermione (Harry thought he wanted to say something more important… at 14, these are not so important things to him, huh?) Crouch appears from the forest, all crazed. He’s delirious, asks to see Dumbledore when he doesn’t talk to the tree, so Harry leaves Krum there and runs to Dumbledore but is found by Snape instead who tries to dismiss it all, then Dumbledore arrives and they hurry to the forest and find Krum stunned on the ground, and no sign of Crouch. Moody arrives, says he’ll go looking, but then says he didn’t find him. 

At divination, Harry has a ‘dream’, he sees Voldemort calling Wormtail on a mistake he made and crucio him, and this time he does what Sirius suggested when he told him of his scar hurting. His scar is hurting now, so he goes straight to Dumbledore’s office, guessing the password by blabbing names of sweets. Dumbledore is talking to Fudge and Moody, who notices his arrival.

The men go out for a little bit leaving Harry alone, and he finds a strange basin and look at it. He knows enough not to touch weird-looking magical objects, but he leans closer to watch and falls into the memory of Karkaroff’s trial, when he gave up names not wanting to return to Azkaban. He also mentioned Snape, but Dumbledore vouched for him again. He also saw the trial of Barty Crouch Jr, both conducted by Crouch Sr. He was accused of torturing with crucio both Longbottoms, Neville’s parents. Dumbledore appears to bring him out of the pensieve, and explains to him what it was, then Harry tells him about his dream/vision. Later he tells all to Ron and Hermione. They see from a window that Malfoy, with Crabbe and Goyle, seems to talk to his hand… then the next day the prophet has a front page story on Harry, unstable, fainting, his scar hurting… and Hermione starts to realise how could Skeeter know about it. Before dinner, the champions receive the visit of their families, and Harry has a surprise, Mrs Weasley came with Bill (who is noted by Fleur right away). After dinner, they go to the Quidditch pitch to start the third and last task, they must enter the big maze… basically at night, of course… now, where would a kid be safer than at school, right? Anyway, the kid enter one at a time (well, Harry at the same time as Cedric, they’re tied in first place) and move in the dark (with a Lumos, of course). Harry is surprised the path is clear, but Cedric is attacked by some monsters, and Fleur yelled and they didn’t see her, and then later Harry hears and sees Krum casting crucio on Cedric, so he helps and Krum goes away. Cedric is first to the cup but a giant spider attacks him and Harry helps and they fight it together (sort of; Cedric is three years older, doesn’t he know a better spell than stupefy? It didn’t work for Harry, try something else…) and they defeat the beast together (really Harry? expelliarmus on a spider, and the spider drops him??? how, why, what… never mind).


Harry is hurt (ankle and leg). Cedric stops, doesn’t want the cup, says it’s Harry’s, they argue about it, but neither will take it so Harry proposes to take it together, split the victory, they’re both Hogwarts after all, so they do it, and Cedric helps him walk. The cup turns out to be a portkey, and they find themselves in a graveyard, away from Hogswarts. Wormtail arrives with a bundle of robes, and Harry scars hurts terribly and he’s in agony. A voice says “kill the spare”, and an avada kedavra later, Cedric falls on the ground, dead. Harry is tied to a statue. Wormtail cuts his own hand, needing the flesh willingly given of a servant, and then takes some of Harry’s blood (he’s the chosen foe), and puts the bundle in a cauldron full of stuff, and despite Harry’s prayers it works, and Voldemort rises again. He uses Wormtail’s dark mark to summon his death eaters, and they arrive. Voldemort expresses his disappointment that they moved on without him, and crucios Avery. He talks to some of the others, noting how the Lestranges are missing because they were so faithful they preferred Azkaban to renounce him. Lucius is there, and also Crabbe and Goyle. Lucius asks, and Voldemort tells them how he came to his rebirth, how he waited thinking one of them would come to his aid, but they didn’t. He possessed Quirrel but was defeated, then Wormtail came to find him. He brought him Bertha of the Ministry, he tortured her for information and learned about the Triwizard tournament. He placed a loyal servant in Hogwarts to make sure Harry won the cup, so he could get his blood. Voldemort gives Wormtail a silver hand.Now he wants to prove to them that he is stronger than the boy who should have been his downfall by killing him. He tries an Imperio on him but Harry resists, and then he wants a duel (after a second ‘crucio’…) but despite the pain in the leg Harry dodges and fights back: an expelliarmus against an avadakedavra… and their wands link and slowly the ghosts of Cedric appears, then the muggle man he killed and then Bertha Jawkins, and then his mother and father… they all tell him to hold on, then his dad tells him to take the cup and go back while they’ll give him time, and Cedric asks him to take his body back to his parents, so Harry runs to him and then accios the cup and is back, and he doesn’t want to let go of Cedric but Bumbledore tells him to. Harry is still shocked and Moody takes him back to the castle and asks him in details what happened. Harry tells him there’s a death eater at Hogswarts, and Moody tells him he knows, and it’s not Karkaroff. He ran away when he felt the mark, (what will happen to him?). Moody reveals that it was him, all him: he put Harry’s name in, defended when it could have been hurt, helped him with all the tasks, every help he got started from him, and he cleared his path in the maze, stunned Fleur and imperiused Krum against Cedric, all to get him to Voldemort. He is also angry that the other death eaters were forgiven and accepted back, he thinks of himself as his only loyal servant. Harry is scared when Moody wants to kill him as a gift for the dark lord, but Dumbledore stuns him instead. He sends McGonagall to fetch Winky, and Snape to get veritaserum, then he questions him: he’s Barty Crouch Jr, his mother’s dying wish was to save him, so she took his place in Azkaban and he stayed home, imperiused by his father who also damaged Bertha’s brain with a strong memory charm when she found out. He broke free at the Quidditch cup (Winky had insisted to let him go see the cup, hidden under an invisibility cloak) but he broke free and he cast the mark in the sky. 

