Here’s an interesting insite on the upcoming movie Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince by Kevin Polowy at moviefone.com, I quote…

School vacation has never seemed longer. ‘Potter’ heads who’ve been breathlessly waiting two years since the last movie from the mega-popular franchise can finally exhale — Harry, Ron, Hermione and their classmates are back for year 6 of Hogwarts training in ‘Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince’ (opens July 15), which is shaping up to be the most romantic — and of course, mature — installment yet.

We visited the 500,000-square foot Leavesden Film Studios in rural London (imagine an interconnecting complex of 15 Home Depots, plus dazzling exterior sets) to see where Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint and Emma Watson have spent the better part of the last decade of their lives — and to get the scoop on their latest ‘Potter’ adventure. Keep reading for a sneak peek from the set of ‘Half-Blood Prince.’ — By Kevin Polowy

1. Army of One
Harry (Daniel Radcliffe) has long since come to terms with a fate that sets him up as the only wizard who can bring down Voldemort (Ralph Fiennes). And in ‘Half-Blood Prince’ the training wheels truly come off, as Dumbledore (Michael Gambon) privately tutors Harry and even commands him to retrieve a key memory out of the newly arrived professor Slughorn (Jim Broadbent). “His want — or his need — in this film is basically to kill Voldemort, and he realizes that the way in which he’ll do this is to become Dumbledore’s favorite foot soldier,” Radcliffe says. “That’s the role you’ll see him gradually moving toward in this film.”

2. Big Man on Campus
“We see a cocky and arrogant side to Ron on this one,” says Rupert Grint about the awkward but lovable carrottop he plays. “He’s on the Quidditch team [as starting goalkeeper], he’s got a girlfriend, and he thinks he’s quite cool.” On the flipside, “at times he can be a bit cocky and he annoys Hermione quite a bit,” Grint adds. Says director David Yates: “There’s a sort of middle-aged quality that develops in the character, which is incredibly frustrating and irritating but very charming at the same time.” That’s Ron, frustratingly and irritatingly charming.

3. Plenty More Malfoy
One character who gets a much more developed role in ‘Half-Blood Prince’ is Harry’s Hogwarts rival, Draco Malfoy, who in this film receives direct orders from Lord Voldemort. Bad for Harry, good for Tom Felton, the actor behind Malfoy. “It’s really nice to take him to a higher level, rather than just being an annoying git at the back of the classroom,” Felton says. “It’s really nice that he’s grown, he was quite a two-dimensional character in the previous films.” He’s also got a girlfriend in this installment, Pansy Parkinson (Scarlett Byrne). Felton’s favorite scene this go-around? “To be able to stand on [Harry's] nose has been a lifelong dream.”

4. Bonus Footage
As faithful as ‘Potter’ directors have been to J.K. Rowling’s source(ry) throughout the series, fans have always delighted in the occasional extra scene. In ‘Half Blood-Prince,’ scenes involving the evil Death Eaters terrorizing the community — only referenced by Rowling in the book — are played out on screen. Says director Yates, “We’ve introduced two moments in the film where we see the Death Eaters do what Jo actually described them doing, but off the page as it were.” Also added: an early scene where Harry’s emerging mojo is put on display as he flirts with an attractive waitress on a train. “You immediately set up the notion that suddenly these characters are a bit more sexualized,” Yates says. “They’re aware of the opposite sex.”

Scenes on the movie Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

5. Game On!
A conspicuous absence since the third installment, ‘Prisoner of Azkaban,’ has been that magical (and extreme) sport known as Quidditch. “I wanted to get Quidditch in the last film but we were so overstuffed with things that it was really hard,” explains Yates, adding that the fun gaming sequence in ‘Prince’ is “kind of comedy Quidditch.” Not everyone on set was thrilled about the sport’s heralded return though — or at least shooting it. “I have to say it was bit of an anticlimax,” says Grint. “I really sort of built it up and thought it would be great fun even though [Daniel Radcliffe] said it was painful. He was definitely right. It’s not the nicest experience.” Their director feels their pain: “[Brooms] aren’t the most seat-friendly contraptions.”

