Better Late Than Never: A Harry Potter denier sits through every movie
Do the Harry Potter films work if you haven't read the books and have ignored the entire cultural discourse around them?
Film Features Harry Potter
Let’s make one thing clear, right away: I do not have an anti-Harry Potter bias. When you’ve missed out on some major, omnipresent cultural force like the Harry Potter movies and books, the assumption tends to be that there’s a knee-jerk, reactionary reason for it—whether elitist, obnoxious, or both, the takeaway from the average person is, “How the flying fuck have you avoided [X]?!” Whether it’s the MCU or Charlie Brown TV specials, admitting your ignorance is a special kind of way to open yourself up to vitriol in the social media age.
The reason for my never giving the Harry Potter movies a chance was more due to just how universally accepted they are, rather than some misguided stance against an especially consumer-friendly franchise. (Okay, with the books, I admit to spitefully digging in my heels.) When I passed on the first few films, my thinking was simply, “These are huge, I’ll get around to them soon enough, maybe on TBS some random hungover Sunday afternoon.” Instead, the movies kept coming out, and I kept… not watching them. “After the next one,” was a common refrain in my brain.
But eventually, the series ended. A decade ago. And in all that time, I still had not managed to rouse myself from Potter-related torpor. Not a theme park, not a new series of films could rouse me from my blissful ignorance. And honestly, once J.K. Rowling revealed herself as a powerfully creepy bigot who apparently thinks imaginary witches are more womanly than actual trans women, I felt justified, as though I had dodged a bullet that would’ve required me to once more retroactively revise my feelings, Joss Whedon-style, about something I could’ve loved.
So when the 20th anniversary of the first film rolled around, I felt the guilt of the cultural critic stirring in my stomach. How had this momentous touchstone of our generation passed me by? How had I continually begged off watching something that had meant so much, to so many, without once capitulating? So it was that I found myself firing up HBO Max and beginning my journey: All the films, from 2001’s Harry Potter And The Sorcerer’s Stone to 2011’s Deathly Hallows—Part 2, would be watched in the course of (roughly) a week.
A few things immediately became clear: One, I was glad to have finally ticked this off the list of missed pop-culture giants. Two, binge-watching these movies was 100% the right move—I can’t even imagine trying to keep track of all the curses, wands, and tertiary characters over the course of a decade. I struggled to remember things that had happened two days prior (or two films prior, rather), so my heart goes out to any non-book readers who stuck with these movies during a ten-year period. Let’s do this.
Harry Potter And The Sorcerer’s Stone (2001)
My first note, of the 25+ pages’ worth of material that I eventually drew on after viewing all eight films, simply says this:
Sorcerer’s Stone: 2 hours and 32 minutes?!?!? Fuck youuuuuuuuuuuuu.
And honestly, after sitting through Harry Potter And The Sorcerer’s Stone, I wouldn’t change a note of that seven-word review. My main takeaway of the first movie in this series? This shit is strictly for kids. While it felt Amblin-esque at times, evoking some of the wonder and magic of Steven Spielberg’s production house (director Chris Columbus may not be a master, but he is occasionally capable of summoning gee-whiz shots of magical fun), it is very broad and silly. I get why little kids would be into it: It’s pure fantasy escapism of the most indulgent kind.
The gist of it, so far as I can tell: Harry Potter is a very special kid because the dark magic lord Voldemort tried to kill him as a child and failed. So now, Harry will go to magic school at Hogwarts, learn to be a wizard, and grow up to eventually defeat Voldemort, right? Just spitballing here, but that sounds like a sensible narrative. Fair enough; after all, Voldemort murdered Harry’s parents and tried to kill him. Damn, Daniel (Radcliffe). It’s all very straightforward, and I can follow it easily, so two points for Gryffindor, there.
Questions: Hermione Granger (Emma Watson) is more or less insufferable, no? I hope she gets hit by the Quidditch ball, or whatever it’s called. The little blond bully (“Draco Malfoy,” apparently) may as well have “asshole” stamped on his forehead—not exactly the subtlest of pint-sized villains. Speaking of which: Does everyone just think House Slytherin is evil? It is very confusing that they would paint one of the four grand wizarding houses as nothing but shitheads, yet here we are.
The basic plot is straightforward, as we watch Harry slowly uncover the danger against him in the form of Defense Against The Dark Arts professor Quirinus Quirell (who is keeping lil’ undeveloped Voldemort safe in the back of his head), but holy hell, the subplots. There are unicorns, mirrors, and a whole host of distracting nonsense that helps drag this movie past the two and a half hour mark, and they mostly bored the shit out of me. If this is what the Harry Potter movies are like, I’ve made a huge mistake.
Harry Potter And The Chamber Of Secrets (2002)
Let’s talk about Quidditch.
Not because I want to, mind you, but because Quidditch sucks so bad, it’s almost stupefying. If I had to guess, I would assume that either J.K. Rowling has never watched sports, and therefore has no understanding of what makes them interesting; or she has watched a lot of sports, fucking hates it, and invented Quidditch as a means of undermining the entire medium by making it look as pointless and ill-conceived as an entire ignorant crusade against basic human rights.
After a lengthy, and deeply boring, introduction in the first movie, we learn the only rule of Quidditch that matters: Namely, the entirety of the game can be rendered null and void by one person who has nothing to do with any of it, and instead just chases a flying gold ball, completely independent of everything else happening. So, yeah: We have to watch yet another game in this film. If you suspect that, once more, the entire match is made pointless by Harry catching the golden snitch, congrats! You get how lame Quidditch is, too. (It’s made worse in this film, with groan-inducing lines like Draco’s “You’ll never catch me, Potter!”)
I wouldn’t have suspected Chris Columbus was capable of making a movie worse than the first Harry Potter film, but that’s exactly what Chamber Of Secrets accomplishes. (Also, the new first note: “2 hours and 40 fucking minutes?! Fuck youuuuuuu.”) The plot—someone is taking out muggle-born students, and Harry has to find the mysterious “chamber of secrets” at Hogwarts and find out what’s really happening (spoiler alert: It’s Voldemort, of course, operating under his given name “Tom Riddle” to lure Harry into a trap)—is once more mostly an excuse for a series of related and semi-related set pieces, only a few of which deliver.
There are so many parts of Chamber Of Secrets that blow, it’s not worth lingering over all of them—the way that, say, a sentient car comes to rescue Harry and Ron in the middle of a giant spider-infested forest, despite that car seeming to hate them in every other scene. The kids who are getting turned to stone left and right are thought to be victims of Harry, but despite this being a literal school of magic, it seems using a truth spell (or potion) is off limits, despite (or maybe because of) how quickly it would resolve this idiotic plot.
Also, can we discuss how Dobby, the House Elf, is the secret villain of this movie? He continually shows up, makes things a million times worse for Harry and impedes any progress, but somehow by the end of the film, we’re supposed to be Team Dobby? Fuck that guy; the only thing worse than Dobby is this movie’s continued use of magic as a catch-all afterthought to fix any problem. When Harry’s dying of his Basilisk wounds, a stupid bird cries on him and suddenly he’s cured, because—and I shit you not, this is the actual line—“Of course! Phoenix tears have healing powers!” What a happy coincidence!
This was a bad movie. I am regretting this project in profound ways.
Harry Potter And The Prisoner Of Azkaban (2004)
Okay, now we’re getting somewhere. This was the first Harry Potter movie to feel like an actual movie, and not like one of those old Wonderful World Of Disney hack jobs that used to run Sunday nights on ABC. Also, it turns out Hermione isn’t insufferable, but rather awesome instead? So far, that’s a much bigger surprise than any of the ostensible plot twists.
Oscar winner Alfonso Cuarón (Roma, Gravity) helmed this one, and it’s immediately obvious that someone with real talent has taken over behind the camera. The opening scene at the Durseley house feels different, with handheld cameras, all intimate and awkwardly close, making newly adolescent Harry seem too large for the space. (Although inflating his awful aunt like a body-horror balloon seems excessive; does she just float away to her death?)
Plus, the plot of Azkaban feels more mature—perhaps Rowling was coming into her own as a writer with this book? There’s an escaped madman named Sirius Black on the loose, and he’s coming for Harry. Or so we’re told—the reversals and fakeouts here all run smoothly and with clever execution, the better to accompany the growing complexity of both the characters and their outsized emotions. By the time Gary Oldman’s Sirius enters the picture (alongside David Thewlis’ excellent professor-but-also-a-werewolf, Remus Lupin—if only there was some clue in his name as to his true nature!), the whole thing feels engaging and rewarding.
Honestly, everything Cuarón does is an improvement. That madcap bus ride Harry takes early on, after running away from home? The Jeunet-meets-Gilliam influence is clear, and fun. The Dementors plaguing Hogwarts are creepy. (Plus, nothing more welcoming to students than an unsettling choral rendition of “Something Wicked This Way Comes” to celebrate their return.) Unfortunately, even Cuarón can’t make Quidditch entertaining. But more importantly…
WHY DID NOBODY TELL ME PRISONER OF AZKABAN IS A TIME TRAVEL MOVIE?!?! That should’ve gone above the title: “Harry Potter And The Awesome Time Travel Nonsense, more like.” Seriously, I am a sucker for time-travel shenanigans, and had I known those were the kind of shenanigans this movie was up to, I would have gotten around to it long ago.
I will say, however, this is also the beginning of the movies’ use of what I like to call “deus ex fill-in-the-blank.” Something completely inexplicable will be thrown in there, and you’re just supposed to roll with it, because magic. Still, whatever; it’s worth it, because these films are finally getting good. And if I’m not mistaken, this is the only one where Voldemort isn’t appearing as a villain during the climax.
Harry Potter And The Goblet Of Fire (2005)
By now, my hastily typed “fuuuuck youuuuuu” in response to seeing the next film’s length as it begins (2 hours 37 minutes, this time) is almost de rigueur. But imagine my elation at this film not beginning with another odious sequence at the Durseleys, but rather at the Weasleys’ house, where we soon see handsome Robert Pattinson joining them for an outing. “This is so fun!” I thought to myself. “It’s different, it’s strange, and they’re going to… wait… the Quidditch World Cup…”
Apparently, even wizards aren’t allowed to escape wearing idiotic novelty hats at sporting events. Revealing this outing to be a stupid Quidditch event was a rotten bait and switch, movie. I started cheering when the Death Eaters attacked and David Tennant turned the sky into a giant skull with a snake coming out of it. Kill that Quidditch, David Tennant! Kill it dead!
While this is arguably the most straightforward of all the films, plot-wise (it’s the Tri-Wizard Tournament, Harry gets magically entered for reasons unknown, and he spends the movie trying to win it while also figuring out who is behind the magical manipulation), it’s also the first time I really felt the seams showing in the story. Condensing a 636-page book into a movie is bound to be a tough ask, and in Goblet Of Fire, the severe editing harms character development.
Ron acts like a complete dick for wholly inexplicable reasons for the first hour. Everyone at school hates Harry because they think he cheated to get into the tournament, but Harry never really speaks up and says, “Um, I don’t want to do this, you assholes?” (And then, just as quickly, they’re all on his side.) The only part the movie really nails is the awkward beginning of sexual attraction and dating among the kids; Harry and Ron are gormless twits when it comes to girls, and it makes the narrative all the richer.
The competition basically allows the film to be structured around the set pieces of the tournament, which makes for a fun progression through the story, ending with the big reveal that Voldemort is reborn and ready to kick some ass (poor Cedric Diggory/Robert Pattinson, you burned too bright for this world). But again, the out-of-nowhere climactic save—in this case, deus ex ghosts of Harry’s loved ones. Still, there’s also Harry-besotted Moaning Myrtle, the scenery-chewing fun of Brendan Gleeson’s Mad-Eye Moody, and even a “no dragons were harmed in the making of this movie” notice during the end credits.
But also, in the “how the hell is this not more widely known” department: The school dance has a goddamned magical post-punk band play?! And along with singer Jarvis Cocker, Radiohead’s Johnny Greenwood and Phil Selway are in the movie, playing in the band?! And the credits showcase a truly terrible song they wrote with Cocker for the film?! I’m going to go ahead and assume they named themselves The Kinky Wizards, after those obnoxious skate punks in High Fidelity.