He had also already told Harry he killed his father. He tells Dumbledore everything, then Dumbledore takes Harry to his office where Sirius is waiting for him, and Harry has to tell them everything that happened to him. Dumbledore explains that his wand and Voldemort’s share the same core, with feathers from the same phoenix, Fawkes in fact (who by the way cries on Harry’s leg so it’s instantly healed), these wands do not want to battle each other, and if forced they activate a Priori Incantate, so Dumbledore guesses that Harry saw Cedric and others.

Then Harry gets some Dreamless Sleep potion and sleeps in the hospital wings, with Sirius in dog form next to him. When he wakes up, he hears McGonagall and Fudge screaming, then Dumbledore arrives. Snape explains to him that Fudge insisted a Dementor escort him into the school to meet Crouch Jr, and that the dementor gave him the kiss. Now he can’t be questioned anymore. Fudge thinks he was only a lunatic, and doesn’t believe a word when they tell him of Voldemort’s return. Dumbledore insists, Harry even tells Fudge what he saw and that Malfoy, Crabbe, Goyle and Nott (he said Nott, didn’t he?) were there, but Fudge doesn’t believe him.

He thinks his career will be over if he starts talking about Voldemort being back or even make peace with the giants like Dumbledore suggests. Fudge refuses to listen to him, the wants to keep the dementors in charge of Azkaban and keep his post as Minister. 

Dumbledore sends Minerva, Bill and Sirius to alert as many people as possible (poor Harry, he wanted Sirius to stay with him), Sirius and Snape still hate each other, and can’t pretend even for Dumbledore that they don’t. Dumbledore then says Good luck to Snape, saying he knows what he’ll have to do. 

Harry thinks of Cedric, of how it was Harry who told him to get the cup together, but Mrs Weasley tells him it wasn’t his fault, and hugs him tightly. Then they give him the rest of his potion and sleeps again. Fudge gave him the 1000 galleons for winning the tournament before going away.

In the next month Harry met the Diggorys who did not blame him, thanked him for bringing him back. They want him to keep the money he won.

He cared about nothing, all the kids believing he was crazy and staring. Mrs Weasley asked Dumbledore to send Harry to them for the summer, but no. Harry talks only to Ron, Hermione and Hagrid. 

Harry can’t understand how Dumbledore might be so sure that Snape is on their side, a spy at great risk but on their side. At the end of year feast, Dumbledore toasted to Cedric’s memory, Cho cried, everyone was sad. Dumbledore told anyone that Lord Voldemort killed him although the ministry didn’t want him to. He also toasts to Harry and his bravery. Everyone did too, but the Slytherins didn’t. 

Before going away, Fleur ran to say goodbye to Harry. Krum came to say goodbye to Hermione, then shook the boys hands too. Although a little jealous, Ron asked for his autograph, and he did it. The trio talk on the train; the Prophet mentioned nothing of Cedric or Voldemort. She tells them that Skeeter won’t write anything for a while, because Hermione found out her secret, how she could spy on everything that happened. Skeeter is an unregistered animagus, a beetle, and she is now in a jar in Hermione’s possession. Hermione caught her in the hospital wing. Malfoy knew, and talked to her in his hands all year through. Malfoy now hears her, entering their compartment. Malfoy reminds him on their encounter on the train in first year, saying he did pick the losing side. Malfoy, Crabbe and Goyle fell on the ground hexed by the trio and also the twins. The bad trio was pushed and kicked outside the compartment, then the twins are showered with questions. They tried to blackmail Ludo Bagman, because he paid them in Leprechaun money and then refused to pay them, even to give them the money they gambled, and they found out he was in trouble with the goblins, full of debts. He bet on Harry winning the tournament, but the goblins said he tied with Cedric so he lost anyway and escaped. 