6. Scrapping Scrimgeour
Of course, not every scene, detail or even character can make the cut when adapting a 652-page book into a two-hour movie. A casualty of the page-to-screen condensation in part 6 is Minister of Magic Rufus Scrimgeour, who famously visits the Muggle Prime Minister in the book. “We struggled to keep him in,” says Yates. “It’s a great scene in the book … We loved that, and it was in and it was out and it was in and it was out again.” It was just announced that Bill Nighy has signed on to ‘Deathly Hallows,’ and though the actor is tight-lipped on who he’ll play, the presumption is he will indeed be Scrimgeour.

7. Love Triangle No. 1
Despite threats of terrorism (via the Death Eaters) and suspected turncoats roaming the halls of Hogwarts, there’s always time for a little romance, especially with a box of love potion-laced chocolates thrown into the mix with the raging teenage hormones. Yates says the story “deals with the politics of romance.” Ron must balance the affections of Lavender Brown (“Lavender’s completely crazy,” says Grint) with his long-gestating liaison with Hermione (Emma Watson). “I think Hermione’s beginning to acknowledge the fact that she has feelings for him, which she’s never done,” says Watson. “She’s always been in denial.” Adds Grint, “All the stuff with Lavender makes her go a bit crazy.” Poor guy, this Ron, surrounded by all these crazies.

8. New Kid on the Block
Jessie Cave, who makes her ‘Potter’ debut as Ron’s aforementioned love interest Lavender Brown, insists there are no initiation rites for new cast members (good news for you, ‘Deathly Hallows’ star Rhys Ifans). But while Lavender is spunky and brisk, Cave admits to being the opposite. “I’m quite shy and I’m not a loud character,” she says. “But it’s quite fun to play somebody who is because everyone has a loud character inside of them wanting to jump out.”

Read 5 fun facts from the set

9. Love Triangle No. 2
Meanwhile, Harry woos Ginny Weasley (Bonnie Wright) away from her boyfriend, Dean Thomas (Alfie Enoch), and seeks her brother Ron’s approval. “The whole thing with Harry and Ginny is quite confusing for Ron, because he’s quite protective,” Grint says. But one scene featuring the three, where Ron obliviously plonks himself down between the two lovebirds, should be good for DVD bloopers: “I have this real problem with laughing through a take and that scene was quite hard,” Grint says. As for the hanky panky between Harry and Ginny, “It’s very odd because I’ve known Bonnie since she was about 9,” Radcliffe says. Wright agrees, sort of. “It is strange, but also it’s more comfortable with someone you know rather than just a random person.”

Scenes on the movie Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

10. Introducing Your New Potions Instructor
With each ‘Potter’ movie comes at least one new teacher, played by some of the UK’s most venerated actors. New to the party in ‘Prince’ is Jim Broadbent, who plays Potions teacher Horace Slughorn. Says Radcliffe when asked if the relationship between Harry and Slughorn will be as strained on screen as in the books: “I think Harry ultimately likes Slughorn. I think he thinks he’s a very good person and his heart is in the right place, but he’s just very opportunistic and totally self-obsessed.” Fun fact: Broadbent played Tom Felton’s father in the young actor’s first film, ‘The Borrowers.’

11. Ist Bruno!
Also new to ‘Prince’ is director of photography Bruno Delbonnel, who shot the gorgeous French flicks ‘Amelie’ and ‘A Very Long Engagement.’ What does that mean to the average fan? “It’ll be warmer than the last film,” director David Yates says of the movie’s look. “‘Order of the Phoenix’ was dealing with teenage angst and it was dealing with that period in life where you start to rebel a wee bit and you’re struggling against authority and all of that, while this film is much warmer and much more romantic.”

12. Magical vs. Fantastical
One of the biggest goals (and challenges) on the set of ‘Potter’ movies has been to maintain a consistent look and feel. “We’ve established a world and it’s a parallel world to our own,” says David Heyman, the ‘Potter’ producer who obtained the books’ film rights. “We’re quite strict about making sure we don’t stray, because sometimes directors or contributors turn up for the first time, and it’s very easy for them to stray off into the realm of the fantastical as opposed to the magical. What we try and establish is a real world that has a magical element, which is obviously not real. But who knows? Maybe there are wizards out there. Maybe we are muggles, after all.”

