Yesterday afternoon, my TiVo reminded me that my 30-day rental of "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2" was about to expire, since I'd grabbed it when Amazon had a brief 99-cent sale last month. That's the big disadvantage of renting rather than buying videos; you have a limited window to watch them in, and in fact once you start watching, the window becomes quite short. You have 30 days overall, and once you start, just 48 hours. It used to be 24 hours, so I guess that's an improvement, and I suppose all video rentals used to have a pretty short duration, back before renting a video meant sitting in your living room and pushing a button.

I'm generally pretty bad about watching movies as soon as I rent them, and once in a while I even let them expire. Perhaps it's for the same reason I tend to let Netflix DVDs sit around for weeks before I get around to watching them; there's always something newly broadcast to watch on the TiVo. Netflix loves me. One of the reasons for the delay this time was that after I greedily grabbed the discounted Part 2, I discovered that there were no online options for paying to see Part 1! Just another of those absurd situations where I want to hand someone my money for digital content, and they won't take it.

As for "The Deathly Hallows," I can understand why there was too much material to cram this book into a single feature-length movie without making it absurdly long, but I also really felt this release got short shrift. It was two hours long without feeling as though it needed to be. Maybe they could've done a better job dividing the two parts of the final story.

Without any spoilers, even though I may be the last person I know who hadn't seen this but planned to, I'll say that I appreciated not only the end of the story, but the way it was filmed. In particular, I really appreciated the filmmaker's choice to close in on a particular set of characters, not once, but twice. This could have gone to the masturbatory excesses of "The Return of the King," but didn't.

And, while I suppose the coda was strictly unnecessary (and I wonder if it was in the book), I've come to appreciate it for its cyclic completeness. As you've probably already guessed, I'm a couple of books behind in the series, too!