Too soon the train arrived. Harry gave his winnings to the twins, he insisted, for the joke shop. He insisted a lot, telling them to buy Ron different dress robes and keep the rest or he’ll hex them.

Uncle Vernon was there waiting for him. Mrs Weasley told him to keep in touch and come to them later in the summer. Hermione kissed him on the cheek, the twins thanked him. Harry went home with Vernon.

The end.


Shazam - 2019

It’s for kids, let’s say it, but it’s not bad. Of course it’s full of silly things because the protagonist is a 14 year-old boy so when given superpowers he goes all silly and pathetic, but there’s also a bit of a real deep story beneath it all. 

Still, I didn’t like a few things: the big, loud speeches, but I know they can’t help it, they do love big loud speeches;

the actor playing the superhero (Shazam…) was… not my favourite choice, and most of all :

the fact that he didn’t even try to act as young Billy. It was supposed to be Billy in a grown-up body, but it was nothing like Billy. Billy didn’t talk much and was not loud, and then Shazam! and he started yelling and talking no-stop and doing selfies with strangers and all that. 


First of all: the magic comes from a very old wizard who is the last one and very old and wants to find a champion to give his powers to so that they’ll be able to keep the seven deadly sins at their place in stone, but he tries kid after kid and is not satisfied. One of them is Tad, whose father and older brother treat like shit, and who causes a car accident while sent away from that mystical place, but his father does not die. Tad spends his life trying to find that place again, and he manages it after seeing a video made by a girl who went through the same thing. He goes there, but instead of becoming the champion, he accepts to host the deadly sins inside himself getting a lot of power from them, basically becoming a supervillain. 


The hero is another kid, Billy, who doesn’t get tested at all, but gets the powers because he is the last hope, so he becomes the new Shazam. By saying Shazam, he can go back and forth from being a kid to being a superhero in the body of a grown-up. 

Billy is a complex character, a kid moving from foster home to foster home because he keeps escaping, running away in search of his real mother. When he was little he got lost, but he never stopped looking for her. Now a couple of ex-foster kids welcome him into their home, but he doesn’t want one, doesn’t want to think of them as family, he only wants to find his mom, thinking that then everything would be ok. Of course there’s something not adding up here, but he is a kid so he doesn’t think that way. An adult would reason that his mom would have found him by now, but he has a very sugared memory of her, and maybe he also thinks that it was his fault for letting go of her hand if he got lost, so he refuses every other attachment because he wants to find his “real one”… and one day, thanks to his foster-brother (yeah, the usual child who can break into federal computers and stuff) he finds her… only to find out that she saw him right away, the day he got lost, but turned around and left thinking he’d have a better life without her… which means she thought she’d have a chance at another life without him, of course, that’s the truth of it. So, poor Billy is confronted with the truth, and has to turn away and go back when he realises that she doesn’t want him back in her life. 

(BTW, she says she was 17??? But how old was Billy then? I thought he looked like 5 at least, when did she have him? Or she meant that she had him at 17 and five years later she was still scared and messed up? No, she meant that she walked away at 17, so she got pregnant… at 11??? Things really don’t add up here…. )


Anyway, things go like this:

Tad opens the chamber and meets the wizard again, but now he’s all pissed and instead of the wizard’s powers he takes the sins, so that ball of energy sort of replaces one of his eyes, and with his new powers he goes to his family’s company, where he takes revenge not only on his brother and father, but also on everyone in that room - the whole council I suppose, but it could be anyone, I don’t know. Tad shows off, saying his father thought he had power because he had money, while he, Tad, has Real power now, but at that the beasts/sins tell him that there is someone with the power to defeat him and that he should destroy the champion, so he decides to do just that. Billy at first test his powers with Freddie’s help (I know this is a movie, but to shoot someone in the head just to see IF he doesn’t die is so not a good idea, it’s just a terrible one as the others they try, such as using an axe to his wrist… I know they are kids, but kids are just immature, they’re not stupid, this was too much, what if something didn’t work… )

Anyway, after Billy and Freddie have a fight, Billy spends his time playing and just hanging around in his superhero-persona, when suddenly Tad attacks him and he realises that although he is invincible against human weapons, Tad can hurt him because he has superpowers too, so he gets scarer and as soon as he can he transforms back into a kid and escapes… leaving Freddie behind who attracts Tad’s attention by calling Billy no-stop. 

Now Tad takes the foster-kids hostage, all of them, so Billy runs back to help after his disastrous encounter with his birth-mother, and together Billy and Tad enter the chamber of the wizard, now empty, so that Tad can take the old man’s staff and use it to gain those powers as well. Of course Billy doesn’t do it, that would be super-stupid, instead he escapes with the kids. 