Harry Potter And The Order Of The Phoenix (2007)
I cannot recommend enough to anyone reading who, like me, has not seen these films yet: binge watch them. I would’ve been completely lost by the time Order Of The Phoenix rolled around, had I been forced to wait two years between films instead of one day. Harry’s PTSD, not to mention the copious references to things only briefly mentioned in earlier films, would have defeated me—much like how Bellatrix Lestrange defeats Sirius Black. (Ya burnt, Sirius!)
This is where these movies start to get really dark, and I am all in. You want the lighthearted nonsense of the first couple films? Please. Those movies are straight clown shoes. This is the good stuff. A worrying parable about the power of conservative tabloid media and how it fosters an environment of fascistic repression in which fear drives otherwise sensible people to support persecution of the most vulnerable in society? It may seem a little ironic in hindsight, given Rowling’s current positions, but it’s rich, meaty material for a teenage wizard movie.
This is the first film to showcase a clear antagonist for almost the entire running time, and Imelda Staunton makes a feast of Dolores Umbridge’s sneering cruelty. You already know things are going to get serious when Harry is transported to the top-secret Order of the Phoenix with Moody’s dire admonition, “Don’t break ranks if one of us is killed,” but to see the steady devolution of Hogwarts into a place of mistrust and fear is something to behold. At least poor Neville, usually the butt of every joke, finally gets a W, locating the Room Of Requirement and joining Dumbledore’s Army.
After Dumbledore is fired and Umbridge takes over (cue the “shit just got real” meme), it’s a nonstop rush to the finish line, and while it doesn’t all hang together smoothly (though the “deus ex friendship” is one of the least out-of-nowhere climactic saves), it’s bleak, and icy, and hard to love, which makes me a fan. Although, perhaps we didn’t need Hagrid to have a mentally challenged monster of a half-brother he keeps chained up in the forest?
Harry Potter And The Half-Blood Prince (2009)
I have questions.
Help me out here, because even bingeing these movies, I believe there are a few plot holes, and not of the “Oy, don’t worry about it, it’s magic!” variety. In general, this is very much an “in between” movie, without a great overarching narrative thread to hold it all together, outside of “Things are progressing toward the end, plus, Dumbledore has to die.” Still, it generally makes sense: Harry finds a magical book formerly owned by the “half-blood prince” that helps him advance, and the kids learn that Voldemort split his soul into seven horcruxes they must now find and destroy. With you so far, nerds.
But here’s the thing: Dumbledore insists that “everything depends upon” uncovering the true memory of what conversation took place between Professor Slughorn (Jim Broadbent) and Tom Riddle long ago. Seems a bit presumptuous to assume that the fate of everything is riding on this one memory from Riddle’s past, Dumbledore, but okay. Harry pulls it off, and learns that Riddle wanted to learn how to create a horcrux. That’s the key to defeating Voldemort! Finding and destroying the horcruxes containing his soul! Great! Glad we finally uncovered the big secret!
Only, immediately after learning this, Harry casts a suspicious eye toward Dumbledore. “That’s where you’ve been going,” he says. “Hunting horcruxes.” And Dumbledore is like, yeah, I have, they’re the key to defeating our enemy. What? If you were already hunting them, Dumbledore—if you already knew that’s what we needed—then why the hell did you make such a production of unlocking a memory that just tells you what you already knew? This is driving me bananas; someone, please explain what I’m missing.
That’s not the only odd moment: After a magic fight where Harry nearly murders Draco, they make a big production of hiding the half-blood prince’s book so that no one can ever find it again. Why? It didn’t seem to have any bearing whatsoever on that fight—at least, none that was effectively explained. This is the kind of thing that makes me almost wish this were a Game Of Thrones-style series, rather than a film franchise; I suspect these connections would be clearer with time to unpack them.
Still, there’s a lot to like in The Half-Blood Prince. Snape becomes a really sympathetic character (at least, to those of us for whom it seems pretty damn obvious that he’s some sort of deep-undercover agent for Dumbledore, which everyone but Harry apparently understands), and there are finally a few moments where Draco doesn’t come across like a one-note cartoon character. Plus, everyone starts hooking up. Hormones-ium Leviosa! Oh, but R.I.P. Dumbledore, I guess. At least his death felt significant, unlike the one at the end of…
Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows: Part 1 (2010)
Fucking Dobby? Really? Don’t get me wrong, this movie works overtime to try and create a far superior impression of the elf than the one left by Chamber Of Secrets. He gets several hero moments during the several minutes of screen time he’s allotted, from freeing everyone to delivering some magical beatdowns on his former masters. But to treat his death as something on par with Dumbledore? This little weirdo who was awful right up until the moment these movies needed him to be cool? Get outta here.
But trying-too-hard death scenes aside, I get why a lot of people consider this to be one of the weaker installments in the series. It’s long, meandering, and almost overwhelmingly downbeat, more depressing road trip than hero’s journey. Yet those elements are precisely what I responded to, as someone who watched the first two films mostly wishing I were anywhere else. Hermione literally erasing the memory of herself from her parents’ lives? That’s hardcore as hell.
This movie does not fuck around. Things are bad, and it wants you to know that. Hell, Mad-Eye Moody dies offscreen, and we just move on. The Ministry Of Magic is overthrown by Voldemort’s henchmen—the equivalent of the January 6 coup attempt succeeding, in other words—and everyone has to continue living their lives as though the world didn’t just collapse. The bad guys win, in a way, throughout this film. Yes, Harry and Hermione (with some help from Ron) eventually figure out how to track down and destroy more of the horcruxes, but it feels, appropriately so, like a fool’s errand. “Maybe we should just stay here, Harry,” Hermione says of one safe place they visit. “Grow old.” A fair point.
But when it does rouse itself from the doldrums (entertaining doldrums, in my opinion), some of its action sequences are among the series’ best. Raiding the Ministry to steal the horcrux Umbridge keeps around her neck is thrilling, and even though I was mostly confused by the visit with Bafilda Bagshot (Hazel Douglas)—she’s an old friend of Dumbledore’s, but is now Voldemort’s snake?—it provided maybe the only effective jump scare in the franchise, and was tense as hell throughout. Maybe that’s why the film worked so well for me: The entire time, you’re waiting for the other shoe to drop in every scene.
The ending was rushed, and treating Dobby’s death like it was on par with any of the long-running characters felt ridiculous, but even when I just had to throw up my hands and hold on for the ride during the climax, it was nervy and compelling. Besides, the long build-up felt apropos for what’s to come.
Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows: Part 2 (2011)
It seems unlikely that it would even be possible to make it through the seven prior films and not have the payoff be at least moderately satisfying. Spending this much time with characters—and watching the actors literally grow up onscreen over the course of a decade—is undeniably affecting. (Just ask Boyhood.) So when I hit play on the last installment of the series, I was primed for some emotional waterworks.
Surprisingly, I mostly didn’t get them. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t enjoy Part 2—far from it. From the raid on Gringotts Bank to the Assault On Precinct 13 showdown at Hogwarts, where Voldemort and his minions do their best to level the place, the movie begins at a frenzied pace and almost never lets up until Voldemort crumbles into ash. And my boy Neville? Full circle hero time! He delivers the blow that basically wins the day; he should be getting monuments in his image, or at least a statue of equal or lesser value to Harry Potter’s.
Plus, I was glad the horcrux issue was resolved. The previous two movies both messed up the numbers—several times I would shout at the screen, “What do you mean, only three left? You’ve only found three! Who taught you math?” But learning that Harry himself was a horcrux made up for some of that confusion. (Some.) And while I tend to roll my eyes at “You’re dead if you want to be, just step into the light” scenes—which only ever exist so the hero can say, “No thanks, my work here isn’t done”—at least Spirit Dumbledore got to be playful.
And then it ends. With a snake beheading and wands unleashing CGI light shows, as it should be. (Bellatrix being killed by Ron’s mom was unexpected.) By the time that “20 years later” epilogue tried to extract some tears, I was mostly just satisfied; so much of those first two movies, along with the current behavior of Rowling, made me worry this wouldn’t be fun. Instead, I once again confronted the old “50 million Elvis fans can’t be wrong” principle, an Occam’s Razor in which, when something is fiercely beloved by tons of people, there’s usually a reason.
Harry Potter isn’t just escapist fantasy nonsense; it’s a deeply realized world that uses its stories to say something profound about How We Live Now, and what it means to be a good person in a bad world. Those are lessons that endure, and immersing yourself in a wondrous (and yes, escapist) world of magic and dreams—no matter how god-awfully cornball that sounds—is an ideal delivery systems for such concepts, especially when you’re a kid just trying to figure out who you are. As long as you’re not Draco; last-second turn toward the light aside, that dude sucks.
310 Comments
I’m going to go ahead and assume they named themselves The Kinky WizardsNope, The Weird Sisters, which lead to a $40m lawsuit by a band called The Wyrd Sisters. It wasn’t successful.
The lawsuit where Shakespeare tried to sue them both was pretty entertaining though.
Didn’t that dude kill all the lawyers?
I always figured Shakespeare was a Ravenclaw.
Any law case that requires necromancy is pretty choice to be honest.
Is there some kind of organized av club ad campaign? That’s two articles in a week about a book series that ended over a decade ago/movie series that ended slightly less than a decade ago.
Two articles? They’ve been doing scads of these for the last couple of weeks (because it’s about 20 years since the first movie came out). It’s a whole thing.
I do strongly suspect money is involved, given how precisely zero other outlets seem to give a shit about said anniversary.
Halloween is over & it’s too early for Christmas articles, gotta write about something.
That would actually suggest money ISN’T involved. A coordinated PR campaign isn’t going to be like “Hey, let’s get reviewers and pop culture sites on this for the anniversary!”
“Cool, I’ll line up some…”
“No no, just The AVClub. No one else. I really want our campaign to reach only a specific niche audience that’s guaranteed to have a disproportionate number of skeptics and people who don’t like Rowling because, well, you know…”“Bigot?”“Right, bigot.”“But maybe a broader…”
“No. I want this as ineffective as possible.”
…and be sure that the first line of a feature article is a “Fuuuuck Yooouuuu” to the movie! Hell, let’s do that part twice!
On the bright side, at least it’s forced a pop culture website to write more articles about actual pop culture, and less about what people on Twitter are HAPPY or MAD about today.
A-freaking-men. This is exactly what people come to this site to do – read about and debate pop culture. And insult each other and the site, of course, but that’s a by-product.
I’m not great at throwing out appropriate Simpsons quotes for any situation, but I love that sweet Laurel Canyon sound.
So you didn’t read the introduction, where it mentions the whole “20th anniversary of the first film” thing, huh.
I work for an animation company. It’s been non stop potter for the last 5 years.
Don’t forget all the articles chastising JK Rowling for her terrible views.
To make people click and view.
That was fun to read. I’m not a Harry Potter superfan; I read each of the books once, and that was enough, but I’ll watch the movies when I come across them on cable, and I’ve been introducing my kids to them on family movie night. I found myself agreeing with pretty much every point in this piece, except I thought the Chris Columbus-directed ones weren’t that bad (although they’re certainly the weakest in the series). I choose not to blame Columbus because he signed on to adapt the weakest books in the series, the ones most designed for little’uns. For me, the rubber starts to hit the road in Azkaban—both book and film—as the tone starts to get more serious (no pun intended).
I think what made Harry Potter so widely beloved was how the writing and stories aged along with the protagonists. Most of the bazillion fantasy series pitched at the pre-teen set stay EXACTLY at that level. Harry Potter, on the other hand, aged in real-time along with the protagonists, so if you were 11 when you read Sorcerer’s Stone, the characters and stories matured along with you through your teen years. By the time you hit adulthood it feels like these characters and stories are part of your life.
This has always been my take. It’s a read as you grow series. Which is why older people generally find Azkaban onward more engaging. (I tell people to start there if reading just for sanity, and then go back if completists).
Like the first two novels, the first two movies are basically children’s stories. Simple, linear, easy to follow, some danger but not too much to be really frightening. I’d be surprised if any adult viewing them for the first time would think those two are anywhere but near the bottom.
In particular, through Goblet, the books have a large dose of “mystery stories for people who haven’t read a lot of mysteries”. Which is fine, because the audience hasn’t.
Very good point. A lot of sleuthing throughout the series, really.
For reasons, I read chamber before stone, when I was about… 21? I picked it up at 7-11. At the time I *think* Goblet had just come out. Order was released arond a year later and I was excited.I remember distinctly thinking “this is very Roald Dahl.” The first two books have that whimsy. Child in a bad situation with terrible relatives? Roald Dahl all over!
That’s actually not a bad comparison. Dahl knew exactly where the danger line was for stories involving children.
