I never really liked the Harry Potter movies as much as I thought I would. I thought the first two were slavishly faithful to the books, Azkaban lost the stiff upper lip and balanced darkness and whimsy perfectly (probably because director Alfonso Cuaron wasn’t …British enough), while movies 4 onwards were examples of teal-and-orange-itis that film students of the future will study as a syndrome brought about by effect-heavy film budgets in the first decade of the 21st century.

It was not great cinema, not at all. But down the line, the Harry Potter movies did something not quite that unusual – they replaced the pastel-flavored imagery of Mary-Grand Pre, the watercolors and inks of Thomas Taylor and Cliff Wright in my mind, in our minds. For better or worse, Warner Brothers helped create the definitive mental picture of the Hogwarts class of ’98 and assorted environments in the HPverse.  Daniel Radcliffe was Harry Potter, gritted teeth and all, likewise Ms Watson, Mr Grint, Mr Rickman – oh hell yeah! – all of them became living versions of a fictional world. They grew up in real (or nearly real) time,  gaining Adam’s apples, cleavage and outstanding degrees of coolness ( I refer to Neville Longbottom. As a t-shirt I saw recently put it – and rightfully so – ‘Neville would have done it in 4 books.’).

With the exception of the Deathly Hallows Pt 1, however, I paid the piper his due, making biennial trips to the theater, regular, IMAX, 3D, whatever the producers chose to throw at me. Not great cinema, but a ritual that marked the passing of time, if you will. Now Deathly Hallows - I wanted to watch Pt 1 the same time as the second part came out, because of my unfortunate propensity to maintain a sense of continuity in whatever I consume ( blame it on comics, yes. And that is also why I am avoiding Breaking Bad as it begins its fourth season. I intend to see it in one marathon sitting, as the season concludes. Wish me luck.) But a cross-Atlantic flight entertainment system whispered temptation to my sleep-addled brain, and I gave in.

Deathly Hallows Pt 2 marks the end of one of the longest sequential narratives in cinema. Possible the longest with the same cast, if you do not count the Zatoichi films of Shintaro Katsu. (Correct me if I am wrong, ok?) I queued up for the last three books in the series, in a different city every time, with filter coffee and sambhar memories associated with each. And tears. Oh yeah, the last book made me cry, and at a very different point than what you would expect. And that is why the movie itself meant so much. I wanted to celebrate the event, and I am glad I could, with friends. The original plan was to hit the theater opposite my office on Friday afternoon, with as many people as possible. But Carmageddon loomed large, and we decided to watch it at midnight instead. People were beginning to queue from lunchtime on Thursday, most of them young boys and girls dressed as wizards and witches, with wands and scars and a whole lot of joie de vivre. I was a little more practical, having made up my mind to reach the theater not later than 10:00 PM. A brief moment of panic when I saw that the queue was no more, then the realization that people had been allowed in and could pick their own seats. Two hours of agonizing patience, more laughter, people trickling in, tubs of popcorn, The Dark Knight Rises trailer, and finally, the film. Two hours of it-all-ends-ing for a journey that lasted ten years. Applause. Cheering. Happiness. All was well.

But Neville would have still done it in 4 books.

No, this is not a quiz question. This is actually pretty embarrassing, but I am kind of in need of some pop culture help here.

So there was this Scandinavian film that I saw a few years ago. I say ‘Scandinavian’ because, among other things, I do not remember which language it was. What I remember is the storyline – ‘normal’ girl has issues, her boyfriend gets arrested, and she needs to find a job. She gets one at the local comic-book shop, and meets a quirky bunch of people there. The rest of the story follows a somewhat-predictable pattern, where she slowly becomes friends with her weird, RPG-loving co-workers. She hangs out with them, and role-plays with them in the evenings – and this is the cool part, the in-game story (where everyone is a stock RPG character, a warrior, a thief and so on) and the actual, real-world story kind of happen in parallel. It gets more interesting when the girl’s asshole boyfriend escapes from prison and comes to find her.