Tad follows him, determined to get his powers, so they escape to the Carnival, and the kids realise that Tad gets his powers from the beasts inside him and the evil eye, so they try to lure the beasts out of him to leave him without powers, but only six get out. 

Remembering what the old wizard said, Billy finally realises that he can share his powers with his new brothers and sisters (the old wizard was the last one, but he used to have company too), so he tells them to grab the staff and say his name… and here it was the funniest scene of the movie: predictable, yes, of course, but nice nonetheless. Mary, Freddie, Darla, Pedro and Eugene, with the outmost conviction, shout in unison “Billy!”, so he explains that they have to say Shazam and they all become superheroes - I so loved superhero Darla !

Now the five superheroes fight against the beast and also helping the people in need, while Billy confronts Tad, and since he knows (by guessing, I suppose, there’s really no way to know which beast is what sin… ) that the one beast still inside Tad is Envy, he uses that knowledge to insult Envy and lure it out, and it works, so Tad is left with no powers, and Billy takes out his evil eye, meaning he uses his magic to take the energy ball out of his head. Now Tad has no more powers and no means to call the beasts back. The six superheroes enter the wizard’s chamber to put the ball back in its place.

Freddie is alone at school, not only because of the two bullies, but also because after he said he knew the superhero and Billy didn’t show up, everyone mocked him and now they all keep their distance, not wanting him at their table, so Mary, Pedro, Darla and Eugene join him instead, while Billy shows in superhero costume, also bringing… a friend?… we obviously don’t see the face, but we do see the big S on his costume, so that’s pretty much everything anyone needs to know who that is.


So, does that mean all the superheroes are called Shazam? Or none of them, but they all have to say Shazam to change from kid to superhero? Now that Billy broke the staff, there will never be a new set of superheroes to guard the sins once they’re gone?… who knows, but the movie shows, at the end, that Tad is in a cell trying and failing to open the chamber again, when something talks to him, a sort of super-villain-bug that tempts him with new powers… I wonder if they’ll ever do another movie. If they do, I hope the other superheroes have more space that just Shazam…


Night wolf - 2010

Rather awful, it was. It had a decent ending (sort of) and a rather good switch towards the end when you understand some important stuff, but the rest was awful. The fact that during the movie you never see the evil creature terrorising them kinda have a reason that you understand at the end, but that doesn’t erase the fact that never seeing it instead of augmenting the tension it sort of makes it dull, also the distorted way the creature sees things is not really well done, and the way they try to create tension by flashing the light on and off is very much annoying, almost in an epileptic sort of way. It’s not scary at all, only annoying. 

Now, I’m not a big fan of horror movies, and I don’t much like gore splatter scenes, but I do sometimes enjoy scary films, thrillers and such, therefore I’m not commenting on the gory details (personally I don’t think they were very well done, but I’m not the expert; fact remains, I didn’t like them), but this movie was not particularly scary, especially if you’re not a kid anymore - and by that I mean that having had more years of time to fill, I have seen more things now that I had when I was like 13, and so this movie is really nothing new and nothing good. It might have scared me then, maybe, but surely not now.


I didn’t like how it was filmed, I didn’t like the annoying flashes, the things briefly shown in the dark that I had no idea what they were, I didn’t like most of the dialogues… 

the characters were not likeable, I don’t think anyone wrote them to be likeable to be honest, they were just there for numbers. 


The acting: The girls do what they have to do, they are ok, right for this kind of movie. The boys… sigh, they were all rather dull or annoying, maybe Gadiot wasn’t all bad, I mean, was I supposed to despise his character from first glance to the end? 

I was disappointed that they killed off Felton’s character right away, I wanted to see him acting a bit instead I only saw him play the stupid kid like the others at the beginning, and then Gary died right away.

Lynch looked alright as the shady beast catcher, I would have wanted a little bit more though, it was all very anti-climatic.


The story is simple: Sarah comes back to her British home after some months working in the states, and finds out that her mom is out probably having an affair, they have money problems and the big house seems almost abandoned, and her stepbrothers are idiots who even got their 13yo brother stoned. Stephen now is with Emily who I think was with Doug before, maybe, who cares really, they spend a few minutes being silly stoned boys then the lights go out because there’s a storm outside so they go back inside the house. Gary goes alone to look for some candles, the others go upstairs, and here it starts: there’s some kind of beast inside tearing people apart and they try to stay alive… doing quite a poor job at it.


Why when they see that there’s a blood trail on the floor, not yet knowing about any beast, do they walk so slowly, like on eggshells? As far as they know at that point there’s nobody else in the house, only their father (stepfather only to Sarah, I believe) so, aren’t they worried about the blood? Concerned that their father might be badly hurt, wanting to help him??? They walk as if they were expecting what they found (his father torn apart on the bed), which is absurd.