I had huge James and the giant peach vibes
[T]he assumption tends to be that there’s a knee-jerk, reactionary reason for it—whether elitist, obnoxious, or both… Whether it’s the MCU or Charlie Brown TV specials, admitting your
ignorance is a special kind of way to open yourself up to vitriol in the
social media age.
You know, it’s a photo finish between people like that and people who say things like, “The critics hated Movie X, and lots of people saw and like Movie X, so why should anybody let critics tell them what movies to watch?” who make me most want to put my fist through the nearest wall.Put it slightly differently: When I was younger I went through a phase where I was damn near obsessed with the Beatles. As I’ve gotten older my enthusiasm for their music has tempered significantly, but I still really admire and enjoy listening to a lot of it. I’ve also met many people that I really respect, particularly with regard to their taste in music, who also roll their eyes at the very mention of the Beatles. I don’t feel the need to subject them to a marathon listening session of all 13 albums. It’s just not their thing. I get it.
Look, we all turn to different things for entertainment. There are probably a lot of movies, or books, or bands that I’ve really enjoyed that you probably think you wouldn’t enjoy, but you actually might if you gave them the chance. If you want to, I’m happy to tell you about them and how to get into them. But I’m not vain or egotistical enough to perceive it as a personal slight if you really don’t want to.
The Beatles are an interesting example of this phenomenon. I grew up with neither of my parents being fans, so I generally counted myself as someone who didn’t know much about the Beatles and wasn’t all that curious. Decades later, one of my friends bought me the big box set as a birthday present. The biggest surprise for me was how many of the songs I already knew, and just didn’t associate them with the Beatles because I’d just not known or had heard them first as cover songs by other bands (so I grew up thinking Got to Get You Into My Life was an Earth Wind & Fire song, for example).I guess the point isn’t so much that you should force recommendations on anyone who rolls their eyes, it’s more that when some things reach a certain level of pop culture ubiquity, it almost takes active resistance to remain truly ignorant of them, and people who boast their ignorance are often trying to prove a point. In my case, I was pretty ignorant of Harry Potter at the height of its popularity—I went with a friend who was a fan of the books to see the first movie, and that movie sucked hard enough that my reaction was “Um, that’s nice, but not anything I’m interested in reading.” I never would’ve had anything to do with the series after that, except I had kids, who when they got old enough wanted to read the books, see the movies, and hear the audiobooks on car rides.
You have to be really perverse not to like the Beatles – in my opinion the only pop culture GOAT to have achieved that status whilst also being (IMHO) under-rated.
It makes me unreasonably happy to read what both of you said about the Beatles – I’ve been telling people for years that the Beatles are actually somewhat underrated and queue the eye rolls haha. I’m totally ‘that guy’ you speak of, I try not to be but its hard. Work in progress! Anyway thanks for making me feel a little less crazy
I (can) hear you Clem Fandango!I always point people towards (cue link being Kinja’d) https://hyperscapes.com/quotes-about-the-beatles/
*cue
Maybe there was a long line of people waiting to the roll their eyes…
Q*(Lawrence)
Yes, the Beatles played for 250 days in Hamburg 4 to 5 hours a night. You get to know your instrument, your voice and your fellows pretty well when you do something that long. If they were normal guys, they would have burnt out. I read the books as an adult. I was entranced with the creativity. I still watch the movies occasionally.
That would be the Beatles with Pete Best, not Ringo Starr. Ringo only played with them in Hamburg for two months after he joined the group in 1962. Ringo did play Hamburg as a member of another group, Rory Storm and the Hurricanes. It was him filling in for Best one night that gave John, Paul & George the idea to replace Best with Ringo.
Awesome. Thanks for the update! I read somewhere that Pete Best became very popular and claimed this as the reason for his firing. But it was George Martin who actually asked Epstein to can him.
If Best said that it’s a bit of wishful thinking on his part. His looks did play a part but it was only one factor and it wasn’t so much that the original three Beatles (Best didn’t join them until 1960) were jealous as that they considered the entire band as one unit. Best’s looks made him stand out individually*. A bigger factor was that Best just didn’t fit in with the group zeitgeist. Ringo did. Probably the biggest factor however was his drumming style, which, again, didn’t fit with what the other three envisioned for the group. When Ringo sat in for Best in Hamburg, John, Paul and George realized both his style and his personality fit the group. Martin’s feedback on Best probably did precipitate Best’s firing, but the decision was made by the three original Beatles. Martin was actually surprised when Ringo showed up in Best’s place for a recording session. *Best’s looks did cause his to stand out from the other Beatles, making him hugely popular despite the fact that he was the least talented member of the band. When he was fired the new Fab Four were met with chants of “Pete forever, Ringo never.” Yet Pete’s firing did have the desired effect the original Beatles wanted. Popularity was pretty much equally divided among the four, and they were unquestionably seen as a unit, but an extraordinary one. To really understand it you just had to be there for all the Beatlemania. Which, as a teenage girl, I was.
Maybe more recently, but for most of my lifetime they have been consistently ranked #1 in any poll of most important/influential rock bands. And it’s hard to argue with that, even if you like other bands better they pretty much all owe something to the Beatles (and Kinks, but that’s a different discussion).
They have always (and probably will always) be ranked at number one. My point was that they were even better than the people who rank them as number one even realise.
Unless you’re referring to George Martin specifically, no, they’re not actually better than their biggest fans realize. That’s just stupid.
I only recently came across this idea that the Beatles are somehow “underrated,” and it really struck a chord with me. Because, while I agree, as some say here, that they’ve long been regarded as THE BEST!!!, I also tend to agree that most people who love their tunes – or even tolerate them – don’t actually get what they actually achieved as a live and, mostly, studio band in the 1960s when tech was so basic. Yeah, I can be that guy.Also, though, right there with you on the Kinks. How many genres did they invent?
I’ve always considered them the unsung heroes of rock & roll. They weren’t as pretty as the Beatles, and didn’t go as big as the Stones or Who, so seemingly were also-rans across both eras in terms of popularity.
You apparently don’t get it either, since you’re another one of those people who give the boys in the band credit for the work George Martin (among others) did.
They were hugely successful and inspired a million clones, but they weren’t doing anything in the studio other innovative bands – e.g., Jimi Hendrix, The Moody Blues, The Beach Boys – weren’t doing. I also feel this way when I hear people talk about Apple as innovative. Now the Kinks are totally under-rated.
A lot of the studio practices and tools that the bands you mention would take advantage of were first used, developed, put into practice, etc. by the Beatles, of course with George Martin and Geoff Emerick. Like, Are You Experienced and Days of Future Passed didn’t even come out until after the Beatles had been experimenting in studio for several years. And of course Brian Wilson has spoken repeatedly about the influence of Rubber Soul and Revolver on the evolution of The Beach Boys’ sound. Ian McDonald’s Revolution in the Head is a good primer one what they were doing in the studio from even early in their career.McCartney does mention in the recent 3-2-1 series how the Kinks’ early hard sound was a big influence on their efforts to add more distortion and try for a harder guitar sound.
McCartney has also mentioned the influence of the Beach Boys production.
Also, the Beatles are who are remembered, most likely because of their song-writing. Other bands were doing dimilar things in the studio contemporaneously. History has a way of only remembering the winners.
It’s funny, because you can’t REALLY say they’re underrated when they’re, frankly, the most successful and transformative band in modern history. But it does kind of feel like it today, when we’re a few generations removed from their success and it’s easy to ignorantly write them off as some old band that had a few hits and isn’t especially relevant today. I’m sure there’s a rebellious “cool” factor to scoffing at something almost universally beloved too, but you’d be hard-pressed to find any band or artist since with as many bonafide great songs as they have, and it’s undeniable that they completely transformed the recording industry.
One of the quotes on the page PF77 linked is, “I really do think the Beatles are responsible for the fall of communism.” You can say they’re underrated in that sense, not getting credit for changing not only music, but the entire world.
George Martin. The Beatles played music. George Martin transformed the recording industry.
Underrated?! On what planet? They existed for like 8 years and people have talked about how they’re the greatest for my whole fucking life. They’re an amazing band but I don’t care if I ever hear about them again, ever.
They’re under-rated because even most of the people that recognise they are the greatest band ever, don’t really know why. The level of invention in their music is off the chart. And they progressed from “She Loves You” to “Tomorrow Never Knows” in just three years, and took their fans with them on that journey. That just does not happen.
I was 13 when the Beatles came to America in 1964. The best way I can describe them is they weren’t just always ahead of the curve, they invented being ahead of the curve. No one could keep up with them. They’d put out an album that was miles ahead of anyone, and then turn around and put out another album that was miles ahead of themselves. They were their only competition. They were magic.
They were part of the Zeitgeist. I believe you ignore the best of their contemporaries.
Yeah, I mean it’s one thing to not like the Beatles in the sense that “I don’t have any of their albums or CD’s” but I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who actively didn’t like the Beatles. At worst, just take ‘em or leave ‘em attitude.
My first boyfriend couldn’t stand them. That should have been a sign.
The Beatles are anything but under-rated. And I say that as an owner of both the Mono and Stereo box sets.
I’ve been looking for years for an old Onion opinion article entitled (and I’m paraphrasing here) “Oh My God, I Can’t Believe You Haven’t Seen Every Movie Ever Made!”, just because a clip of that headline would be very helpful, in the style of “Heartbreaking: The Worst Person You Know Just Made a Great Point”, in replying to people who CANNOT believe that I just got around to seeing Catch Me If You Can or Videodrome this year.
I absolutely CANNOT BELIEVE that someone has WAITED UNTIL NOW to see one of MY FAVORITE MOVIES EVER MADE, the incredible mindbender that is VIDEODROME!!! What were you THINKING all these years?!?!?(I have never seen Catch Me If You Can.)
(You should, it’s a really fun yet unexpectedly moving film and probably the best casting of Leo’s life)
It’s on the list, for sure!
Yeah, it was pretty kickass!
Especially whatever you may think of James Woods now does not tarnish the GREATNESS OF VIDEODROME.
He was a great actor who went insane at some point.
Closest I could find:https://www.theonion.com/area-girlfriend-still-hasnt-seen-apocalypse-now-1819565513
I did see that one, but thanks! : )
Wait – is Catch Me If You Can considered some sort of hidden gem now? I vaguely remember enjoying it a long time ago. But I can’t imagine anyone giving you shit for not having seen it.
Yeah, apparently! I mean it ruled, so I get it, but whatever.
“It’s not that I have anything AGAINST it. It’s just that, what I have AGAINST it is…”. That’s pretty bad. But the actual explication, of “1. I’ve always planned to, and 2. it got so big!!” is quite reasonable. And all that’s necessary, before diving in, if that – The article isn’t “WHY I MISSED HARRY POTTER!!”. It’s “I’m watching Harry Potter now”.I do kind of sympathize though with the background to the pre-emptory defense, that people get SO UPSET about your opinion sometimes – ALL the people. I hate “Star Wars”. Fucking hate it. Hate it. Always have (well, hated once it REALLY started to become a never-dying…thing. I was indifferent in general before that, it just didn’t work for me). But I learned to just keep that opinion to myself, because people just got so upset and even angry about it. Why? Why do they care, about my not liking it?? And, really, it was a good lesson to me – not everything is worth the trouble it takes to engage about with others. And, really, who cared about my opinion?? Really, just me. I actually never heard Beatles music until I was in my thirties, other than as incidental music here and there. I certainly never LISTENED to it until I was in my thirties, when they blew my mind. “I don’t care for them” is cool, though I’ve more often heard “I think they’re overrated”, which is honestly stupid to me, because it’s an opinion about other people’s opinions. Who cares if you don’t like what other people think about something? Weird.
Even weirder is when people know you like something they don’t, and you say you like/love it, and they still blithely go on and on about how awful it is, and how much they hate it. This happens spontaneously too, in conversation. It’s like a phenomenon, I’ve experienced more than once, with both “Blade Runner” and country music. Maybe it’s ONLY these two things! Man, people really can go into a zone about hating “Blade Runner” and country music. It happened recently to me at a get-together, and it goes like this:“You know, I’ve never liked/gotten […]”. “I actually love […]”. “Oh, I just think it’s [5 minutes of monologued vitriol]”. Gentle reminder of: “It’s one of my favorite things, I really love it”. [vitriol continues unabated for more minutes].When I said I loved it, the first time, and the vitriol continued, I turned to my bf and murmured “Watch this: they’re going to talk about how much they hate […] now, for a long time. It’s so weird.”
