Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part I

Rufus Scrimgeour gives a speech to the Ministry stating that it has and will always stay strong through these "dark times." Severus Snape, now the Headmaster of Hogwarts, meets with Voldemort and his fellow Death Eaters at Malfoy Manor where he then shares his intelligence about when Harry will be moved from his home. Harry Potter and his friends Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger know that their only hope is to find and destroy the Horcruxes before their enemy Voldemort restores his full powers by killing Harry. Voldemort is forced to borrow a wand since his is unable to kill Harry. The Order and Harry's friends show up at the Dursleys' house and turn all of his friends into decoys of Harry to move him to The Burrow, the home of the Weasleys. Once they're in the sky, they are immediately attacked by Death Eaters. Voldemort's borrowed wand fails to kill Harry, whose wand acts of its own accord. Mad-Eye Moody and Harry's owl, Hedwig, are killed during the battle. Despite the deaths during the attack, they manage to make it to the Burrow.

At the Burrow, The Minister of Magic, Rufus Scrimgeour, arrives and distributes the items from Dumbledore's last will and testament: the Deluminator to Ron, his personal copy of "The Tales of Beedle the Bard" to Hermione, and to Harry, the Snitch Harry caught in his first Quidditch game. Dumbledore also bequeathed Godric Gryffindor's sword to Harry, but Scrimgeour maintains that the Sword was not Dumbledore's to give. Also, the whereabouts of the Sword are unknown. Later, the wedding of Bill Weasley and Fleur Delacour is interrupted by Death Eaters. During the chaos, Ron, Harry and Hermione disapparate to London, where they are attacked again by two Death Eaters in disguise in a cafe. While planning not to return for their final year at Hogwarts, they head to #12 Grimmauld Place, where the house-elf Kreacher is hiding. They discover that RAB is Regulus Arcturus Black and that Mundungus Fletcher has stolen the real locket of Salazar Slytherin from the house. Harry orders Kreacher to apprehend Mundungus, who reveals that the locket is in the possession of Dolores Umbridge. Using Polyjuice Potion, the trio break into the Ministry, retrieve the locket, and Disapparate to a forest.

Despite their attempts, they are unable to destroy the Horcrux, which makes its bearer experience deeply negative thoughts. They take turns wearing it in order to dilute its effects. Especially susceptible to its effects, Ron is overcome by suspicion that Harry and Hermione are getting close and departs from the group. His departure, combined with the tension of their situation, is a severe blow to their morale. Harry momentarily raises their spirits when he invites Hermione to dance with him as they listen to some music on Ron's radio. Harry sees a vision of Voldemort interrogating and killing Gregorovitch, an old wand-maker, and going off in search of a mysterious teenage wizard that Gregorovitch said robbed his shop many years ago.

Harry and Hermione go to Godric's Hollow to find Bathilda Bagshot, a magical historian who they think may have the Sword, which they have determined can destroy Horcruxes as it is impregnated with Basilisk venom, but they are nearly cornered by Lord Voldemort's snake Nagini who has killed her. Hermione identifies the teenage wizard seen in Harry's vision as Gellert Grindelwald.

Harry sees a Patronus doe, follows it to a frozen pond, and finds the Sword of Gryffindor. As Harry swims to reach it, the locket attempts to drown him, but Ron reappears and saves him. Harry convinces Ron to try and destroy the locket with the sword. It manipulates Ron's worst fears, but Ron successfully destroys it with the sword.

After seeing a strange symbol throughout their journey, they decide to visit someone who knows what significance the symbol has. Xenophilius Lovegood teaches them about the Deathly Hallows (an invincible Elder Wand, a Resurrecting Stone, and an Invisibility Cloak). Together all three items make someone a "master of death." Xenophilius betrays them to the Death Eaters as ransom for his daughter Luna. The trio escape and Disapparate back to the forest, where a group of Snatchers are waiting to capture them and take them to Malfoy Manor. Harry, meanwhile, has another vision and sees Voldemort finding Grindelwald who tells Voldemort that as a result of a long ago duel, Dumbledore is now the master of one of the Deathly Hallows, the Elder Wand.

At Malfoy Manor, Bellatrix imprisons Harry and Ron in the cellar, where she has also imprisoned Luna, the wandmaker Ollivander, and the goblin Griphook; meanwhile, Bellatrix tortures Hermione (by carving the word "mudblood" into her arm) to try to find out how they acquired the Sword of Gryffindor, which she had believed to be safe in her bank at Gringotts.