Only after they see the man’s mangled body they hear the beast and close the door; they hear Gary’s yell of What the hell is going on, after he found the dog’s mangled corpse, and then nothing more from him, the beast got him.

The others lock themselves in a bathroom and then under the roof, and plan to wait there for someone to rescue them, only not one of them has a cellphone with them (really, Stephen’s doesn’t work and not one of the others has theirs…) and Sarah is worried about the little one that they left sleeping in the barn… so they have to do something.

Sarah tries to attract the beast’s attention while one brother calls for help, but the beasts apparently wasn’t fooled and turned around and went for him instead. 

One father and two brothers down. And one dog.

They fight and argue some more, then Emily gets mad at her boyfriend, with reason, since he left her alone and ran away at the first sign of trouble. He ran as soon as he got the weapon (they call it both gun and shotgun, I thought it was a rifle, I don’t know, one of those they use when they go hunting) but she got the bullets; it was quite the scene, she was totally right in her rage - although I don’t see the meaning of it all, the dialogues are so meaningless here, why did she think that sleeping with Sarah’s brother would be ‘getting back at her’? she was probably upset that Sarah left for the States and only sent an email in maybe eight months, but why would this upset her? Stephen also maybe did it for that same reason, and again why? I don’t get these people.

Anyway, in a poorly filmed way we see that all of a sudden she seems to have slippery socks on her feet, so she falls down and shoots herself dead. Stephen laughs showing he’s already losing his mind, kind of stopping the audience who laughed as well, but him laughing is not funny anymore. 

We are now at one dog, one stepfather, two stepbrothers and a friend down.

Sarah wants to get out of there and they get on the roof. They see a police car: a policeman who brought a beast-catcher along, and again it was really poorly done in my opinion. Very slowly the policeman enters the house and then we see McRae getting his stuff, he turns and sees the man dead, and gets killed himself right away, they barely arrived and are already corpse on the ground.

The kid entered the house after waking up and managed to reach them and get on the roof with them without troubles - other than seeing Gary’s body, that is, but with all the yelling he did it’s quite absurd that he wasn’t caught as well.

Sarah hopes to escape in the police car but she has no keys, so they hide in the barn again. Sarah saw her mom’s wallet in the police car, and now Stephen tells her that he did something to the car so that she could not go to her fancy lover who she apparently spent so much money on, and Sarah thinks, and tells him, that by doing so he caused her death. Stephen hits her then runs out and is caught right away. Good. 

Now it’s: one dog, one stepfather, three stepbrothers, a friend and two men down.

Sarah shows sign of being infected and tells them to run away. The 13yo hides in her car now that he found the keys, while Sarah battles with the first beast, and then she bites the last stepbrother. 

Dawn breaks and with the sun Sarah wakes up naked on the piano, and sees the deaths all around, and sees that the beast was her mother, so she takes the car and drives her little brother away, to the only safe place she knows of, and here we realise that their mom was not having an affair, she did not pay rent for a fancy lover but she kept a safe place where she could hide where she needed to transform…

which is when, exactly? every night, every time there is a storm? Who knows.

The very last scene, we see Gary sort of coughing, making it look like he’s not really dead… she didn’t check, did she? She just assumed they were all dead and went away…


Sarah - Isabella Calthorpe

Gary - Tom Felton

Emily - Gemma Atkinson

Doug - Josh Bowman

Stephen - Peter Gadiot

McRae - John Lynch



lunedì 27 settembre 2021

Harry Potter and the prisoner of Azkaban by J.K. Rowling

(audiobook read by Stephen Fry, loved it. I listened to it while going to work ^_^ )

The story, in details, and I do mean Details:

 

Harry must do homework at night in secret so not to anger Vernon. For the first time he receives cards and gifts on his birthday, by Ron, Hermione and Hagrid. Ron tried to phone him once but not knowing how to use it he shouted into it and got him in trouble with Vernon. 

A letter from Hogwarts says that the third years can have visits to Hogsmead village, but he should have his guardian sign a permission form… 

Aunt Marge is coming to stay for a week. Harry tries to be good so Vernon will sign the form, but it’s hard because she’s a monster. He almost made it, until the last meal when she went on and on insulting his parents, so he exploded in rage defending them. Marge starts inflating and she floats to the ceiling. After something like that, he runs and takes all his stuff before going out. 

He’s alone and with nowhere to go, both Hermione and Ron are abroad now, and he’s also worried that he’ll be expelled for that magic with Marge. The night bus appears, an emergency transport for the stranded witch or wizard. The driver tells him all about escaped prisoner Sirius Black, a big supporter of Voldemort who killed a lot of people. Harry rides the bus to Diagon Alley, and meets Minister Fudge right away. 

