shadows of echoes of memories of songs

Yes, Rowling writes clichéd, clumsy prose. But Order of the Phoenix was one of the ones that managed to do the good bits of schoolfic -- the conflicting loyalties, the being at odds with everyone around you, the teen angst -- reasonably well, and reflect that angst in the stuff the 'grown-ups' are doing with their seekrit Order, and... okay, basically, Young Adult fantasy fiction always makes some kind of link (implict or explicit) between magic and puberty, and HP does it far more clumsily than many, but HP5 is the one where that really starts to come together into some kind of coherent picture of how the magic works in her world and what the point of growing up is; and I do find that interesting, even though I can't really defend the quality of the writing at all. (Though some bits of her dialogue are quite funny, and those invariably end up stuck in the film because they're funny rather than because they actually gel with any of the rest of the film, which of course then makes them much less funny.) But anyway, all of that was lost in the film, which would have been fine if it'd been replaced with, well, anything. I don't object at all to brain-free action movies punctuated by moody looks from Alan Rickman; but it didn't even do that properly. Not nearly enough of Rickman for a start. ;)