Harry, using a magical mirror, sees what he believes to be the face of Dumbledore and begs the person in the mirror for help. Dobby then appears and, at Harry's request, rescues Luna and Ollivander and returns to help Harry, Ron, Hermione, and Griphook. During the rescue, Bellatrix kills Dobby as they Disapparate. Harry gives Dobby a proper burial on the beach. The first part closes with Voldemort breaking Dumbledore's tomb, stealing the Elder Wand and testing it's power.

James and the Giant Peach

James Henry Trotter, four years old, lives with his loving parents in a pretty and bright cottage by the sea in the south of England. James's world is turned upside down when, while on a shopping trip in London, his mother and father are eaten by a rhinoceros that had escaped from the zoo. James is forced to go and live with his two horrible aunts, Spiker and Sponge, who live in a high, desolate hill near the white cliffs of Dover. For three years Spiker and Sponge physically and verbally abuse James, not allowing him to venture beyond the hill or play with other children. Around the house James is treated as a drudge, beaten for hardly any reason, improperly fed, and forced to sleep on bare floorboards in the attic.

One summer afternoon when he is crying in the bushes, James stumbles across a strange little man, who, mysteriously, knows all about James's plight and gives him a sack of tiny glowing-green crocodile tongues. The man promises that if James mixes the contents of the sack with a jug of water and ten hairs from his own head, the result will be a magic potion which, when drunk, will bring him happiness and great adventures. On the way back to the house, James trips and spills the sack onto the peach tree outside his home, which had previously never given fruit. The tree becomes enchanted through the tongues, and begins to blossom; indeed a certain peach grows to the size of a large house. The aunts discover this and make money off the giant peach while keeping James locked away. At night the aunts shove James outside to collect rubbish from the crowd, but instead he curiously ventures inside a juicy, fleshy tunnel which leads to the hollow stone in the middle of the cavernous fruit. Entering the stone, James discovers a band of rag-tag anthropomorphic insects, also transformed by the magic of the green tongues.

James quickly befriends the insect inhabitants of the peach, who become central to the plot and James' companions in his adventure. The insects loathe the aunts and their hilltop home as much as James, and they were waiting for him to join them so they can escape together. The Centipede bites through the stem of the peach with his powerful jaws, releasing it from the tree, and it begins to roll down the hill, squashing Spiker and Sponge flat in its wake. Inside the stone the inhabitants cheer as they feel the peach rolling over the aunts. The peach rolls through villages, houses, and a famous chocolate factory before falling off the cliffs and into the sea. The peach floats in the English channel, but quickly drifts away from civilization and into the expanses of the Atlantic Ocean. Hours later, not far from the Azores, the peach is attacked by a swarm of hundreds of sharks. Using the blind Earthworm as bait, the ever resourceful James and the other inhabitants of the peach lure over five hundred seagulls to the peach from the nearby islands. The seagulls are then tied to the broken stem of the fruit using spiderwebs from the Spider and strings of white silk from the Silkworm. The mass of seagulls does indeed lift the giant peach into the air and away from the sharks, although the peach is badly damaged in the incident.

As the seagulls strain to get away from the giant peach, they merely carry it higher and higher, and the seagulls take the giant peach great distances. The Centipede entertains with ribald dirges to Sponge and Spiker, but in his excitement he falls off the peach into the ocean and has to be rescued by James. That night, thousands of feet in the air, the giant peach floats through mountain-like, moonlit clouds. There the inhabitants of the peach see a group of magical ghost-like figures living within the clouds, "Cloud-Men", who control the weather. As the Cloud-Men gather up the cloud in their hands to form hailstones and snowballs to throw down to the world below, the loud-mouthed Centipede berates the Cloud-Men for making snowy weather in the summertime. Angered, an army of Cloud-Men appear from the cloud and pelt the giant peach with hail so fiercely and powerfully that the peach is severely damaged, with entire chunks taken out of it, and the giant fruit begins leaking its peach juice. All of this shrinks the peach somewhat, although because it is now lighter the seagulls are able to pull it quicker through the air. As the seagulls strain to get away from the Cloud-Men, the giant peach smashes through an unfinished rainbow the Cloud-Men were preparing for dawn, infuriating them even further. One Cloud-Man almost gets on the peach by climbing down the silken strings tied to the stem, but James asks the Centipede to bite through some of the strings. When he does a single freed seagull, to which the Cloud-Man is hanging from, is enough the carry him away from the peach as Cloud-Men are weightless.