Harry is scared because he did magic while underage, and Fudge is scared because he ran away from home.

Fudge says the incident has been dealt with, and “no harm done”, and suggests he takes a room at the Leaky Cauldron. Harry asks about his punishment, and can’t understand why nothing is happening. Fudge refuses to sign his permission form for him, saying it’s best if he doesn’t go to Hogsmead.

Harry spends a few blessed weeks wandering Diagon Alley and doing homework freely, then meets Hermione and the Weasleys on the last day. Hermione buys Crookshanks, a huge cat nobody wanted.

Percy is the new Head Boy, and they all torment him. Percy is a 7 year student, the twins are in their 5th year, Ginny is in her second year.

Harry eavesdrops Molly and Arthur saying that Black is after Harry to kill him, but they don’t tell him. Molly says he’ll be perfectly safe at Hogwarts with Dumbledore… (really? where were they the last two years?)  

Harry goes to the station with them all in a ministry car. Mr Weasley asks Harry to promise he won’t go looking for Sirius Black, after they discuss it…

On the train, Harry tells Ron and Hermione. Malfoy stops to make fun of them, but goes away when he sees there’s a professor in their compartment.

When the train stops early and a dementor checks the train, Harry feels weird and falls off his seat, and prof Lupin sends the dementor away and gives them chocolate. Malfoy makes fun of him, “you actually fainted?”

At their first ever divination class, she predicts that one of them will leave them forever at Easter, then tells harry there’s the grim in his teacup, an omen of death. It looks like the dog he keeps seeing around from time to time. Next class though, McGonagall says that Sybil Trewlaney predicts the death of one student every year, and nobody has died so far.

Then there’s their first Care of magical creatures lesson with prof Hagrid, with the Slytherins. Malfoy is upset, nobody has even managed to open the monster-books. Hagrid is surprised, and teaches them to stroke them, then he brings forth some hippogriffs. Harry volunteers to help Hagrid. The hippogriff bows back and Harry is forced to ride it. They all try, and even Malfoy is petting Buckbeack, but then he insults Harry and the hippogriff, and the animal takes offence and injures him, and they have to take him to the hospital wing.

In Potions, Malfoy has Ron and Harry cut his ingredients saying he can’t because his arm is on a sling. 

In the Defence against the Dark Arts lesson, Lupin teaches about the boggart. Many students try but Lupin intervenes before Harry can have a go.

Quidditch. Oliver Wood is a seven year, and it’s his last chance for the quidditch cup. They start training.

There’s the first visit to Hogsmead, but Harry can’t go. He has tea with Lupin and asks why he didn’t face the boggart. Lupin answers very openly that he thought his fear would be Voldemort, and then praises his fear of fear (ie: dementors). Snape brings him a potion and Lupin drinks it, and Harry is suspicious of Snape wanting to poison him. Ron and Hermione had a fight because Crookshanks chases Scabbard the mouse, but they made peace for the trip and brought lots of sweets for Harry. Draco mocks him about his fear of dementors…

The fat lady is no more in her painting because scared by Sirius Black… apparently he got in the castle, so all Gryffindors sleep in sleeping bags. Hermione reminds all that he can’t have apparated in because it’s not possible to apparate in Hogswarts. 

Lupin is absent and Snape gives them a lesson and homework about werewolves.

Their first match should be against Slytherin, but using Malfoy’s arm’s excuse, they don’t play so Harry is against Hufflepuff and their seeker Cedric Diggory. The weather’s awful, and while they’re playing 100 dementors appear. Harry hears his mother’s screams in his mind and faints falling off the broom. When he wakes up in the hospital wing, he learns that Cedric got the snitch before realising what had happened, and won. Dumbledore saved him and sent the dementors away (I now know he used a patronus). His broomsticks is broken.

For the second time he had seen the grim during the game, but he hasn’t told anyone.

Malfoy keeps taunting him. Lupin is back in class, and they tell him all about Snape. Harry asks why he’s the only one so affected by the dementors and Lupin explains that he’s not weaker than everybody else, but that the dementors affect him more because nobody else has such horrors in their past. After his pleas, Lupin agrees to teach him to fight dementors after the holidays.

This year, Ron and Hermione stay at school to be with him. 

Another Hogsmead trip. Secretely, Fred and George give Harry a present, the marauder’s map, “I solemnly swear that I am up to no good” and the map appears. “Moony, Padfoot, Wormtail and Prongs”. There are also secret passages to go to Hogsmead. Harry goes and finds Ron and Hermione and tells them about the map, and she says he should give the map to McGonagall… hah!

