It’s been a long time since I paid attention to any promotional materials related to a Harry Potter movie. After awhile, it had seemed the movies all look the same, at least in trailers, posters and other marketing tools. And since I stopped caring about both the books and the movies after Goblet of Fire (though Order of the Phoenix has admittedly been floating around the bottom of my Netflix queue since it was released to DVD), there really was no reason for me to bother with ads for whatever installment Warner Bros. is currently attempting to ram down my movie-blogging throat.

However, due to my job of keeping abreast of all that’s super-hot in the world of film (according to film blogs, at least), I was obligated to watch the latest trailer for this summer’s Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. And I have to admit that it makes the new movie look incredibly epic. I feel like even if I had never seen a Harry Potter movie before, I’d still go see this, whether I went back and acquainted myself with the predecessors or not. Even more than exciting me with its percussion-heavy music and its promise of kissing scenes (aka “mild sensuality”), the trailer really impressed me with its turn-face on the usual trailer-pause technique, in which the cliche “It has begun” is replaced with “It’s over.”

After the jump, read what other bloggers are saying about this new spot:
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One of the hardest things about being a young film critic is that it’s impossible to catch up to the older guys in terms of how many films I’ve seen. To think Roger Ebert was already reviewing films at the Sun-Times for ten years before I was born. And gee whiz, Andrew Sarris has been doing this forever. I mean, it’s hard enough seeing every significant film released in a year, let alone every significant film released in the 8 decades before my lifetime. But while it’s certainly in my best interest to see all those Ingmar Berman films I’ve avoided, and see everything else on all those “all time best” lists, and maybe watch Turner Classic Movies 24-7 for the rest of my life, there’s just no way I’ll ever be complete in the eyes of some of my peers or, more importantly, of my readers.

Last Sunday, SF Chronicle critic Mick LaSalle confessed to having never previously seen some “classics”, including 2001: A Space Odyssey. But he had finally just watched them and proceeded to review them. Some bloggers have responded, including Kevin Lee, who is disappointed in LaSalle’s low-level insight, and Jeff Wells, who admitted to his own unseen, none of which seemed too embarrassing. But then LaSalle ponied up a response to the responses:

“Of course, since I’ve written that article I’ve heard from people telling me that I’m an illiterate for not seeing the movies they’ve seen (although I’ve seen them NOW). Needless to say, I could name hundreds of worthy and significant films that probably none of them have seen. But hey, people need something to make them feel good about themselves, and they’ll find any excuse.

But that’s neither important nor interesting. However, the larger point this brings up, though, does interest me. Movies have been around now for about a century. Fifty years ago, we might have reasonably assumed (it wouldn’t have been true, but it would have been a reasonable assumption) that every film critic of significance had seen all the major movies.

But after a hundred years, do we really want our film critics to be generalists, all familiar with the same batch of pre-digested movies that everyone agrees are good? By now, you really can’t see everything, so do we want critics all to have seen the same narrow basic repertory?”

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In an apparent bid to play every villain that, as a child, I found weirdly sympathetic (after the Grinch and, um, Andy Kaufmann), Jim Carrey will star as Scrooge in a Robert Zemeckis adaptation of The Christmas Carol. Zemeckis, who has spent the past few years mired in his soon-to-be-released motion-capture adaptation of Beowulf, is setting upCarol as another CG/motion-capture/3D stereoscopic extravaganza.

Todd McCarthy assesses Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. “Pottermania will reach a peak in July with the nearly simultaneous release of the fifth film and the seventh and final book, and only commercial concern for Warner Bros. may be that, after the second or third week, curiosity about the concluding tome could overshadow interest in the film.”

Is Phil Donahue the next Al Gore? The Man Who Fell To Oprah is shopping around a documentary, which he co-directed, called Body of War, described by Variety as “an unashamedly partisan film arguing the folly of the Iraq campaign.” The pic apparently paints most Democrats as ineffectual yes-men, while trumpeting Senator Robert Byrd as the lone maverick who dared to go against the pack.