Flickgrrl

...is the curse used by teen wizard Harry Potter to disarm his enemies. In yesterday's announcement that it planned to make two films from Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the seventh, and last, book in J. K. Rowling's series, it would appear that Warner Brothers is invoking Expelliarmus on its rival studios.
Was this decision made for financial reasons -- milk the cash cow for all its worth? Or artistic --reducing the action of an 800-page book into a 150-minute movie doesn't work cinematically? Methinks both.
According to Potter screenplay scribe Steve Kloves, the studio initially considered twinning Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. Kloves told the Baltimore Sun that ideally he'd like to do Deathly Hallows, surely the densest of the books, in three parts. He's happy that it will be done in two installments, though, and thinks it will give the action more breathng room and the characters a "proper sendoff."
Your thoughts? Favorite Harry film? (Mine are Alfonso Cuaron's Prisoner of Azkaban and Mike Newell's Goblet of Fire).

Governor Eliot Spitzer's extracurricular activities beg the question of how the movies handle the adultery narrative. In the case of Citizen Kane (pictured are candidate Kane, Orson Welles, and his wife, Ruth Warrick), the pol is outed, his campaign crashes and he leaves wife for mistress. In An Unmarried Woman -- in which cheating Michael Murphy and his wife, Jill Clayburgh, physically resemble Spitzer and spouse Silda -- first the straying husband leaves, then wants back, then wife finds happiness with abstract painter Alan Bates. In sex, lies and videotape Peter Gallagher enjoys nooners with Laura San Giacamo, sister of his wife, Andie McDowell, who leaves him for James Spader. Besides Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice, where brittle blondes Barbara Stanwyck and Lana Turner play around on their husbands I'm having trouble thinking of erring wives. For the most part the movies say that marriages don't survive adultery. Can you think of films that suggest otherwise?