They buy sweets then go to the Three Broomsticks where Ron fancies Madam Rosmerta, and they drink butterbeers. McGonagall, Flitwick, Hagrid and Fudge enter and chat at a near table, and Harry hears them say that Black and his dad were best friends, that he was his best man at the wedding and godfather of the baby. Dumbledore warned the Potters that Voldemort was after them and advised to use the Fidelium charm to hide, but then Black betrayed them and got them killed.

After the deaths, Sirius wanted Harry, but Hagrid had orders from Dumbledore to take him to the relatives. His friend Peter Pettigrew got killed when he confronted him, and Black got arrested.

Harry wants revenge, and remembers Malfoy’s words about wanting revenge, but back then he had not understood, not knowing.

Hagrid is desperate because there will be a hearing for Buckbeack to see if he’s to be killed.

Hagrid is very down, and the Flobberworms he had for a lesson time ago died for too much lettuce (not much care for creatures… I don’t like this, does he care only for some animals but not all of them? Only for the big ones, the scary ones, but not smaller, ordinary ones?)

Harry gets a Christmas gift, a new broomstick, the new Firebolt. Crookshanks keeps hunting Scabbers making them fight.

Hermione tells McGonagall about the Firebolt, and the prof takes it away for checking, because Hermione thinks Sirius sent it.

Ron and Harry don’t speak to Hermione now. 

Lupin teaches Harry the patronus charm against the dementors, and they use a new boggart to practice. On his third attempt he makes it. Lupin says he was friends with James Potter after Harry heard his voice because of the dementor.

Ravenclaw beats Hufflepuff, but Slytherin beats Ravenclaw, so if Gryffindor beats Ravenclaw they’ll be second.

Some lessons later, he still has a too feeble patronus, not enough.

Harry get his broom back. 

Scabbers disappears, there’s blood on a sheet, so Ron thinks it’s dead and blames the cat.

The Ravenclaw seeker is Cho Chang. 

Everyone admires the new Firebolt, Malfoy is his usual self.

Harry notices that Cho is very pretty. They play, then Harry sees three dementors so he casts the patronus then catches the snitch and wins. Lupin comes to him and reveals that it was in fact Malfoy and Goyle and Crabbe dressed as dementors, and they get detention, to Harry’s happiness.

Hermione is super-tired from all her work, and it hurts that Ron is still angry at her.

At night, Ron wakes everyone up screaming that Sirius Black was in the room with a knife, he entered because he found Neville’s paper with all the passwords…

Now everyone is around Ron to hear the story, and he enjoys the popularity.

The kids don’t get, though, why Sirius went away, if he had killed so many people in the past, why would he run when confronted with four asleep boys and Ron.

Hagrid scolds Ron and Harry for valuing broomsticks and rats over their friendship for Hermione.

At the next Hogsmead trip, Hermione doesn’t want Harry to go and threatens to tell on him, and Ron shouts at her. Harry goes with the invisibility cloak.

When they meet Malfoy who talks about the imminent death of the hippogriff, invisible Harry throws mud at him, pretending it’s because of the haunted Shrieking Shrak. Then Malfoy sees part of him and runs to the school, and Harry runs too. Malfoy told Snape he saw his head. 

Snape talks to Harry, saying that he is unconcerned with rules like his father.

Snape tells him that James and his friends pulled a trick on him that would have killed him, and that it was only then that James saved him.

Snape finds his map and tries to find its secret but some writing appears insulting him, so he calls Lupin and then Ron arrives and gives him an alibi. Lupin takes the map, then makes him feel guilty for risking the life his parents died to protect.

Back to Gryffindor tower, Hermione is waiting for them, but she didn’t tell on them, she has a letter from Hagrid, he lost the battle and now Buckbeat awaits execution. 

Malfoy is cheering and mocking, says Hagrid is pathetic and Hermione rounds on him and slaps his face, “you foul, you evil!” and would have slapped him again but Ron stopped her and Malfoy went away. Ron now wants to help Hagrid, Hermione is beyond exhausted with too many subjects, and drops divination after a confrontation with the prof, when she saw once again the grim for Harry.

The whole school wants Gryffindor to win the cup and beat Slytherin (Gryffindor hasn’t won the cup since Charlie Weasley was seeker). The Slytherin play a dirty game, but at the end Gryffindor wins!!!!!!!

It’s exams time, everyone is very tense in school for Owls and Newts. The appeal for Buckbeak will be at Hogswarts, but an executioner will come too… already decided huh?… Malfoy is all cocky again.

At dada exams, Hermione breaks because her boggart is McGonagall saying she failed everything…

The appeal is of course lost, so Hermione retrieves Harry’s invisibility cloak for him to go to Hagrid. Hermione cries, then she sees Scabbers there, he was not eaten after all…

Ron takes Scabbers and they go away, and they hear the execution… but don’t see it.

