With the stateside debut of the final "Harry Potter" film, "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2," this Friday (July 15), HP fanatics are asking themselves, "What do we do now?" As for us here at Billboard.com, after sitting through seven (and soon to be eight) Potter films that featured regal yet haunting musical scores by John Williams and Alexandre Desplat (among others), we're left wondering what Harry's main jam is.
The songs that pumped him up for the big Quidditch matches, or gave him the strength to face He Who Shall Not Be Named -- or at least what he listened to while trudging through his Defense Against the Dark Arts homework.
We're putting aside the fact that in J.K. Rowling's books, Harry was born in 1980, not pinning down his musical choices to any specific era. Read on to hear a choice (and telling) selection of songs from the iPods of Harry Potter, Hermione Granger, Ron Weasley and Draco Malfoy, or at least what we imagine them to be....
A LOT has happened since the screenwriter Steve Kloves began working on his adaptation of the very first Harry Potter book, “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone,” in the late 1990s.
The three central characters — Harry (Daniel Radcliffe), Hermione (Emma Watson) and Ron (Rupert Grint) — have grown up on screen, enduring the twin horrors of Voldemort and adolescence before our very eyes. The stories have become progressively darker and more complicated. And Mr. Kloves has immersed himself so deeply in the world of Harry Potter that by the time J. K. Rowling’s seventh and final volume, “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,” came out in 2007, he said, he knew the characters almost as thoroughly as she did herself.
Adapting the stories for film has been a delicate process all along, as faithfulness to books adored by millions has always had to be balanced with the conventions (and length) of Hollywood blockbusters. (Mr. Kloves is the screenwriter for all but one of the movies, “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.”) But “Deathly Hallows” was perhaps the most difficult of all. More than 700 pages long and crammed with quick-moving plot developments leading to an apocalyptic finale, the book ultimately proved too dense to make into a single film. So it has been split into two.
Part 1, to be released on Friday, covers the first half of the novel, a kind of prolonged road trip in which Harry, Ron and Hermione become nomads in hiding, sorting out their feelings for one another while eluding capture and searching for magical objects that must be destroyed before Voldemort (Ralph Fiennes) can die. Part 2, which builds to a final battle between good and evil inside the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, ...