Just went to see Harry Potter ... a mere 26 hours after I finished the book.

A tip: don't watch a movie when you've just finished the book. It was a good movie, but I think it would have been better if I didn't have the running commentary in my mind: "They skipped that part altogether ... they moved that around ... they re-wrote that part ... I really wanted to see that chess game ... why did they cut that dialogue? ...."

Personally, as I read the book, I thought it translated beautifully into a movie, but I understand that they had to move and consolidate stuff to fit it into the 2 1/2 movie that it turned out to be. (Tip #2: if you're not enamoured of watching a movie with people who don't know better than to bring babies and/or toddlers to a 2 1/2 hour movie, then go see the night show. You'll still get kids, but maybe they'll have fallen asleep.) Alan Rickman didn't put in as much of a show as I expected, but everyone else was great.

I briefly considered stopping my reading of the Lord of the Rings, but ... I found this morning that I'm more than halfway through the book, and stopping now would be silly. I'm hoping that if I finish the book this weekend, then maybe some of the details will be fuzzy in my head and I can stop the internal commentary. And maybe Liv Tyler's bad performance will distract me from what they had to change in the movie.