They try to go away, but Scabbers runs, Ron follows and grabs it but the huge black dog arrives, grabs Ron and carries him under the Womping Willow. Crookshanks somehow stops the tree moving and they crawl forward… they arrive at the Shrieking shack, and discover that the dog is an animagus. Sirius, who uses an expelliarmus on them. The kids stay with Harry in defence. Harry hates Sirius so much he launches at him. The three kids battle the man, and Harry gets his wand, but Crookshanks goes between them. Then Lupin arrives and expelliarmus them again. Lupin helps Sirius up and they think he’s a traitor, and Hermione regrets hiding her discovery that he is a werewolf. Lupin says she really is the smartest witch of her age he ever met, then he gives back their wands, and says that he saw on the map that they were there, he is Moony and he helped make it, so he knows how it works, and he saw Oeter Pettigrew ’s name, he was Scabbers.

Peter should be dead. Nobody knew Sirius, Peter and James were animagi. Before the Wolfbane potion was discovered, Lupin had troubles, but Dumbledore let him go study there, and they planted the tree because of him, once a month he could go through the tree to the shrieking shack to transform. His friends found out and became animagi to help him, in three years, in 5 year they did it, and kept him company as animals. 

Sirius is Padfoot, Peter is Wormtail, James was Prongs. They were in the same year as Snape, and Snape wanted to find out where he went every month, so Sirius tricked him and told him how to get past the tree. He would have been alone with a dangerous werewolf, but James stopped him and brought him back, but Snape had seen Lupin and knew what he was. 

Snape is there now with the invisibility cloak.

Snape wants to give Black and Lupin to the dementors, and won’t listen to anyone, he wants revenge. The 3 kids use expelliarmus at the same time and he’s knocked unconscious. Sirius recognised Peter in the picture of when Ron’s family won some money in the summer. 

It turns out that Sirius convinced the Potters to change the secret keeper at the last moment, to fool Voldemort into going after himself for nothing, not knowing that Peter was already his spy.

Lupin and Black are about to kill Peter when Harry stops them, not wanting them to become killers, and says that Peter will go to Azkaban (Black escaped as a dog under the dementors nose, swimming away, do rats swim?). Black also says Crookshanks is very intelligent, the cat recognised what Scabbers really was immediately, and helped dog-Sirius.

Lupin bandages Ron’s broken leg and levitates Snape, while Peter is bound in ropes. 

Sirius doesn’t care that Snape’s head bumps on the ceiling. Sirius tells Harry that he’s his godfather, his appointed guardian, and after his name is cleared he could stay live with him. 

Remus had not taken his potion tonight (that’s why Snape went looking for him, to give it to him), and now transforms and is dangerous. Peter gets Remus’ wand and frees himself and escapes as a rat, then 100 dementors attack them, Harry tries to cast a patronus but he can’t manage, it’s all going bad, he’s alone… then they leave.

Sirius is still thought as guilty. Snape brought everyone to Hogwarts, but is set on Sirius’ guilt. Harry is frantic to have people understand, finally dumbledore comes to the hospital wing to see them and he says that there’s no evidence of Sirius’ innocence and there’s no time for that. Hermione says Snape hates him for a stupid prank when they were young (stupid prank… could have been fatal though…)

“What we need is more time” he says, and Hermione understands, then he says they could be able to save more than one innocent life tonight. Hermione explains about the time-turner and uses it now with Harry: it’s three turns, and they go three hours back in time. McGonagall gave it to her to get to her lessons.

They plan to rescue Buckbeak, then fly it to Sirius and let them escape together. They save Buckbeak, then Harry casts the patronus that saved his own life before - he had thought he saw his dad but it was he himself - and then fly to Sirius and get him out, and fly him to the tower. Harry and Hermione hurry back to the infirmary just in time. When Sirius’ absence is found, Harry has always been under someone’s eye, Dumbledore and then Pomfrey.

Snape told the Slytherin that Lupin is a werewolf so now he resignes, and after the night before when he forgot his potion, he agrees to do it. 

Harry tells Dumbledore about Trelawey’s prophecy, Voldemort’s servant escaped and will bring him back… Dumbledore says that it’s her second prophecy.

Harry is very sorry that he won’t get to live with Sirius… :(

Harry is so down when they take the train but Ron says he should go stay with them, so they’ll go to the Quidditch world cup together, then an owl arrives, by Sirius who says he sent the Firebolt, and he gives him permission to visit Hogsmead, and that Ron can keep the owl since he has no pet anymore. Ron has Crookshanks sniff the owl to be certain it’s okay, then keeps it happily. 

Vernon is waiting for him at the station, and Harry says the letter is from his godfather, a convicted criminal on the run who likes to check on him :-p