That’s someone who needs a blog.
Not judging, but earnestly interested … how did you not actually hear Beatles music for 30+ years?
Since you asked so nice, I won’t make you wait for my blog. I made sure to say I’d heard various songs as incidental music here and there (like “Shake It Up, Baby” in “Ferris Buehler’s Day Off”), but not ever listened to it. And it wasn’t played as incidental music much, because it was rarely licensed as such, right? Nothing but country music and country music radio until I was 10, in 1976. And we didn’t have a television until then. My parents didn’t listen to it, so it just wasn’t “there” for me, though I definitely had heard of them. I didn’t listen to classic rock stations on the radio. So when I eventually started seeking to widen my musical horizons, it was 99% new to me. Except that its influence on so much which came after was astonishingly apparent. I wouldn’t shut up about the white album, in 2001 or so.
The name of the song is “Twist and Shout.”
I worked with a guy who’s in his early 30’s and the whole Harry Potter thing clearly made a big impression on him. My take on it all was that I saw the movies, sure…read the first book, once, it’s fine, and he blanched as if I’d cast withering judgment on his fandom or something.
“Man, I’m 47. You ask me about Star Wars, I’ve got opinions. Ask me about Harry Potter, I still don’t understand what Voldemort wanted.”
“Man, I’m 47. You ask me about Star Wars, I’ve got opinions. Ask me about Harry Potter, I still don’t understand what Voldemort wanted.”
That’s a little weird, since the Emperor and Voldemort basically wanted the same things. You don’t have to zoom out too far before most major villains generally start looking alike.
Not to mention that Star Wars (OT) and Harry Potter are both The Hero’s Journey and imo, while there are distinct differences, aspects of Harry’s story parallels Luke’s a bit too closely to qualify as an independent Hero’s Journey.
This to me highlights whats actually so great about music and movies and why I loathe snobs of both sorts in general, because we live in this era where things don’t really go away younger people can just re-discover how great things from the past are. As a kid who was a teen in the early aughts getting into folk music from the 60’s and synth-pop from the 80’s was sooooo fun and you feel a weird connection to the music that like is kinda transcendent. I also went through a Cary Grant crush phase that put me onto classic movies. So I dunno I’m never gonna get tired reading people who never were into Harry Potter basically watch it and come up with the same funny conclusions most of us reached while watching them originally. It’s a good time all around.
it still bothers me when people like you mention act like the beatles somehow weren’t… like, good songwriters, innovators, etc? doesn’t have to be your speed but there is this movement among some music snobs to outright dismiss them. but y’know, slather love on led theftelin.
The Beatles were great songwriters (well three of them were). They did not change music, however.
That’s a very good comparison. Personally The Beatles and Harry Potter are both things I’ve listened/read but they aren’t for me. I also understand how important they are to others, and I’m glad they exist. Now let 14 year old me talk to you about Lord of the Rings and Led Zeppelin…
Great comparison. Now I have listened to most of the Beatles stuff and I have read some and watched most of the Harry potter franchise. I can recognise that they are well crafted works that bring great joy to people and I’m glad they exist. I also don’t get the same from them. It’s not lack of understanding, nor am I eyerolling. Some things are just not for me. Now if you want to talk to 14 year old me about Lord of the Rings and Led Zeppelin…
I scrolled through tiresome, pedestrian “Harry Potter and the Half-assed Jokes” for what certainly seemed like more than 2 hours and more than any HP movie amount of minutes?Fuuuck Yooou, Mr. McLevy.At least I’m well-warned now.
This was a good article.But I’m sorry to inform you, Alex, most of the rest of us have known that Jarvis Cocker was a wizard for decades now.
My take on it was that originally quidditch wasn’t supposed to be thought about as a real game, it was just supposed to be a joke about the impenetrability of cricket rules. I expect Rowling was astonished to hear people were playing it in swimming pools, etc.
The rules of cricket are quite straightforward and easy to pick up. The terminology of cricket is where it starts to lose people. Americans in particular have issues with the names of the fielding positions, especially pertaining to leg or off side.
I hear you on the terminology but are the rules really straightforward or just straightforward if you grew up with them? I ask because I think American baseball is straightforward but my Euro-born husband finds it impenetrable.
I enjoyed all the films at the time they came out (with the exception of a slight downer on DH1 which was just a bit, dull). I think what helped is the age of my kids. I think watching films with your kids helps you lean into the sense of wonder, whilst ignoring the plot holes. And what worked well about both the books (most of which I haven’t read, but my kids have) and the films is that they grew up with their audience. The Philosopher’s Stone is a fun kid’s book/movie, but by DH2 the whole thing has become very dark and complex.As for Rowling, I think it’s (relatively) important to remember her reputation as a liberal spokesperson who was often brilliant on twitter, destroying the reactionary elements of society, until she suddenly revealed her massive blind spot on the trans community. That’s not to excuse her – in fact it makes her views all the more depressing – but it does help explain why people remain attached to her work, despite her efforts to destroy their legacy.
There were definitely some warning signs in the books—the rampant fatphobia, the whole “house elves love to be slaves!” thing—that crop up in hindsight, but yeah, Rowling was generally perceived as “one of the good ones.” Which made the “oh by the way, transwomen are faking it so they can assault me in the bathroom” heel turn all the more jarring.
The goblins who run Gringotts are basically every awful stereotype about Jews.
I’d always assumed the connection was from the phrase “gnomes of Zurich” and that the Jewish characterisation was down to the film-makers.
I’d always assumed the connection was from the phrase “gnomes of Zurich” and that the Jewish characterisation was down to the film-makers.Except for the fact she’s probably one of the most well known cases of author retaining massive creative control out there.The amount of benefit of doubt people want to give her by blaming the shit parts of the films and the play on other people as though she wasn’t involved even when it’s completely in her pattern of behaviour continues to make me laugh.
You may have a point.
She’s exactly the repugnant person I’d expect from a bourgie lib.
Whereas you sound delightful.
ciViLitY
As for Rowling, I think it’s (relatively) important to remember her reputation as a liberal spokesperson who was often brilliant on twitter, destroying the reactionary elements of society, until she suddenly revealed her massive blind spot on the trans community.Except that’s complete bollocks.She was anti-Trump and anti-Brexit and from that the kids of Twitter deemed her to be socially liberal. In reality her writing is extremely socially conservative in intended message if you look, with racial stereotyping, negative depictions of native cultures, obvious uncomfortableness with LGBT+ people, and deference to authority being the norm.It was no surprise to many frankly that she also had issues with trans people.
I take your point, and I expect a lot of the “socially conservative” comes from her upbringing – but what I’m trying to say is she doesn’t come across to me as an irredeemably evil person, but one who, through a dangerous combination of ignorance and stubbornness, has come to represent some pretty evil views about trans people (along with some lazy and ignorant, but generally, I think, non-malicious, stereotyping in her work).
She’s rubbished Native American culture as ‘dumb natives didn’t understand magic’ and claims two major characters are gay yet has in zero way after, what, a decade and a half still not actually acknowledged that in any of the text or films that are supposedly centred on these two characters.She’s socially conservative with extremely shitty views. She just pretends to be someone else to make a profit.
uggggggggggh yeah the history of magic in the USA is fucking bewilderingly terrible and tone deaf. I went through the houses on the pottermore site and was like… how in the blue hell did this make it past ANYBODY?
I don’t disagree with your overall opinion on Rowling at all, but the subtext in the Dumbledore/Grindelwald relationship felt obvious to me when reading it on release. So on that claim I do give her the benefit of the doubt, but agree that if they continue the Fantastic Beast films, they really need to not chicken out and make that subtext into full text.
Before you go too far with the “Except that’s complete bollocks,” I knew members of the LGBTQIA+ community that were completely pro-Rowling until she revealed her problem with trans-rights.She was a runner up for Time’s Person of the Year in 2007. She got a human rights award in 2019 from the Robert F Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights. She gave the thing back in 2020 after Kerry Kennedy said that her Trans-rights stance was “inconsistent with the fundamental beliefs and values” of the RFK Human Rights organization and of RFK personally.So, lots of people were fooled.
Lol.
There’s a huge white, Brit, colonialist mindset about her writing.
As someone who avoids social media and is almost certainly happier for it, I’ve had no trouble separating author and art. I didn’t like the books or movies more because of Rowling’s political views, and so that wasn’t available to be taken from me now.
But co-sign completely on the age of your kids being a key ingredient. My parents started giving them to my oldest when he was about 10, which he subsequently passed on to his two younger siblings when they were about the same age. They’ve all now read the series probably five times apiece. It’s what got them into tackling longer works for sure. Seeing the movies with him was a family experience, even if the first few were at home as we caught up with the series.
I’m attached to Harry Potter but I am most definitely not attached to Rowling. And there were signs the JK wasn’t who she appeared to be long before she revealed herself as a TERF. Her history of magic in the U.S. was a major red flag, and there were others before that.
I think gender is just a sore spot for her. Her publisher wouldn’t let her publish as Joanne Rowling because they didn’t think kids would want books by a woman. So her life’s masterwork isn’t even published under her own name, because her publisher thought her gender was a liability. It doesn’t excuse her views but I can see how she could have a twisted view of womanhood.
If you were already hunting them, Dumbledore—if you already knew that’s what we needed—then why the hell did you make such a production of unlocking a memory that just tells you what you already knew? This is driving me bananas; someone, please explain what I’m missing.Half-Blood Prince is one of the movies that eliminates big chunks of the book, chunks which the series then assumes you know in the movies that follow. However, none of that affects the Harry/Slughorn plotline, which is all kinds of stupid. The only piece of information in Slughorn’s memory that Dumbledore didn’t already have is the part where teen Voldemort says “Isn’t seven the most powerfully magical number?” because that lets him and Harry know how many horcruxes they’re hunting for (supposedly, no one else had ever thought to make more than one). Just from that one off-handed reference in that one conversation decades ago, they take it as gospel that Voldy made seven of them prior to getting wrecked by infant Harry Potter. Part of the confusion is that for drama’s sake, Rowling has Dumbledore not tell Harry what a horcrux is all story long, even though he knows, and Harry never asks Dumbledore…because he’s stupid, I guess? Weirdly, the interaction between Harry and Slughorn works, and Harry’s procrastination with Dumbledore makes sense to anyone who’s left a semester-long project until the last minute, but the big reveal is almost entirely for the audience’s benefit, not the characters’.
Voldemort deserved to die for the horcrux thing alone. Dude had the foresight to store his soul in various magical artifacts, but instead of burying them in the side of the mountain, or enchanting an old tin can and letting it sink to the bottom of the sea, he instead chose A) objects of enormous, easily guess-able personal significance, that he B) just kind of left around without even bothering to check up on. We’re well past hubris and into bizarrely careless territory here.
Characterization is generally Rowling’s strength more than is fantasy worldbuilding (the world is fun, but does not stand up to close scrutiny of its internal logic the way Wheel of Time, Lord of the Rings, or any Brandon Sanderson books do).That said, Voldemort is painfully inconsistent and it shows in the Horcrux selection. While the mysteries or sleight of hand around some characters (Snape, Dumbledore, The Maurauders) are there because of the limitations of the viewpoint characters setting up reveals later for Voldemort it never quite shakes out. Is he The Nightmare Brilliant Magical Fascist? Is he the Manson style unhinged but charismatic puppet master? Or is he Magical Hitler, exploiting the right place and the right time but with obsessions and blindspots that are his ultimate undoing? He’s each at various times and there’s never a clear picture.
I’ve always gone with Magical Hitler. His arrogance breeds blind spots that are ultimately his undoing. I’m sure he thought he was being very clever with his selection of horcruxes, and none of those lesser intellects would ever figure them all out.
Voldemort’s a bad fit for Magic Hitler, because Voldemort’s actually content to be controlling things from the shadows rather than being in the spotlight. Grindewald’s more in tune with that, in that he wants to throw rallies and appeal directly and openly to the populace, rather than secretly being in charge and referring to him by name being a taboo.
I don’t know about that. We don’t see how he behaved prior to nearly being killed by his own curse when trying to murder baby Harry, but he sure comes off like a would-be messiah by the end of Deathly Hallows 2.