As the sun rises, the inhabitants of the giant peach see glimmering skyscrapers peeking above the clouds, and a sprawling urban city far below them. The inhabitants of Manhattan see the giant peach suspended in the air by a swarm of hundreds of seagull, and panic, believing it to be a floating, orange-coloured, spherical nuclear bomb. The military, police, fire and rescue services are all called out, and people begin running to air raid shelters and the New York Subway, believing the city is about to be destroyed. A huge passenger airplane flies past the giant peach, almost hitting it, and severing the silken strings between the seagulls and the peach. The seagulls free, the peach begins to fall to the ground, but it is saved when it is impaled upon the spike at the top of the Empire State Building. The people on the observation deck at first believe the inhabitants of the giant peach to be monsters or Martians, but when James appears from within the skewered peach and explains his story, the people hail James and his insect friends as heroes. They are given a welcoming home parade, and James gets what he wanted for three long years - playmates in the form of millions of potential new childhood friends. The skewered, battered remains of the giant peach are brought down to the streets by steeplejacks, where its delicious flesh is eaten up by ten thousand children, all now James's friends. Meanwhile, the peach's other former residents, the anthropomorphic insects, all go on to find very interesting futures in the world of humans...

In the last chapter of the book, it is revealed that the giant hollowed-out stone which had once been at the center of the peach is now a mansion located in Central Park. James Henry Trotter lives out the rest of his life in the giant peach stone, which becomes an open tourist attraction and the ever-friendly James has all the friends he has ever wanted. Occasionally one of his friends visits: the Old-Green-Grasshopper would pop by and rest in the armchair by the fire with a brandy, or the Ladybug would pop in for a cup of tea and a gossip, or the Centipede to show off a new batch of particularly elegant boots that he had just acquired. Always imaginative and creative, James becomes a successful author, writing his story in James and the Giant Peach - "the book you have just read!"

State of the Union

Word of the Day: Ten

A ten is the rating assigned to a flawless outfits. If an ensemble is sub-seven, it's an ew-fit. Tens usually appear on special occasions, like proms or black tie parties, but it’s not impossible to score a ten on the car ride over to OCD!

What makes an outfit a ten?

State of the Union

In                                                      Out

 GOING WAVY          MAKING WAVES

This fall, forget about causing any BFF rifts or making waves with your clique – you’ve got better things to do. Instead, set aside some time to experiment with your style. While messy breakups and fights are a total “no,” messy (a.k.a. perfectly tousled) hair is ah-dorable.

What’s your fave wavy hair styling product?

Disney's New It Boy Gregg Sulkin

Five years ago, Gregg Sulkin, fierce athlete and rabid fan of England's Arsenal, blew out his knee on the soccer field. "When the doctor said, 'Gregg, you can't play for a year and a half,' I thought he was joking," says the London native. "Soccer was my whole life." But life has a funny way of making other plans, and if the eighteen-year-old hadn't hurt himself, he'd probably never have the chance to play a werewolf opposite Selena Gomez in Wizards of Waverly Place or spend two months in New Zealand filming the new Disney Channel movie Avalon High.

"I didn't ever think about being an actor," he says. "But I fell in love with it when I realized how amazing, difficult, and interesting it is." As it turned out, his first film role combined both of his passions: In 2006's Sixty Six, he played a Bar Mitzvah boy whose party plans are dashed by the 1966 World Cup final.

These days Gregg is focusing on the small screen. He's working on the fourth season of Wizards, and TV movie Avalon High, in which he stars as a reincarnation of an Arthurian-age character opposite Life Unexpected's Britt Robertson, debuts in November. To prep for his role, Gregg learned American football and hit the gym ("to beef up," he says), but due to a last-minute decision, he had only two days to master the biggest challenge--an American accent.

His native lilt will be back in full force when he surprises his parents with a visit after spending almost a year away from home. "I was definitely a mommy's boy growing up. She's going to cry when I show up on their doorstep," Gregg says. "And I probably will too."

Tinker Bell and the Great Fairy Rescue

Years before meeting Wendy and the Lost Boys, Tinker Bell (Mae Whitman) meets nine-year-old Lizzy Griffins (Lauren Mote), a little girl with a steadfast belief in the power of pixie dust and the magical land of fairies. During the fairies' summer visit to the flowering meadows of England, Tinker Bell ends up getting trapped in a small fairy house Lizzy had built so she could catch a fairy. Tinker Bell is brought to Lizzy's house, where the two form a special bond with each other. However, when Lizzy's scientifically-minded father discovers Tinker Bell's presence in his household, he attempts to deliver her to the museum for study. When Tinker Bell's rival Vidia (Pamela Adlon) is taken in her place, Tinker Bell and her fellow fairies (Raven-Symoné, Lucy Liu, Kristin Chenoweth and Angela Bartys) launch a daring rescue to save her. Tinker Bell takes a huge risk, putting her own safety and the future of all fairykind in jeopardy.