3. Buddy Comedy
Harry, Ron and Hermione may be the tale’s inseparable trio of BFFs, but behind the scenes Radcliffe bonded most with an older soul — Michael Gambon, who plays Dumbledore. For the first couple months of filming, Radcliffe and Gambon were the only actors on set. “The relationship between me and Michael really built up over that time,” Radcliffe says, adding that the two have similar senses of humor. “When you know that you’re both going to have to work together very closely doing very difficult stuff, you really need to very, very quickly find something that you can bond over.” Radcliffe was especially tickled when Gambon responded to news that Rowling had “outed” Dumbledore by “camping it up around set for a couple weeks after that.”

Scenes on the movie Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

14. Kissing Co-Stars
“There’s so much kissing going on in this book!” Watson says. And fans aren’t the only ones who get excited by the Hogwarts smooch fests. Radcliffe admits he was disappointed he missed the kiss between Ron and Lavender, “Just ’cause I thought it’d be pretty funny.” According to Matthew Lewis, who plays Neville Longbottom, kissing scenes are usually shot on closed sets, “so no one can go in and start laughing in the background,” but Ron and Lavender’s kiss was filmed in front of most of the cast. The reserved Grint describes the scene’s filming as “quite embarrassing,” but says, “I had a room full of people cheering.” Well, he must be doing something right.

15. Hints of ‘Hallows’
“We’ve kind of altered our story to make sure we don’t tread on the toes of what comes in ‘Deathly Hallows,’” says Yates about the final chapter, which was released in bookstores only months before ‘Half-Blood Prince’ went into production. Among the changes: A subplot surrounding Dumbledore’s wand, and a major development in the Ron and Hermione saga: “We had a kiss planned for ['Half-Blood Prince'], which we’ve sort of saved because we think it’s better to maintain that sexual tension.” In other words, fans yearning for a taste of that sugar will have to wait until Nov. 19, 2010, the day ‘Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part I’ opens. Unless, of course, it’s decided that the kiss will be better in ‘Part II.’

Photo credits from cinematical.com.

One of the things me and my husband, along with our little Vaughn, usually do is watch movies. Lately, we were able to watch the science fiction film, KNOWING, starred by Nicolas Cage, Chandler Canterbury, and Rose Byrne. The beginning of the movie was kinda scary in a really creepy way but eventually the majority of the scenes were entertaining and mind bogging. This is one of those movies were you’d really have to listen into their conversations just to understand its plot but I’ve always loved movies by Nicolas Cage and this is just another one of those I’d like to put into my collection.

Here is a really detailed synopsis of the movie KNOWING from imdb.com.

The film opens in Lexington, Massachusetts in 1959, where a competition is held among the students of a new elementary school to celebrate its opening. The winning plan, from student Lucinda Embry, a seemingly mental disorder/mentally disturbed girl, is to bury a time capsule containing the students’ drawings of the future to be opened 50 years later in 2009.

She is prevented from finishing her image, which is actually a series of seemingly random numbers, and goes missing during the ceremony. Her teacher later finds her in a gym closet, frantically scratching the remaining numbers into the door. Fifty years later, the time capsule is opened and the pictures are handed down to the new generation of students. Caleb, the son of MIT professor and astrophysics|astrophysicist John Koestler, receives Lucinda’s envelope. Initially dismissing them as random numbers, John notices a single random number sequence, 911012996, which contains the date of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks|World Trade Center attacks as well as the death toll of the attack. Further research leads John to realise the numbers are a list contain the dates and death tolls of every major disaster, natural and man made, that has happened over the past 50 years, with three that have not occurred yet.