We know that during the the first war, he was all about secrecy and hiding. That’s why the Death Eaters wore masks, and why so many of his followers got away with saying that they’d had a mind control spell put on them. In Deathly Hallows, even when he takes over the government he operates through a figurehead and the fact that he’s in control isn’t publicized. It’s just a different model of dictatorship from the Nazis.Also, when Voldemort does his would-be messiah thing in DH2, it’s kinda hilariously inept. In the middle of it, Fiennes gives Draco Malfoy the world’s most awkward hug, which just screams that he’s not a natural at politics.
Ha, yeah Voldemort is definitely not much of a hugger.
Well there’s a line in one of the books about how the child born of a love spell is twisted and doesn’t have the ability to love.
One of my favourite fantasy writers, Harry Connolly, has a character in a book say, “Love potions are rape magic.” And I liked that clear indictment of what love potions are far better than Rowling deciding that the real problem with love potions is you get a fucked-up kid. (As if children are booby-prizes to punish bad people, rather than separate humans trying to navigate their own life, undeserving of the burdens of their parent’s crimes.)
I was a big fan of the series, but there are some highly icky things woven into it, and that line was one of them.
The bottom half of the series really does feel different then the middle parts and I think it’s because she was trying to get it to work with the ending she already pre-planned instead of adjusting to the tone that developed in writing which is also why the epilogue is such a WTF moment to.
Voldemort is written pretty intentionally as very dramatic and harmfully egotistical. I mean, the kind of person who becomes a cult leader and mass murderer over the idea of wizard bloodlines probably isn’t going to be too practical, smart, and stable in other parts of his life either.Its like murderers who hold keepsakes that are used as evidence against them or thieves who brag and get caught because gossip spreads. The kinds of people willing to be criminals are damaged people to begin with so its not too weird to also see them be bad at the actual crime they are doing as well.Voldemort was too emotionally flawed to pull off his plan of taking over the wizarding world. A bit how Trump couldn’t get re-elected. You can try every dirty trick but if your ego, awfulness, and toxic brand are holding you back, you just won’t be able to overcome your ultimately sabotaging nature.Also playing what-if with the HP series doesn’t go to good places. The bigger what-if isn’t Horcruxes but stuff like why didn’t the death eaters just use guns on Harry when he was summering at the Dursley’s every year? Or hire a hitman? I think its best to read these books as this wonderful fantasy and not to think too deeply about them when it comes to how to actually murder Harry Potter because it would have been trivially easy to do so with the use of non-magic weapons.
That’s actually a character beat for Voldy. He’s so high on his own supply that could never even consider putting his soul in some random object because that would be beneath what he considers to be the Greatest Wizard That ever Lived.
The one of them that’s most stupid is the “clever” hiding place at Hogwarts that Voldemort explicitly believes only he has ever discovered, even though it’s literally filled with stuff people have thrown away there over the centuries. So if he’s the only one who knows about the Room of Requirement, or even just that aspect of it, how did the rest of the discarded/hidden stuff get there? Indeed, he should know that Draco knows all about it, because his people use his hiding place to sneak into the school in HBP. People can handwave the rest of the horcruxes as him being egotistical or overconfident, but that’s plain stupid.
Reminds me of the old “Rules for Evil Overlords” list: http://www.eviloverlord.com/lists/overlord.htmlThe artifact which is the source of my power will not be kept on the Mountain of Despair beyond the River of Fire guarded by the Dragons of Eternity. It will be in my safe-deposit box. The same applies to the object which is my one weakness.
The whole series isn’t super well written but it was dropped on an American public that hadn’t read much of anything for at least 20 years so people friggen loved it. The best thing it had going for it was that it was easily digestible pop fantasy. Even the thickest books in the series can be read in an afternoon or so.
I like that it got people back into reading but it’s not nearly as good as a lot of people think it is.
Your “or so” is doing a lot of heavy lifting there for books that can exceed 700 pages.
I think the longest it took me to read one was 7 hours, so yeah a bit longer than an afternoon. They’re super light reading that doesn’t give you any reason to pause for thinking or digestion.
… nah
…yah?Not sure what you mean, do you think I’m lying for some reason? These are books with simple sentences and concepts printed in large font, not Moby Dick
Oh, sure, cos I was comparing them to fucking Melville. I don’t think they are as pap or meh as you want it to be, and while the books have issues, they are fairly well-written and fun to read. I think you’re attempting to “prove” a point beyond “I didn’t really like them” with “facts.” Except Phoenix. That book is in badly need of all the editing and a chop of 200 pages. I’ll die on that hill, that book is fucking POORLY written. *all of Harry’s lines of dialogue for first 200 pages or so*“WHY DIDN’T YOU TELL ME ANYTHING AND YOU AND ANGRY AND LOUD NOISES AND ALL CAPS AND NOBODY CALLING ME OUT ON MY GODDAMN SHIT”
You’re not wrong about Phoenix. In fact, imo, Phoenix is the only one where the movie was actually better than the book.
Longest book.Shortest film.Little of value was lost in the chopping.
It’s well known that book five was rushed due to American demand and that there was no time to edit. Your instincts are correct on that count.
Whoa. I genuinely had never heard that. Makes some sense then, because it badly needs sanding. My theory has always been book 5 was the point where they did little more than a cursory proofread over it, because they were all too busy counting their money. Book 1 and 2? Usual editing stuff. Book 3 more freedom. Book 4 more, but enough strong editing. Book 5? yeah.
The prophecy as the book’s lynchpin never worked for me. OOTP was really about Harry learning that his heroes aren’t perfect and that he’s not special – he was interchangeable with Neville. But the writing never quite delivers and the final battle seems tacked on as an obligatory setpiece.
The big battle is actually epic and sweeping in the film, probably Yates’ best setpiece. Like you say in the bool it doesn’t quite land.
OTOH I far prefer the book duel between Harry and Voldemort to the movie’s version.But then OTOOH Harry snapping the Elder Wand in two and chucking it into that bottomless canyon makes way more sense than burying it back in Dumbledore’s tomb and then spending the rest of his life hoping he dies a peaceful death.
I dunno… in the book, we get to the climax of an amazing 150-page battle and we… stop dead for an exposition dump about who owned the Elder Wand that reads like a section of the tax code. I think the movie handles it more deftly, albeit a little dumbed down.
Rowling herself said that Phoenix was the hardest of all the books for her to write. She struggled all the way through with it, and it was exacerbated by the fact that she’d quit smoking. The final product pretty obviously shows that.
Omg. EDITOR
Well no kidding but seriously there probably wasn’t enough money in the world to make it worthwhile for an editor to tell Rowling her book was awful and needed a serious edit. And the thing was going to sell like hotcakes no matter what she wrote.
Reminds me of the scene from Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back where Damon and Affleck are making “Good Will Hunting 2: Hunting Season.” They keep panning to Gus Van Sant counting money instead of directing. “Busy, Matt, very busy.”
“I think you’re attempting to “prove” a point beyond “I didn’t really like them” with “facts.””I think you’re getting really defensive of a pop pap book series that I wasn’t actually insulting at all…? Calm the hell down dude.
My 9 year old can read one of these books in less than 2 days.Maybe try harder?
I typically fall asleep by page 10.
That’s the thing though, the page count was high, but actually sitting down to read them didn’t take any longer than polishing off a Jack Reacher book. Those pages didn’t have a lot of weight to them.
It also asks less of an audience because it’s clear Rowling herself isn’t that strongly influenced by the evolution of fantasy as a genre from Tolkien/Lewis through Jordan and LeGuin and into its more modern form with authors like Sanderson and GRRM. Instead almost all of her influences are drawn from classicism and myth; whether Arthurian or Grimm. On the one hand that helps her paint her world with a pretty brightly colored palette that’s immediately evocative and entertaining; on the other hand it doesn’t hold up to close examination even as well as magic in the MCU, to say nothing of really well thought out magical worlds in modern fantasy literature. Unfortunately “because it’s magic!” works better when it’s creating problems to be solved, like in older myths and fairy tales. If you get to use magic to solve the problems than it needs to hang together more consistently than it does in Rowling’s world or you end up draining dramatic tension.
“Instead almost all of her influences are drawn from classicism and myth; whether Arthurian or Grimm.”I’ve always seen her as a cut rate Susan Cooper.
I would definitely put her more as somebody who was more inspired by like other more recent at the time writers from the 80’s/90’s like Susan Cooper, Dianna Wynn Jones, and Jill Murphy. And other school story novel’s like St. Trininan’s and the like for tone. Although she never would’ve admitted that if you were of a certain age and reading fantasy books it was very on trend for the time and adding the mystery element is what really helped the HP books stand out for the pack.
It’s the same appeal that the TV show Game of Thrones has too honestly. Fantasy Light + something else audiences really like.
Reading 800 page books in an “afternoon or so” is quite a feat there, Speed Reader.
IIRC the main reason no one made more than one was that it extracting an actual part of your soul is an incredibly unpleasant experience and each time you do it, there’s that much left of yourself in your body.
Yeah, if I remember correctly, that’s the reason why he looks like he froze in the middle of morphing into a snake, because the process of making horcruxes mutilates him, physically and spiritually.
In case anyone is wondering, no I did not have a stroke in the middle of typing this. Wow.
They absolutely spell out that to make ONE horcrux is an act of unspeakable, soul-splitting evil.
The Seven is alluded to as Tom Riddle as a child having a bit of OCD around the number. You see it in the movie with the 7 stones on the window sill, and some things lined up in the closet. The window shot also has the cave picture, which is why reviewing the memories is important.
Those are nice Easter eggs in the movie, but they should be more than that, since “seven” and the cave are kind of big plot points this movie and the movies that follow depend on. In the next movie, the fact that HBP never really goes into Voldemort being obsessed with artifacts or the Hogwarts founders makes that plot look a lot flimsier than it actually is, as well.
For me, and I’m no Potter purist or anything, Slughorn’s confession in the book is one of the key scenes of the whole series. Harry manipulates Slughorn because of his love for Lilly and it really sets the scene for where the cards will fall in the final book. Even though it’s not totally believable plot-wise, character-wise it slays me.
I love the way that storyline literalizes the idea of Harry being protected by his mother’s love, not in the form of some super-powerful and enigmatic protection spell, but in a way that’s more basic and human. My only complaint is that the McGuffin memory it doesn’t work very well as mystery reveal. The McGuffin prophesy from Order of the Phoenix was a similar letdown, for similar reasons.
It’s a great scene. I love how felix felicis is telling him to wait, wait. Slughorn will tell you. I love that whole FF scene in the movie, and I absolutely adore the original memory. “It’s called, as I believe, a horcrux…which is why I came to you…it’ll be our little secret.” Tom plays him so expertly and I love the actor’s choices.
Everything starting with Goblet of Fire on falls into the realm of “it made more sense in the books”.Dumbledore’s lessons in Half-Blood Prince? It was to teach Harry not to rely on short cuts in his pursuit of a goal. Don’t rely on assumptions, trust but verify in other words. The reason Dobby’s death was treated with such reverence is because Dobby in the books, unlike the movies DIDN’T disappear never to be seen again after the end of Chamber of Secrets. In the books his death WAS an extremely emotional. But the movies not so much because of much stuff had to be cut for time, and lack of foresight on the adaptation’s part.Speaking of cut for time, there are two really great scenes cut from Order of the Pheonix. While Arthur is recovering in St Mungo’s, the trio of kids run into Gilderoy Lockheart when they got lost and wandered into what is essentially the Psych ward. Which THEN leads to a scene where the trio run into Neville and his Grandma visiting his parents. A fantastic scene where Neville’s grandma is telling him “Don’t be embarrassed of why you’re parents are here, be proud of them. I am proud of my son for standing up Voldemort and his followers”.
I can’t remember what’s in the movies and what’s in the books anymore, but don’t they cut out the part about the prophecy potentially applying to either Harry or Neville and how Neville very well could’ve been the Boy Who Lived if Voldemort had chosen differently?
I only knew that from my book-reading offspring – its definitely not addressed in the films.
The books don’t make a whole lot of sense on their own, either!
Yes, the prophecy specifies that Voldemort “will mark him as his equal”. Up until Voldy cast that killing curse on Harry, who it was going to be between Harry and Neville was up for grabs.
And I believe the reason Voldemort chose Harry was because he was also a half-blood whereas Neville was pure blood.
The Neville and his parents moment is my favorite sequence in all of the books. It hits all the right emotional notes, and comes right around the time that you are learning that the prophecy could be about Neville instead of Harry and it just stays with you.