I enjoyed the movie quite a bit. Sure, it was cheesy at times and the fantasy sequences were not multi-million SFX events, but it was fun and made me laugh, and hey, it was set in a comicbook store. What’s not to like?

Now the embarrassing part – this is a movie I’ve recommended to other people before, and when I was trying to recollect the name recently, my mind went completely, totally blank. I know that the name of the film was the name of the comic-book shop, but no, the actual name eludes me. It drove me completely nuts last week. And the worst thing is, forgetting the name of this movie is only a small fragment in the grand scheme of things. I have this sneaking suspicion that I am beginning to lose my memory, slowly. Like my neurons are beginning to realize that they cannot spark and retrieve information when I need them to. It shows in the oddest of instances – like when my boss was talking about River Tam from Serenity, and forgot the name of the actress, and I realized I had too. I knew that she had acted in Dollhouse and The Big Bang Theory, hell, I even knew which episode of TBBT she appeared in, but I. Could. Not. Remember. Her. Name. (Summer Glau. It came to me a few hours later) Then the other day, I could not remember the Cornelia Funke book that I hated, about the father and daughter who bring stories to life. I remembered the Funke book that was not part of this series (The Thief Lord) and I even remembered the other Funke book that I had not read (Dragon Rider), and probably never will because I did not like her writing anyway. I had to Google for the answer, which was Inkheart.

There are three conclusions I draw from this:

• I am getting old. My brain cells realize this and are slowly committing harakiri. I like that mental image, actually. Billions and billions of microscopic katana in my head slicing through axons (axii?) in I-am-too-old-for-this-shit bursts.
• I think I am all set to become an unreliable narrator. I have a valid excuse.
• This space intentionally left blank. I forgot what I had to say. (See? SEE?)

So there is an inordinately high number of movies on my hard drives. Most of them were downloaded over the last year, some from hearing a passing mention on some blog, others based on suggestions from friends, and yet others because of the primal urge to own 27 Gigs of Stephen Chow movies. They stay arranged in a folder called – duh – “movies”, and loosely grouped under categorical sub-folders called Anime, Korean, Indian, Chinese, Japanese, and H.  Yes, “H” – which used to be called “Hollywood”, until I downloaded a Harry Potter blu-ray rip collection and found out that the filenames were long enough for the subtitles to not extract themselves into the location I wanted them to be in, and only after I removed “ollywood” did I manage to get things done the way I wanted them.

The sad thing is that there is hardly time to watch movies nowadays – I seem to have run out of free time, period. (The blog has not been updated in 6 months. You need more proof?) Dinnertime is about the only portion of the day I get any time to indulge in anything, and a TV episode beats a full-length movie every time. On top of it all, the obvious fail-points about a list of downloaded MKV/AVI/m4a rips: after a point of time, the names tend to blur against each other as the numbers increase. Until you forget that Mary and Max was the claymation movie and Lars and The Real Girl was the story of the blow-up doll, and most of the names are just….names. When I want to watch something, I would be like – “what the hell is this movie all about? When did I download this? Wait, did I download this at all or just copy it in some mass dump from someone else’s drive?”  At times, I even took to deleting the movies I was sure I would not watch. I mean, really, The Condemned?

The other problem is that of choice. You know how it is – you want to watch an action movie or whatever, and the only ones you want to see are the ones you’ve seen already. Or the one you want to see is in a DVD and that’s in the wardrobe and you’re too lazy to walk over and find it. (Ironic, because that was the reason I stopped buying DVDs in the first place.) The more the days pass, it becomes harder to justify why exactly I keep the movies still on the drive.

Anyway, I have arrived at ( what I think ) is a sane conclusion to this mess. I have moved everything into two piles – “seen” and “unseen”. The unseen folder will be the one I hit everytime I want to watch something. By December, if there are still movies in that folder, I will delete the lot. I figure that means there is some element of urgency to it, a bit of self-encouragement, for me to watch things that I have not seen yet.

On a side-note, I seem to be headed towards an ailment called NoMoreDownloaditis, caused by over-saturation of media.