Humor by John Christmann
Harry Potter and the News of the World
This weekend theater lines will stretch down the block as movie goers wait excitedly to see Harry Potter battle evil incarnate, the dark lord, the villain of all villains, the slithering snake of the underworld: he-who-must-not-be-named!
I am of course referring to Rupert Murdoch.
For those of you hibernating under a Whomping Willow for the last ten years, the final movie installment of the popular book franchise by J.K. Rowling hits theaters this weekend. It concludes a decade long quest by a crew of mystical kids led by wizard and true star, Harry Potter, to make their creator the wealthiest woman in the British Empire.
I don’t want to spoil the ending, but they succeed.
The teenage occult bookstore owners-in-training all attend a bucolic, Ivy League prep school hidden deep within Sherwood Forest, called Hogwarts, where they learn such wizardly activities as how to microwave hot dogs using Latin incantations and how to cure acne with a magic wand.
In this final episode, Harry, Ron Weasley, and Hermione (pronounced Hermione) Granger diligently study the dark arts in an effort to permanently change Hermione’s name, which she just hates and blames on her insensitive muggle parents. Muggle is an inflammatory term used to describe the lowly group of people who are standing in line to see the movie.
Hermione, a precocious Goth who listens to Nine Inch Nails and is addicted to reruns of Bewitched, also wants to change the name of their beloved school to Harvard because it will look better on her resume.
Ron secretly loves Hermione, but remains painfully aloof in part because there are no video games at Hogwarts to divert his amorous attentions. Harry Potter struggles with issues of insecurity amid his tremendous fame, which is only eclipsed by Lady Gaga.
Harry also has a jagged scar on his head; the result of a collision with a moving staircase shortly after he heroically earned top honor in the Triwizard beer pong tournament somewhere in the fourth movie.
Did I mention they are all teenagers?
Anyway, after the demise of Hogwart’s founder, Ronald Regan, evil forces conspired to bankrupt the noble institution with massive amounts of debt. In an effort to raise the ceiling and prevent foreclosure in what has become a really bleak market for ancient castles, Harry, Ron, and Hermione must break into the Federal Reserve Bank of Gringotts and steal a magic wand chillingly referred to as The Wand of Compromise.
Along the way their lives are placed in jeopardy by mysterious dark apparitions appropriately called Death Eaters, but more commonly referred to as Tabloid Reporters. Sent by the Dark Lord to gather the News of the World which he profanely pedals to innocent muggles queued up in grocery checkout lines, his angry Death Eaters want revenge on Harry Potter because they have not been able to hack his iPhone since he left the Quidditch stadium, the only facility on campus with a cell phone tower.
With the help of their Professor of Marriage Arts class, Newt Gingrich, Harry, Ron, and Hermione make their way to a secret vault deep under the country of Greece, where they discover a NASA control room, a television studio, and a scale model of the International Space Station and the Shuttle Atlantis coupled in front of a green screen. Realizing they have potentially solved the deficit crisis by exposing an entitlement-sucking NASA conspiracy, they decide they must find a non-biased news outlet with journalists they can trust to inform the world.
Their efforts to spread the truth are quickly thwarted by a three-headed dog, several dragons, and a giant ostrich dispatched to cover the story by the liberal media.
In a panic, Harry takes matters into his own hands by posting a tweet of the incident while Ron inexplicable uploads a picture of himself posing under the Cloak of Invisibility to Facebook. Unfortunately the cloak has dropped and Ron is seen standing in his underwear.
The Death Eaters seize the photo and instantly brand Ron a Weasley Congressman in bold headlines, posting the rather large grainy picture on Page One along with insets of Dominique Strauss-Kahn celebrating Bastille Day in handcuffs, the happy-go-lucky muggle who caught Derek Jeter’s 3,000th hit at Yankee Stadium, and a woman in a bikini.
Fortunately J.K. Rowling picks up Harry Potter’s story and Jon Stewart finally exposes the truth on The Daily Show.
Which is why I know so much about the movie.
OK, by now you have figured out that I have never really seen the Harry Potter movies. However, I do from time to time catch our local news, which is how I come by this all of the late breaking movie buzz I am irresponsibly passing on to you now as a credible columnist.
Maybe I should start watching Entertainment Tonight.
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