Neville’s parents being tortured into permanent madness by Bellatrix is definitely more prominently referenced in the books, making him a tragic figure who is basically on his own to find his place in the world. His fuck you to Voldemort in Deathly Hallows is the high point of the entire series IMO (books or movies).
Dumbledore’s lessons in Half-Blood Prince? It was to teach Harry not to rely on short cuts in his pursuit of a goal. Don’t rely on assumptions, trust but verify in other words.I think its more than that right. It’s like, “I’m dying, I think I fucked this up and I’m not as smart as I think I am. I need you, Harry, to be a your own person, because I clearly can’t save us and maybe you can.”
I’m a Gen-Xer who read the books as an adult and has been re-experiencing them with my kiddo. I dig them, but also, meh. But I was talking to a really smart, literate millennial dude a couple years ago, and the deep, emotional way he spoke about that scene between Neville and his grandmother in the hospital really moved me, and gave me a bit of insight into what I got and what I didn’t get about this series.
I got a little misty eyed just thinking about that scene with Neville’s parents. Especially the part where he quietly saves the piece of paper his mom gives him. One of the many reasons I have never loved the films is how they abandoned so much of the details and side stories that made the novels such a joy to read growing up.
I always wondered if people walked out of HBP wondering what “Half Blood Prince” actually means. Because, unless I’m misremembering, the movie cuts the part where we find out why Snape chose that name.
My wife who never read the books was completely confused by the end of the movie. I let her watch them on her own, and afterwards she asked “So, why is this movie called The Half Blood Prince?” We had a big back and forth where I had to explain the entire story to her and her reaction was just “Why wasn’t any of this in the movie?!”. Then it gets even better because Death Hallows starts and you have to wonder how many people like my wife were lost when they started talking about the rest of the Horocruxes that the move version of HBP forgot to establish because it was too concerned with shitty scenes like burning down the Burrow.
I’ve never seen a Harry Potter film all the way through, but whenever i’ve caught a snippet on TV or whatever, it always seems to involve someone trying their best to kill a child. Its weird.
That’s a lot of adventure stories aimed at young teens, to be honest.
Yeah, you can’t spend more than five minutes in YA fiction before some kid either dies or just narrowly avoids it.
hunger games is a series of diminishing returns (both book/film) but man the conceit is fuuuuuucked
Dobby is a bigger character in the books. His misguided attempts to “help” Harry in the second book are portrayed in a more complicated, ultimately sympathetic light. Plus it is made much more apparent how abusive Daddy Malfoy is towards Dobby. And then he appears in most of the following books and has a lot of character development, into the more competent, lovable and heroic figure they tried to shoehorn into the last chapter. The books are not entirely without plot holes, but when you really get into it, the number is shockingly low.(Obligatory disclaimer: I roundly reject J.K. Rowling’s anti-trans bullshit.)
I’m pretty sure the movies gave a bunch of the stuff Dobby did to Neville (finding the Room of Requirement, recommending Gillyweed, maybe more).
“And honestly, once J.K. Rowling revealed herself as a powerfully creepy bigot who apparently thinks imaginary witches are more womanly than actual trans women”
I am not American but are you all officially crazy now ? JK Rowling said things that 99% of people agree with, I mean, outside the bubble of craziness that the english speaking world has become. Get a grip. A few years ago nobody even in the USA would have been offended by saying that women are women. You just lost your mind to this nonsense.
What a great read to start off the weekend! Agree with others that the books round off things that aren’t clear in the movies (for example, in HBP, the spell Harry uses on Draco comes from the spell book, which Hermione and Ginny warned Harry about using because of the events from Chamber of Secrets). With that said, I think the movies were successful in drawing in another group of people into the world who just aren’t going to read the books. And I ultimately think both forms were so successful because of the world building. Even my husband, who could careless about this stuff, finally understood the draw when we visited Universal and saw the detail in the Wizarding World. Still not watching or reading, but at least got how much there is to engage with.
I believe that the margins of the Half Blood Prince textbook is the only place that Snape wrote out the specifics of his bloodletting spell that Harry used against Draco. It’s a really nasty spell, so I guess they’re assuming if they hide that book, no one could ever learn that spell again. Of course, it’s been a long time since I’ve seen or read either, so I may be conflating a book plot detail with a movie plot detail.
The Half Blood Prince material was weird, because it really is kind of peripheral to the plot, but they couldn’t excise it entirely because “Half Blood Prince” is the title of the damn movie/book. So instead you have stuff like Shape randomly blurting out that he’s the “Half Blood Prince!” before running away at the end of the movie.
Isn’t there some suspicion that it’s Voldemort’s book, since he’s half-blood? I think the tone of that mystery and Harry wondering if he’s learning from Voldemort is crucial to something stirring in Harry, but that’s all internal.
Exactly, it’s significant thematically in that it represents Harry’s “there but for the grace of God…” struggle with his Slytherin side and his affinity toward people like Snape and Voldemort, who were similarly lonely and resentful, but it doesn’t have much to do with the overall plot.
In the book, Snape reads Harry’s mind and demands him to give him the Prince’s textbook, so Harry switches his textbook with Ron’s and takes the Prince’s to the Room of Requirements so that Snape can’t find it(?). It doesn’t make a lot of sense, I think it’s mostly an excuse to show that the room can transform into this room were people hide their stuff so Harry knows where to find the diadem later on.
I’m not even sure if the films work when you DO know the books. Prisoner is the only one I would go back and rewatch, the rest ranged from ‘wow that’s boring’ to ‘ok’.
I am a HUGE James Bond fan, and I imagine other people look at 007 movies the same way I look at Harry Potter movies: uneven, tiring, cruel, unnecessary.
Aye
My wife and I were in our 30s, and yet to have children, when the first two Potter movies were released and really enjoyed them (well, Sorcerer’s Stone anyway). In retrospect, I think that was due to cultural timing – 9-11 had happened only a couple months before, and Sorcerer’s Stone, as well as Fellowship of the Ring released at about the same time, really helped to get our minds off that for a while. If the quality of subsequent Potter movies had not improved we would likely have bailed out. We’ve since seen them all (so has or daughter). Azkaban is our overall favorite, but the battle in the Department of Mysteries that ends Order of the Phoenix is my favorite segment in the entire series.
Skimmed, but THANK YOU for the last line.
Fuck Draco. Fuck Snape. Fuck the Slytherins. The only “good” Slytherin is a dead Slytherin. The entire line was founded because Salazar Slytherin wanted to exterminate an entire race and didn’t like it when the others told him he couldn’t.
If my kid got sorted into Slytherin, he or she better not come back.
On Pottermore I got sorted into Slytherin and was devastated. (Seriously, I couldn’t believe how upset I found myself.) So I created a new account with a different email and re-took the test and tried as hard as I could to get into *any* other house. I ended up getting re-sorted into Gryffindor. Although it occurred to me that gaming the system like that was a pretty Slytherin thing to do.
I think once the world of HP became an adult phenomenon beyond the books, people actively retconned Slytherin from House of Evil, which made little narrative or world-building sense, to the house of people who don’t feel like they fit in, who rebel, who see through the bullshit. Suddenly it’s full of gothy creative types and it seems like the cool house to be in. (Even in the books, I always assumed Slytherins threw the best parties.)
I’m much in the same boat – it’s never been some overall grand plan of mine not to watch the movies (or read the books, but then, that was never going to happen. The period of my life where I could spend the time reading Tom-Clancy sized novels – let alone six of them – is long past) or anything. Just that I simply had no interest. And of course now that Rollings is a confirmed bigoted piece of shit, she’ll never see a dime of my money.So thank you for taking the bullet for me.
People saying the movies get better is not enough to get me to watch past the first. There are enough good movie series that start out good rather than requiring me to endure bad ones to get to the good ones.
The first movie put me to sleep when we watched it in school, and I was done with the series. I am glad for its existence, however, because it gave me “Wizard People, Dear Reader,” where Brad Neely talks/narrates over the whole first movie with his own weird, funny version. I haven’t listened to it in probably a decade, but it had my friends and I in stitches.
This was me several years ago.
My main takeaway from watching the whole series?
It was OK.
Still helping promote the TERF’s work, eh?
I watched the first Harry Potter movie in college and it did nothing for me. Just a boring kids’ movie. Then I was dating someone who was really into Harry Potter when the fourth one came out, so I ended up seeing all the films from that point forward, most of them on opening night. Enjoyed all of them, other than having the same issues with The Deadly Hallows Part 1 as Alex noted. Then I eventually went back and watched the second and third and I felt pretty much the same about them as I did about the first one. I wonder if I really missed something in The Prisoner of Azkaban and need to watch it again or if it only seems so great if you’re coming into it fresh off of the first and second films and less so if you’ve seen the other, more mature films in the series.
Sorcerer’s Stone might not be the best “movie” in the series, but I’m not so sure it isn’t the best Harry Potter movie in the series.
I can’t disagree with this. It’s the most faithful adaptation, and has a sense of wonder that is not present in any of the other films, except maybe Chamber.
I was never a fan of this. Never read the books. Didnt want to see any of the movies, wound up watching some cause for awhile id go to my friends house on the weekends, and they would be on, and she wanted to watch them. The best thing i can say about them is theyre okay. As far as pop culture crap goes, theres definitely worse. Still wouldnt voluntarily watch em on my own, or read the books. Dr Strange in the MCU is enough magic for me, and even him, i only like him in small doses, as a supporting character.
I’ve always considered the movies a visual companion to the books. For the most part, they capture what I had in my head almost exactly.What I never understand is how folks fawn over Prisoner of Azkaban. I think it’s most poorly adapted movie. The skip over the whole thing of the Marauders! Why are all of them Anamagi (including Harry’s Papa)? To support Lupin. The Marauders created the map that is a huge plot device. Skipping all of the Marauders backstory doesn’t allow the (movie) audience to feel the true impact of Wormtail’s betrayal.
Worse than that, Lupin apparently knows all about the map when he confiscates it from Harry. But how does he know about it? It is never even explained. In the books, it is hinted that he knows the creators when he confiscates it. But in the movie he just blurts out “The map never lies.”I still like the movies, mainly for the near-perfect casting (except Emma: too pretty and her teeth are not abnormally large) and the effects.But the books, mainly from Harry’s POV, go a little deeper in explaining things.
The casting exercise was apparently epic. They compared pictures of the cast with those of their parents and older siblings when they were the same age to get an idea of how these child actors would mature, and maybe it was that kind of diligence or just luck (probably both) that resulted in as about as good an outcome as they could have hoped for.
I mean…
Also, Alfonso Cuarón made an advertisement for Autism Speaks, dude can just suck shit for the rest of his life.
Ugh, really? That’s incredibly disappointing.
Here’s the ad in question. It is atrociously offensive:
But … Buckbeak!
I think you mean “Witherwings”? *wink*
I think people spotted Azkaban an enormous amount of goodwill because it just was on an entirely different level of cinematic competence than the Chris Columbus films. If you walked into the film having never read the books — hell, if you walked into it not speaking a word of English — you’d find at least one or two things to love about it just in terms of visual storytelling. It’s also the moment when the obvious question that had been hanging over the first two films (“this is nice and all, but are any of these kids going to turn out to be able to actually act?”) was answered with a surprisingly consistent “yes”.
But yeah, Cuaron managed to completely miss most of the key emotional beats of the book, including spectacularly botching the climax. So it goes.
PoA is an odd film because some of Harry’s key dialogue is given to Hermione.
Although Prisoner of Azkaban is literally the only movie that got Dumbledore right, even when the same actor played him in later movies.It was the only film where Dumbledore is impish and whimsical, as well as wise. None of the other directors (or scriptwriters) gave Michael Gambon space to do that again.
Gotta strongly disagree with you there. Richard Harris portrays book Dumbledore perfectly.I just don’t understand some of the directing/acting choices that were made with Michael Gambon. He just seemed to be portraying a different character that how the books described.
I remember seeing it in theaters when it first came out and I was baffled that they didn’t include the fact that Harry’s patronus being a stag is significant because it was his father’s animagi! That was one of the biggest most emotional reveals in the whole damn novel!
Why does this article read like a felix biederman parody article?
I think it’s very weird to treat the movies as the entry point into Harry Potter; they’re basically cliff’s notes versions of the books that aren’t especially entertaining or enjoyable on their own, beyond certain entries.