Nicolas Cage and Rose Byrne

When a commercial plane crash kills 81, the legitimacy of the list of numbers is confirmed and leading John to believe that Lucinda had an ability to prognosticate since childhood until she died. It is also revealed through this incident that the numbers contain the coordinates for every event listed. As his wife died in one of the past events, John starts to believe his son was chosen to get Lucinda’s prophecies. After Caleb receives a vision of future global catastrophe from a silent man, John tries to contact the late Lucinda’s daughter, Diana, to gain more information, but is rebuffed. But when John also predicts the second event, a subway train crash, Diana and her daughter, Abby, visit John and Caleb, and Diana reveals that her mother foretold of the date of her death would be on October 19th, which is also within the list. They investigate Lucinda’s old mobile home in the woods, discovering walls of news clippings of the events and a drawing of Merkabah|Ezekiel’s Wheel. During their investigation, the group encounters the silent man and three others, who vanish in a flash of light protruded from the man’s mouth when John confronts them. Later Caleb is found writing numbers very similar to the ones that Lucinda wrote without realizing what he is doing. This may suggest that those numbers are predictions for future events. As a result of the confrontation, Abby is revealed to have been contacted by the “whisper people”. Initially believing that the last event will kill only 33, John eventually re-examines the numbers after Diana’s mention on how her mother used to write numbers and letters backward. He discovers that the final digits are not “33″, but actually “EE” written backwards; the final event is a massive solar flare that will kill “Everyone Else.” As Diana prepares to travel to a system of caves she believes will save them, John breaks into the school to steal the door Lucinda scratched the numbers on. At his house, he begins to scrape the paint off the door, but Diana refuses to wait for him, and leaves with the kids. As the solar flare approaches, it begins to disrupt cell phone signals, preventing John from contacting Diana.

The Strangers in the movie Knowing

She is finally able to contact John through a gas station pay phone, and he tells her that the final numbers are the coordinates of her mother’s house, which he believes is safe, while the caves won’t protect them from the solar flare’s radiation. When panic erupts at the gas station following the government’s activation of the national Emergency Alert System and announcement of the solar flare, two of the whisper people hijack Diana’s car with the two children. Giving chase in another car, Diana is hit by a truck trying to run a red light, dying exactly at midnight, on the very day her mother predicted. Arriving back at Lucinda’s mobile home, John discovers the children are safe and comfortable in the presence of the whisper people. The whisper people are revealed to be celestial angel-like beings who invite the children to escape the destruction “to help everyone start over”. At first, Caleb is very reluctant to go when his father is not invited to come along; John successfully persuades him to go, saying that they will be together again eventually. The whisper people leave Earth on their ship, a massive structure resembling Ezekiel’s Wheel, as other ships also depart Earth. As anarchy reigns in New York City and Boston John arrives to be with his parents and sister just as the solar flare strikes Earth and incinerates all life on the planet. Caleb and Abby are dropped off on an Earth-like planet with at least two moons as the other ships drop off their passengers. The movie ends as the two children, dressed in white, run toward a large white tree, possibly being the fabled Tree of Life.

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Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen

I’m in high spirits today. At last, we were finally able to watch the must-see movie Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen earlier today. The movie was shown here in Cebu last June 24th and unfortunately, due to the scarcity of time which is normal when you work in a call centre, we were only able to book a ticket online today for the movie. The movie was definitely awesome! I enjoyed the humour you’d witness from Shia LaBeouf’s character, Sam Witwicky, an average teenager with the same anxieties and excitement about leaving home for a chance at normalcy in college but found himself in the middle of a War between the Autobots and humans against the Decepticons, much to his dislike. In addition to the facetious characters in the movie would be John Turturro, who was the former Sector 7 Agent Simmons and Ramon Rodriguez, Sam’s self-absorbed roommate. Sam’s parents were also quite amusing as they are not the typical parents you know in reality. Let’s not forget Megan Fox who plays Sam’s hot and sexy girlfriend.

Val showing off our movie tickets!

I was astounded by the many robots and metals smashing against each other and of course, how the vehicles, trucks, planes, etc. transformed into huge Autobots and Decepticons. My admiration for Optimus Prime’s courage and determination to protect the Earth and its inhabitants also captured my interest. When I was younger, I used to watch Transformers in cartoons thanks to my brother’s influence and I enjoyed every single episode. My favorite were and are still Optimus Prime and Bumblebee. The scene with Optimus against Megatron and two other Decepticons was breathtaking. Its amazing how he tends to fight multiple enemies at the same time.

In conclusion, the movie was worth every penny and I would definitely want to watch the movie again if given the opportunity. I would also encourage those who haven’t watched Transformers 2 to find time and watch it on the big screen since it’s really different when you’re watching the movie at home and when you’re at the theatre.