Enchanted

Giselle (Amy Adams) lives in Andalasia, an animated fairy tale world with talking animals, characters breaking into song and "happily ever after" a foregone conclusion. Prince Edward (James Marsden), her designated true love saves her from a troll and they plan to get married the next day. Queen Narissa (Susan Sarandon), Edward's evil stepmother, schemes to protect her throne. She throws Giselle into a portal that transports her to a world without "happily ever afters" -- modern (and live-action) New York City.

In New York, Giselle soon meets Robert Philip (Patrick Dempsey), a hardened divorce lawyer. At his daughter (Rachel Covey) Morgan's insistence, he lets Giselle stay at his apartment. Giselle, following the ways of her fairy tale world, recruits urban animals—pigeons, cockroaches and rats to clean his apartment while she makes a gown out of his curtains. Robert's fiancé, Nancy (Idina Menzel), misunderstands the situation and begins to argue with Robert.

He decides to part with Giselle at Central Park, but rejoins her after seeing her give the money he gave her to an old woman. During their walk through Central Park, Giselle questions Robert on how he displays his affection for Nancy and spontaneously starts the musical production number "That's How You Know" with many performers in the park joining her. Giselle helps Robert reconcile with Nancy by sending an apology on Robert's behalf, along with tickets to the King's and Queen's Ball.

Meanwhile, Queen Narissa's henchman Nathaniel (Timothy Spall) follows Edward and Pip, a speaking chipmunk who is friends with Giselle, who have journeyed to New York to save Giselle. They stop at a motel, where Nathaniel questions his relationship with Narissa after watching a soap opera. He sneaks out to give Giselle a poisoned apple. Pip is unable to speak coherently in this world and has a frustrating time alerting the Prince of the minion's intentions. When Nathaniel fails twice to poison Giselle, Narissa becomes infuriated.

As Giselle and Robert spend more time together, Giselle discovers that the real world is much more complicated than she realized, while Robert is affected by her optimism and idealism. Edward continues to look for Giselle and eventually finds her at Robert's apartment. While Edward is eager to take Giselle home, they go on a date around New York at her insistence. To Nancy's chagrin, Giselle and Edward attend the King's and Queen's Ball. After Nancy and Edward pair off to dance, Giselle dances with Robert. During their dance, Giselle realizes that Robert is her true love as he, very softly, sings the lyrics of the song to her. Unbeknownst to them, Narissa has traveled to New York from Andalasia. Under her old hag's disguise, she manages to successfully poison Giselle, but is stopped by Edward before she can escape with Giselle's unconscious body.

A remorseful Nathaniel reveals Narissa's plot, admits his deeds and reveals that the spell of the poison apple has to be broken before midnight or Giselle will die. Robert realizes that only true love's kiss can revive Giselle, but it doesn't work for Edward. Desperate, Edward begs a hesitant Robert to try. Nancy gives her consent and Robert kisses the sleeping Giselle. Giselle awakens to Robert's kiss. Narissa uses the distracting moment to break free. She transforms into a dragon, deciding to write her own ending to the story. Taking Robert hostage, she lures Giselle out the window and up to the top of the Woolworth Building. With help from Pip, Narissa falls from the roof to her death, exploding into magic dust at street level. Giselle catches Robert, and they manage to keep themselves from falling off the roof. Edward and Robert are praised as heroes.

Nancy goes with Edward to Andalasia and marries him. Giselle opens a boutique in New York City, where she is assisted by both humans and animals. Both Nathaniel (in New York) and Pip (in Andalasia) become successful authors. The last scene shows Giselle, Robert, and Morgan playing together and living happily ever after as a family.

State of the Union

Word of the Day: Witty

“Witty over pretty” is one of Kristen’s favorite expressions – and it couldn’t be more aw-nest. Alphas are known as much for their beauty as their wit, which means you’ve got to be on your (perfectly pedicured!) toes at all times. After all, clever conversation is essential when it comes to dominating at OCD.

The PC has a whole bunch – but what are your wittiest expressions?