trailer break: ‘Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince’ NEW!

We should be actually seeing this movie this weekend -- instead, we have to settle for a new trailer.

I’m relieved to see are few light moments in this one:

because the teaser trailer was so relentlessly grim. The Harry Potter books get progressively darker, so we should expect the same of the films, but still, there is some humor in all of them, and I would hope that those moments aren’t the first ones to go when something has to be trimmed.

Ron’s in love with a girl he’s never met! Harry’s flirting with girls in the library! Hmm, why does that snippet remind me of how Daniel Radcliffe has said that he doesn’t care if girls want to sleep with him only because he’s Harry Potter? Not that I think he has to worry about that. Look how adorable he is:

And gosh, Hogwarts is beautiful, isn’t it?

Why didn’t my schools ever look like that? Harry wouldn’t even need escape from his horrible adoptive family as a reason to rush back every September.

And the Hogwarts houses have their own logo T-shirts finally:

Maybe there’s a Warner Bros. merchandise store on the Hogwarts grounds...

(Poor Hermione! Why is she crying?)

London under magical attack:

I love it when the Harry Potter movies spill over in the muggle world -- it makes it all seem so much more real. In fact, the seamless blending of reality and fantasy in the series is one of the best such treatments I can recall in any movies.

But we’ll always have quidditch:

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince opens in the U.S. and in the U.K. on July 17, 2009.