This ^^^^^^
“Does everyone just think House Slytherin is evil? It is very confusing that they would paint one of the four grand wizarding houses as nothing but shitheads, yet here we are.”It’s moments of clarity like this that make me think AV Club and other left-leaning publications really do have some principles and aren’t just turning on JK Rowling out of the need to signal their distaste with her personal views that should have no bearing on her artistic output in order to assuage their left-leaning readers. I enjoy a good movie review (or takedown) as anyone else, but it’s hard to enjoy a piece by a writer that so obviously dislikes JK Rowling and thinks their view is the de facto correct one. But then they write something like the quote above, directly contradicting their own stance on the author. While, yes, Slytherin is not the “evil house” – much like both Draco and Snape, the head of Slytherin, it is revealed to be of equal importance and worthiness as the other houses by series’ end – its role in the books parallels the journey of the Wizarding World choosing between the Dark – pureblood mania, hatred of “halflings” and “mudbloods”, etc. – and the Light sides. Their is nuance there that the writer, and many other AV Club contributors, seem unwilling to extend to JK Rowling. Whether or not I agree with her views, I’m not the kind of person to immediately “paint her as nothing but a shithead,” and I just wish the AV Club’s writers would have more journalistic integrity by doing the same.
I had a similar, although far less forgiving experience, stretched across a few years. I hated the first two films, loved Prisoner of Azkaban, didn’t care for anything else. I hated Dobby. I wanted to step on him and throw him against the wall. It says a lot when you’re more annoying than Jar Jar Binks.When Joanne came out as a piece of shit, I started feeling some strange feeling of warmth from the hateful backlash. It just felt good that people were reexamining their affection for an overrated franchise and finally seeing all the same flaws I did. They go to a secret school to learn magic secretly, are forbidden from using magic outside of school, so … they learn magic so they can teach the next generation to repress themselves?
“When Joanne came out as a piece of shit, I started feeling some strange feeling of warmth from the hateful backlash” Good for you.
They’re forbidden while students from using it outside of school. Not for life.Also learning Rowling has major character flaws making you feel better about previous undeserved antipathy towards her isn’t something you should really brag about.
There’s a bizarre schadenfreude when a figure you merely thought was annoying for reasons reveals themselves to actually be a not very great individual. It’s bad, but it’s also so good feeling, like confirmation bias served to you by the universe. Won’t pretend I don’t understand the sensation, but I do feel bad for like all th epeople people just trying to have a clean dorky time who have to like…insert themselves in some serious quandaries now. But alas that’s just adulthood.
Oh, I definitely feel bad for people who loved these movies. I take no pleasure in their conflicted feelings, only a sense of collective understanding, not unlike when I meet someone who also used to be Catholic.
Gotta’ read the books, man. It’s one of the greatest fantasy franchises of all-time for a reason. The movies didn’t have time to cover half the things that make the books so awesome. More people enjoy the books than the movies.
I too missed it. Felt too old for it despite some of my peers really getting into it. I can’t even bring myself to read the whole article.
I was in my 20’s when the Harry Potter books/movies came out and was too interested in trying to get laid than reading about teenaged wizards. When I finally got around to reading all of the books and watching the movies I was that lame guy on message boards getting way too excited about something that was a bit past its prime. Yes, I know there’s other books.
“What? If you were already hunting them, Dumbledore—if you already knew that’s what we needed—then why the hell did you make such a production of unlocking a memory that just tells you what you already knew? This is driving me bananas; someone, please explain what I’m missing.”You’re not missing anything. It’s as poorly thought-out as it seems.I have the same complaint about movie/book 5; the whole thing is about this essential quest to find a “prophecy”. This prophecy contains information that Voldemort must have in order to succeed…and that information boils down to “one of you – Voldemort or Harry – must die.” Really? That’s it?
Dobbie (and Kreacher) both had a lot more to do with the books, and I was very sad at their demises.
Which just reminds me of this exchange I had with a friend; the friend was a book reader, but I experienced the entire series as audiobooks.ME: Wait, it turns out that the character I thought was called “Creature” is spelled “Kreacher”? That’s a pretty weak pun.FRIEND: HOLY SHIT IT’S PROUNOUNCED CREATURE I didn’t get that.
I’ll do that as well: “Oh, this collection of letters is this name” without ever bothering to try and pronounce it in my head.
Same friend — who is from the South! — smacked his forehead (over the phone) when I pointed out that the name “Rita Skeeter” kind of gives away the game about the small insect that buzzes around during the book. I think he’s kind of inattentive.
Yeah, it really makes you hope that the author’s on the nose hyper-literalism never comes out in other more unsavory ways.Ooopsie Daisy.
…… it took me a while to realize the Diagon Alley pun
For me it was Knockturn Alley.
I… ………… TIL
Mirror of erised is Desire backwards, like in a mirror!Topher Grace is short for Christopher Grace!!!!
Slytherin! Slithering, like a snake!
Kreacher doesn’t die, does he? He’s at the Battle of Hogwarts, he leads the charge of the other elves–and he’s explicitly fighting against Voldemort, which is huge character growth.
The memory is important because it tips them off as to how many horcruxes Voldemort has made, which they obviously need to know to be sure they got them all.As for hiding the book, it was the source of the “cut you up motherfucker” spell that Harry just used on Draco and Snape is suddenly way too interested in where, exactly, Harry learned that spell. So he’s hiding the book in a panic under the general rule that anything Snape wants, he doesn’t.Both plot points are clearer in the books because of course they are.
Never read the books (they came way after my time, but I imagine I would have liked them if they had come out in like 1986), I only know some of the more famous references through pop culture osmosis, and I only saw the first movie (in theaters; not my idea) which I hated and gave me a headache.
I’ve never understood people who can’t keep track of plotlines and characters or whatever in a story. This isn’t Primer. There’s maybe 100 named characters in the movies, and only 10 of any real importance. It doesn’t really matter if you don’t remember Professor Trelawney, it’s just the weird bug eyed woman who says crazy things. Even if you don’t have the context of the books, it’s not that hard to keep track of things even when going years between movies.
“Namely, the entirety of the game can be rendered null and void by one person who has nothing to do with any of it, and instead just chases a flying gold ball, completely independent of everything else happening.”Been saying this for years. Quidditch is easily the worst part of the HP universe, and the fact that we spend so much time with it really hampers the first few movies for me. They couldn’t get like a sports consultant or something to make sure the game made any kind of sense?
Such an easy fix, too. Make the rule you have to win by a certain number of goals, and only then may you try to catch the snitch. So your seeker can alternate time between trying to score and keeping an eye on the snitch, before finally turning entirely to the latter one you’re up, say, five goals. Meanwhile you can’t dedicate too many players to trying to protect your seeker and catch the snitch because all the while the team that’s down is trying to score and catch up. This is literally the first thing that came to my mind when I first saw the movie, and I can’t believe no one suggested something like this to Rowling.
Yeah, it’s pretty dumb. “Okay, so it’s flying Lacrosse, but also two guys chase a rabbit during the match and if one of them catches it their team automatically wins.”
Not to say it isn’t still dumb, but the basic idea is that the Snitch is worth 15 points (I’m dividing everything by ten to make it less dumb) so if your regular athletes score 16 points or more, the opposing Seeker can’t get the Snitch to win.
In theory there’s an interesting game that revolves around a competition between two individuals whose stakes are determined by a different team, while enchanted cannonballs try to kill everyone involved. In practice, the Snitch is so powerful that it renders the game useless and it’s generally an auto-win to catch it; if it was worth like 5 points and ended the game the rest of the team would actually matter.
Right though as far as what the movies show (and from the couple books I read, this is consistent with the books), that very rarely happens. So the Snitch 99 % of the time will end the game, outside of an incredibly rare dominant performance by your team. Like saying in baseball that your team has to be up by 10 runs.
Like I said, the execution is quite dumb. Someone who gave a shit about sports could use the core concept and tweak it into something way more exciting.
Crucially though, this did happen in the 1994 World Cup (Obviously to show that the rules aren’t stupid after all, critics!), which is a ridiculous mistake to make at that level of play. And the Seeker wasn’t even roundly ridiculed by everyone for years after like he would be in any other sport. That’s some “Laces Out” level of ineptitude
OMG, that’s so ridiculously dumb but also I now need a wizarding SportsCenter to do a Quidditch Not Top 10.
Even easier fix: catching the snitch simply ends the game, no points scored. Seekers then strategically try to catch it when leading and prevent the other when losing. Instant drama!
Yup great idea, that’s the winner. NO NOTES!
Yeah its very specifically the kinda game that children would never play. Because one kids are obsessed with fairness and a game that can be overturned despite your effort with one move would instantly cause anarchy of any kid you’d try to convince to play. Now Quidditch as a metaphor for capitalism would work, because we’re all forced to play…but as a game people actually opt into it muddies the thing and doesn’t work.
It’s one of the pieces that I think is a lot more fun in the books, because it’s just whimsical and weird. In the movies trying to take it a bit seriously.
I loved most of the books, but have never been able to get into the movies. I watched the second one in the cinema and hated it, and didn’t watch any of the others until a few years ago.There’s some good moments, but the plots all just feel like Cliff’s Notes versions of the books. The best moments are usually when they add in scenes that weren’t in the novels (mostly the non-Harry scenes the books couldn’t do).
“all just feel like Cliff’s Notes versions of the books.” I mean, basically. I think there simply wasn’t enough space between book and movie. You don’t have decades of time which allows a film adaptation to do new things and create something viable in its own right. To say nothing of the creator retaining significant control and finishing the series at the same time. Not saying that’s good or bad, just that it “is.” And how massive HP was, rather than an adaptation of a successful but less iconic or fan-oriented book.
After a magic fight where Harry nearly murders Draco, they make a big production of hiding the half-blood prince’s book so that no one can ever find it again. Why? It didn’t seem to have any bearing whatsoever on that fight—at least, none that was effectively explained.I have not seen the movie; I take it that it didn’t make clear the sectumsempra curse Harry used to (presumably) slice Draco open like a trout came from the notes that the Half-Blood Prince scribbled in the margins of his potions book? If so, big fumble, because that ought to be easy enough to include without taking too much time (Chekhov’s Curse, anyone?) and not leave anyone who hasn’t read the book totally confused.Re. Dobby’s death, yeah, never cared for him, but at leas he went out like a boss. I’ll give him that much.At one point after seeing the first two films, I considered just watching the movies and never reading the books. Then one summer I finished a book early while on a trip, and the rental I was staying in had a copy of Sorcerer’s Stone, so to alleviate boredom, I read it, then figured in for a penny, in for a pound and proceeded to read the whole series.And now when it comes to the movies, I have really only watched up to the fourth one, and have caught a few pieces of the fifth. My kids like them, but they’ve never clamored to watch Half-Blood Prince through Hallows, Pt. 2.
Hallows Pt. 2 is basically a war movie. It’s the fireworks factory for the whole series, and really doesn’t let up.
yet somehow, it is dull and absolutely fails to make some of the biggest FUCK YEAH moments in the books come to life
It’s been a while, and an old man’s memory isn’t perfect, but as someone who watched HBP before reading the book, I remember knowing that the sectumsempra spell was something Harry learned from the margin notes of his potions textbook. I won’t claim that everything is clearly spelled out in the movie, but I believe it at least strongly implies Harry hid the book out of fear of what he was learning from it.
So we’ll chalk this up to McLevy being inattentive, then.
It’s a total blink and you miss it moment in the movie. They pan over Harry reading the book and seeing “For enemies – Sectumsempra”.
I’m fairly sure there is a montage in HBP that shows Harry learning from the potion book and seeing notes about the sectumsepra being a spell “for my enemies” or something like that.
Preface: Generally very cool and into most of what Alex writes here, but:1) Yes, the children’s movies were made for children and some of the glut is o include the book loving audience. Failing at that would have been a bigger issue – so unicorns, and subplots, oh my. And as a teacher, I literally had to address an extracurriculur conflict with this premiere with HIGH SCHOOL students who had grown up reading the first few books – don’t mess with fandom.
And as noted, the stories increase in complexity and character as the age of the children does. I’m not a big Rowling fan, but I will credit her with creating a series that actually grows with the reader in theme and content if you assume the initial age is a child. It is why the fandom worked the way it did.2) This is why we need diversity in criticism – because every book smart girl who was criticized for being bossy or too eager or too whatever needed a Hermione. It’s takes Alex until movie 3 to understand why this makes her awesome, but immediately there is empathy for the adolescent boy twit phase with dating around the Triwizard Tournament. 3) Mythologically, yes, fucking Phoenixes have healing powers. That’s why you introduce a Phoenix…. unless you need arson. (Or a dramatic escape I guess.)
