- Scott Pilgrim vs. The World
- Inception
- How to Train Your Dragon
- RED
- The Social Network
- Alice in Wonderland
- Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1
- Rifftrax: The House on Haunted Hill
- Iron Man 2
- Toy Story 3
- Megamind
- Due Date
- Despicable Me
- The Town
- Killers
- The A-Team
- Leap Year
- Valentine’s Day
- Knight and Day
- Eat Pray Love
- The Last Airbender
- Clash of the Titans
To say this right now: I’m a huge Harry Potter fan. I’ve read all the books more times than any person really should read a book. I have the audio books that I love to listen to on slow work days, and I don’t like any of the movies because they leave out too much from what I loved so much about the books.
My problems with the earlier movies are like this: the first two were filmed and edited rather poorly in my opinion. The child actors did as well as kids can do, but they’re 11 and 12 and now required to hold up entire movies. It didn’t go so well for them. The third movie was better, a bit divergent at times from the original story but better written (for the screen) and the main characters started to do better in their roles. I always had a sense that they were leaving out what made the books fun for me, and that’d be time in the classroom watching them learn, or reading about this thing they did in that one class. I understand the need to take it out of the story for the movie, but it inevitably made the movie less interesting to me. When they said that Book 4 was going to be one movie, I felt like they were going to have to take so much out of it that it wouldn’t be any fun to watch for me. Sadly, I was right. Just the three events of the tournament took up so much time that it left out a lot of the subplots and side characters that I didn’t really enjoy it at all. Book 5 had its own trials because I wasn’t a huge fan of the book to begin with and the movie again had to stay focused to the main plot which made it all one big meh to me again. Book 6′s movie started to get its feet under it, but I’d been so underwhelmed by 4 of the last 5 movies, I didn’t really get into it. I saw it at midnight (probably a mistake, since I fell asleep in it). I went into this movie with such low expectations, I may have actually helped myself enjoy it (not the first time this has happened…).
So, that’s why I was surprised at how much I liked the movie. The reasons for that is two fold. The first is that they took this fairly long book and split it into two movies. This is what I’d hoped they’d be doing since the fourth movie, but they didn’t think it was a sustainable business venture. The second is that there was enough that could be removed from the book to not make me feel like I was missing something. It’s probably more about the available time now since 2.5 hours is enough time to film a good 350-400 pages of any book.
Also, part of reading the series means you know when the “Gotcha” moments of the movie are coming. You know the plot twists and the surprises. It probably really hurts that I knew all of these things were coming. If I’d never read the books, the movies would be a lot more interesting to say the least. That said, Stacy nearly tore my hand off a few times in the movie. She didn’t take my hints early on when I knew scary parts were coming and she got to see things like a giant loud snake leap out from nowhere and things like that. She also has the tendency to curse that makes me laugh. (Sorry, honey, but it’s true. 
)
So, from a Harry Potter fan who doesn’t like the movies…I think it’s worth seeing.
2 Comments
I just came back from watching it. I much preferred this one to the sixth movie, but the third is still my favorite of them. I don’t memorize the books, or anywhere near it. I think I’ve read the 1st book twice, and all the rest once; so the movies generally are good enough for me as far as hitting the highlights of the stories. I do agree that they really needed to start turning them into two part movies at least as far back as the fourth book.
As far as this movie goes, the direction was so much better than HBP and most of the actors did a great job (though I didn’t like Xenophilius or Bellatrix). The one thing I really didn’t like and I felt was really off-putting was the cinematography.
Yeah, the times they used the “shaky cam” technique were really distracting and out of place. I suppose you felt like you were there, but it just seemed unnecessary, a medium shot would have sufficed rather than an over the shoulder running shot.