May 2022 Favorite Watches & Lukeadamy Awards

 That month I fell in love with Harry Potter again

Top Ten Favorite Watches of the Month:

​Marvel marathon last month; real HP and Star Wars heavy this month.

​Stunning animation, a whimsical array of characters, an evocative score, and admirable anti-capitalist themes championing the importance of generosity and selflessness over greed.

Alfonso Cuarón really raised the bar for what the franchise could achieve visually.

​All of the design aspects of A New Hope are still leagues ahead of most sci-fi coming out today.

​After watching 4 movies of dopey school children learning the basics of magic, the sorcery flying around in the Dumbledore v Voldemort battle still blows my mind.

​A truly and fittingly magical introduction to the series. The hammy expressions the kids make had me in tears.

Impactful messaging and dynamic battle scenes serve as a satisfying end to an unforgettable franchise.

With its crushingly grim atmosphere and plethora of horror imagery, this is easily the most adult and intense film in the series. A lot of gorgeous location photography though.

A hot-take ranking and rating but I love it. Especially all the teenage high school drama, made even more special as it’s the last time they get to be kids before all innocence is annihilated at the end.

It’s flawless other than the ragamuffin hairstyles. Love that they make schoolchildren participate in deadly murder games for essentially just a trophy and bragging rights.

​Richly philosophical with gripping, action-packed set pieces, breathtaking expressionistic cinematography, penetrating emotional resonance, and a final reveal that’s one of the most defining moments in American cinema: a masterpiece through and through.

May Lukeadamy Awards:

​Legacy Award goes to everyone involved in the making of the Harry Potter films. Same as I felt after finishing the books in 2007, same as I felt in 2011 after Deathly Hallows Part II came out, I was hit with a palpable sense of loss after binging the series again a few weekends ago. And I think that’s part of the reason why I’ve avoided rewatching them for so long and why my love of the series soured over the years. After it ends, it breeds a sort of resentment that comes after a breakup or a rejection that you’d given your hopes up for - the type that comes from wanting something that you can’t have. It’s like being stabbed 8 trillion times in the heart with a love-blade while you’re consuming them - whether books or films - and then afterwards it just cuts that fucker right out of your chest and says, “Hope you don’t mind if I take this with me! Toodaloo!” I do mind though, Harry Potter franchise. I mind a lot.

​And yes, I do realize that I’m talking about a fictional story world. Shut up. It’s healthy to embarrass yourself on social media sometimes probably.

To further embarrass myself, I was also blindsided by a wave of long-forgotten feelings from my childhood, and realized that Hermione Granger - and Emma Watson’s immaculate embodiment of her - was the first true love I ever had (shut up, stop laughing at me). I remembered the utter disdain and jealousy I had for Victor Krum when reading Goblet of Fire as a small boy-child. I remembered going googly-eyed over Emma Watson after watching Prisoner of Azkaban. I remembered going to whatever the hell the Harry Potter website was back in the mid-00s and staring at the Goblet of Fire production stills of Emma Watson as Hermione Granger every day after school. I remembered the utter disdain and jealousy I had for Victor Krum again while watching Goblet of Fire as a small teenage boy-child. And it didn’t help that they turned her into the most perfect human being to ever walk the planet in the later films, where literally her only flaw is that she’s very occasionally a bit of a buzzkill: it was a lost battle from the jump. If only every person could be as thoughtful, compassionate, brave, unequivocally supportive, and emotionally intelligent as her, this world would be a much better place. But that’s why she’s fictional. Because real people have flaws in all their imperfect glory past occasionally being a bit of a buzzkill, regardless of how many other boxes they check. Nevertheless, whatever partner(s) I have the rest of my life will have to deal with the fact that Hermione Granger’s name will forever be carved into my heart, and that like Charles Foster Kane whispering “Rosebud” at the end of his life in Citizen Kane, my dying words as I go into that beyond - my brain filling with vivid images - will almost certainly be “Hermione.”

And one of those vivid images will also certainly be the image of Emma Watson’s Hermione sitting by a tree in the snow by herself, bundled up and reading a book in Deathly Hallows Part I; it’s one of the most perfect images ever recorded. It still makes my soul ache as much today as it did back when I first saw it. I still feel it all. Every last ounce.

If you’re going to make fun of me, please wait at least another month, as I am still in a very sensitive place about it. And the Lukeadamy awards are canceled because this cringy outpouring has taken up too much space and I’ll just give them all to Harry Potter anyways.

Supercut song credit is “MORE LOVE” by Moderat, from their recent album MORE D4TA.