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For someone who rarely visits the cinema, I am madly interested in movies and movie news. Instead of going to the cinema, I buy DVDs which I never get a chance to watch… although actually I do copy them onto the Archos and watch them on the Camberley Express into London.

I quite liked the recent ‘Hulk’ movie directed by Ang Lee and starring Eric Bana - some of it was a bit slow-going but there’s a glorious segment about two-thirds of the way through where the US armed forces chase the big green fella across the desert, and fun ensues as he throws tanks and helicopters around.

An even newer Hulk adaptation starring Edward Norton is one the cinematic highlights I probably won’t get to see this year, along with ‘Iron Man’, ‘The Dark Knight’ (the latest Batman flick) and ‘Indiana Jones and the Curse of the Zimmer Frame’. Nevertheless, I was excited (possibly the wrong word… interested, maybe) to see the news of the Hulk trailer on Comingsoon.Net. So I clicked on the link and made ready with the headphones… but in the embedded movie player I saw the message pictured here.

I can understand being asked to leave a room while someone explains US encryption export policy to some US citizens (yes, it did happen), but this is a bit stupid. What’s the point? Spoilsports.

It’s okay, no spoilers here. Today I finished reading ‘Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows’. No, it’s not just for kids, why should it be? I was slightly concerned that after all the build-up, the intricate detail of the preceding books, it would be a disappointment - that some detail that seemed so important and left us all hanging would be glossed over, be poorly explained, or just turn out to be plain rubbish. Nope, not in the least. Everything was pieced together, everything worked, and the conclusion was very satisfying. Quite a few surprises, although my guess about Snape was right (that’s not a spoiler, I was just right about Snape, that’s all).

Now the big problem for Warner Brothers… turn it into a decent movie. The Harry Potter movies to date have been pretty good and entertaining, and you couldn’t expect them to go into the minute details that the books do. So they have skipped some large portions of action and sub-plots, and there’s a general feeling of the approach being “well, we have to make this into a movie so let’s get it done” and hey presto, another Harry Potter movie rolls off the conveyor belt.

In ‘The Deathly Hallows’ there’s a lot of skipping to different locations (unlike the mainly Hogwarts-based ‘Order of the Phoenix’) and there’s a lot of flashbacks, a lot of action, and a lot of detailed explanatory dialogue. Miss out that stuff and the movie will be a confusing turkey. But it’ll still be better than ‘The Matrix’.