More interestingly, did you know Hippogryphs are a cross between a Horse and a Griffin, but Griffins normally EAT horses, so it’s a whole star crossed lover thing and one of my favorite creatures, and I would also probably die for Buckbeak, I admit. Alex was understandably focused on time travel here.
4) They hide the spell book by the Half Blood Prince because a) Harry is tempted by it, and Voldemort is a cautionary tale about power, b) one of those spells is exactly what let Harry injure Draco so badly, and visciously, c) those spells are also part of the worst parts of Snape, who is Harry’s other cautionary tale about talent and seeing oneself as always the victim. Think of the Half Blood Prince and bitter pining Snape. Burying that book at first is burying the treachery of Snape killing Dumbledore, but is really burying the less noble part of Snape in favor of seeing him in the light of his sacrafice.
5) Dobby is always annoying, but there is a whole House Elf liberation plot in the books (no one loves it, it IS Hermione at her most annoying, but she is right and it is important for relationship sign posting with Ron) so Dobby is a bit more present. Actual movie fact – they wanted to cut Dobby in film 2, but Rowling explained that he was needed for plot points later, and this is accurate – they don’t escape without him.
I think what’s weird about the Sectumsempra spell(and the other spells in the book) is that it doesn’t really follow any internal logic of spells in the series. I don’t get too hung up on “O, My Immersion”, and truthfully I just skimmed past this knot when I read it, but how did Snape invent new spells? Is it so simple a teenager could do it? It’s possible that spell creation is a fairly common thing (Though I imagine you’d run out of Latin eventually), but if so, any particularly smart and vindictive student should be able to reproduce it independently or make something similar/worse. It doesn’t make burying the book a futile gesture, but you could also just burn that page or something.
There’s also the plot hole about why Snape’s personal textbook is in the pile of classroom loaners.
I think you’re wrong about the “wanted to cut Dobby part” – I think what you’re thinking of is they wanted to cut Kreacher in OotP but Rowling knew how important Kreacher was to the last film and told them to reconsider.Dobby is such a huge part of CoS – not sure how he could have been cut.
I would say this is the big gap between book Hermione and Ron and movie Hermione and Ron rearing its head. Like the book is way more self aware when certain characters are being awesome or annoying but movie translation is purely Hermione is the bestest ever and Ron is a doo doo friend why do they keep him?
So true about Hermione. She was important to every bookish girl who didn’t want to be seen as a nerd, or at least aspired to be a little bit cool.
Death by cutesy.
My issue with Marvel was that a number of the early entries had reputations for not being very good, so I never made seeing them a priority and now there is a million of them and trying to catch up seems more or less impossible. With so many of them being crossovers especially where I feel like I’d need to bring familiarity with / affinity for the various characters. I don’t want to go into a series of movies feeling like I’m doing homework assignments.
I kind of ignored it until summer of 2009, when I was unemployed like many other people, and I plowed through them all in 2 weeks, then caught up on the movies.I enjoyed them just fine, they aren’t THE BEST THING EVAR!!! but they are perfectly enjoyable. Lord of the Rings is certainly better, lots of Arthurian legend is better (particularly The Once and Future King, and Mists of Avalon), and I have a soft spot in my heart for Eddings’ Belgariad and Mallorean as far as epic fantasy goes.
They’re good movies overall.
25+ pages of notes! I can’t watch and write at the same time. It breaks my concentration of what I’m seeing and affects the experience of what the filmmaker intended me to have. Yes, every film/TV/play critic takes notes. Guess it’s a developing talent to fully feel the thing while you’re scribbling.Nice idea for a regular feature. For those of us who are willfully ignorant of the cinematic Death Eaters that is the MCU, have a like-minded critic do that next.
What does deus ex mean. You use it an awful lot.
Deus ex ghosts is a play on the phrase deus ex machina, which translates literally to God out of the machine. In Greek drama, actors who played the gods were craned onto the stage and often provided a resolution. Nowadays the phrase refers to any conflict which is solved with an unknown, new element—in this case, Harry is getting his ass kicked by Voldemort and is about to die in the graveyard until their wands link and the ghosts of Harry’s parents emerge and save his life. I will say, in the book priori incantatum (the spell that’s triggered by the wands linking) is introduced much earlier, in the Quidditch World Cup sequence.
This was a fun read! I was an adult (soon with children) when the books came out, so despite reading almost exclusively fantasy and science fiction, I didn’t get into them until a number of years after they became such a phenomena. I…liked them okay? Like, they were fine. I reread them at one point and discovered that my favorite of the movies (Azkhaban) was my least favorite of the books, and that both Goblet of Fire and Half Blood Prince were the best of the best, which spilled over into me liking those movies the most as well. So your rankings of the movies feels pretty accurate to me. The most astonishing thing I have found is that people who grew up reading these books treat them as gospel, when to me they are just mediocre fantasy novels, and hate the movies, which I enjoyed very much. But I have to remind myself how utterly disappointed I was in the Narnia movies when they started coming out, when those books were my life when I was a child. I haven’t reread them recently, but just having that feeling in my soul while watching The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe of “This is not right, this is just not right” made me understand the Potter kids a little better.
J.K. Rowling revealed herself as a powerfully creepy bigot who apparently thinks imaginary witches are more womanly than actual trans women
her belief isn’t about degrees of “womanliness” (where womanly is an adjective denoting a quality held by a human) but about a yes/no about identity (a noun) as in “is person [x] a woman or not?” as well as her apparent belief that womanhood comes at birth, and manifests with chromosomes and genitals.
a more apt sentence would be “J.K. Rowling revealed herself as a powerfully creepy bigot who – despite becoming a billionaire writing about shapechangers and Polymorph Potions and a man who hid as a child’s rat for fifteen years, apparently thinks the identity you hold should be limited to subsets of the body you found at birth.”
The dude complaining about the nearly three hour runtimes of the individual movies is also insisting I “binge watch them.” In what was does watching 8 nearly three hour movies make watching one nearly three hour movie better?This fun write up only confirms my decision to never bother with this bullshit.
Grew up with the books and liked them quite a bit as a kid / teenager but yea, most of the complaints here are very valid. I rewatch bits of the movies every now and then and they’re mostly really mediocre and parts of the story (like Slytherin being associated with evil or the incredibly terrible rules of Quidditch) are more and more grating over time. Plus Rowling sucks.
“Slytherin is full of jerks” as a conceit is fine and goofy until basically the end. I do think, overally, the book Deathly Hallows was quite satisfying. But one huge misstep was that every single slytherin in hogwarts leaves before the final battle. Not one. Not a single Slytherin is brave enough or anti-voldemort enough to stick around for the fight. Sigh.
Slughorn stays and fights, he’s one of the three (?) who is dueling with Voldemort.
This is true. I suppose I meant, primarily, from the student body. Pansy Parkinson makes a point about “WE ARE CHILDREN AND PROBABLY GOING TO DIE IF WE STAY.” But everybody leaves. I’ve always found that a disappointing route. Slughorn is an odd one. From his introduction on, he is portrayed very much as “one of the good ones” from Slytherin. Sure, he plays favorites and likes to name-drop and is a shmoozer, but he’s not “evil.” He’s one of the only Slytherins we see given a characterization beyond “a total bully and prick or outright evil.” Yeah, it’s three. I want to say —- McGonagall, Shacklebolt, and Slughorn. In the movie, Jim Broadbent literally has like, one shot of him raising his hand to help put the magical dome shield over Hogwarts. Sigh. =D
I don’t know. Slytherin’s are almost universally portrayed as wizards who become Death Eaters and their founder was a dude who hated anyone who wasn’t pure-blooded to the point where he created a chamber that housed a monstrous snake whose sole purpose was to purge the school of Muggle-borns.It kind of made sense as a kid. As an adult, it’s as if Adolf Hitler was a co-founder of a school and the school kept letting kids get sorted into House Nazi for traditions sake.
Right, and I’m saying that’s a flaw in the writing. It’s thematically inconsistent, too: one of the key themes is that people have a level of choice. The sorting hat, after all, takes Harry’s desire to NOT be in Slytherin into account. Every Slytherin I guess has zero agency? Whoops, Slytherin. You’re evilllll!
I agree with you – I more just mean the concept of Slytherin House from the start doesn’t really work when you realize what Salazar Slytherin stood for. So I’m arguing that even if some Slytherin students had switched sides, the idea still doesn’t really work.
Oh that’s a great point.
“an entire ignorant crusade against basic human rights”Oh give me a fucking break. She’s never been on a “crusade”. She said some tweets, some people completely lost their goddamn minds and piled on her, she responded.This is a “crusade”? lol…I don’t like Harry Potter, I think Rowlings is a shit writer, and I don’t necessarily agree with most of her politics. But the over-the-top screeching over a pro-woman tweet is peak bonkers.
1. I think it’s a weird take that some people view this as a “movie franchise/series.” It’s… a book series. I recognize there are people who have never read the books, but seen the movies. But it’s really weird to me. The films are more of, as another commenter posted, “visual companions” to the books. I guess it’s weird to me that some people think the movies alone are something so special? I’ve always speculated that the movies made little sense to non-book readers.2. While I like the general thrust of the piece and I think it’s entertaining, McLevy just *CAN’T* get off his smug snarky horse the whole time. It’s written in a super informal style, which is fine, but in a way that feels out of time and place. Like some shitty blogger with a site nobody goes to writing a “hilarious” review. And despite saying nah, there is an obvious and obnoxious “pride” in being so “clueless” about the Potter of it all. Cool, dude. 3. “ the only thing worse than Dobby is this movie’s continued use of magic as a catch-all afterthought to fix any problem. When Harry’s dying of his Basilisk wounds, a stupid bird cries on him and suddenly he’s cured, because—and I shit you not, this is the actual line—“Of course! Phoenix tears have healing powers!” What a happy coincidence!” I mean, okay? I guess? It’s magic. It’s movies. It’s a KID’S MOVIE. But also, I completely FEEL the “THIS IS TWO AND A HALF HOURS LONNNNNG?” piece? Re-watching Philosopher’s Stone with my oldest after reading the first few books let me appreciate how whimsical and magical the world is in the first film, but ye gods it goes on and on and on. Chamber is worse, it’s not nearly as skillfully adapted.Has AV Club in this “twentieth anniversary” (of the film not the books) managed any article really worth the word count? There was that godawful roundtable featuring 3/4 people who basically couldn’t give two shits about Potter.
Not to mention that the phoenix tears are not any sort of out of nowhere deus ex machina (Fawkes himself showing up at all kind of is, but not his healing powers themselves). It’s not emphasized or lingered on, but Dumbledore mentions that phoenix tears have powerful healing properties when he speaks with Harry in his office earlier in both the book and movie. It is at least set up. And any argument about it being convenient could be said about literally any Chekhov’s Gun, really, so that complaint in particular felt really jarringly wrong to me.
In fiction, LOTS of things end up happening that are “convenient.” Sometimes it’s poorly done, sometimes it is not. Merely *being* coincidental isn’t a great complaint in and of itself. Might also suggest the author uses “deux ex machina” too liberally. It can be all of these things. Great point about the Chekov’s Gun.
I saw all of then except for Order of the Phoenix, and didn’t read any of them until 2008, when I read all of the books and was unimpressed. But they matter so much to so many people that I kept assuming I missed something.Surprised to see you liked the fifth movie so much. I don’t remember much about the third, aside from thinking it was the best and all the others featured too much deus ex.
So you were a Harry Potter denier… it never existed?!?
How about you use a perfectly good word called ‘disliker’?
I totally feel you on letting a big pop culture thing get away from you and letting it go far enough that catching up seemed too daunting. It happened to me with MCU (never really liked superhero movies, saw a few of the first ones and was like meh these are fine and now there are like 30 of them) and also Game of Thrones (I had just quit my job at one of the producers of the show and manager of David Benioff when it premiered and I hated everything associated with that place so I obviously wasn’t watching, by the time I got over myself there was just too much to slog through).
“You want the lighthearted nonsense of the first couple films? Please. Those movies are straight clown shoes.”Sigh. Author was paid for this article, people.
That was my thought when I read that line. I just skim read the rest, figured it wasn’t worth my time if that’s the lazy style and shit snark they’re going for.
“immersing yourself in a wondrous (and yes, escapist) world of magic and dreams—no matter how god-awfully cornball that sounds”Wtf is this shit
I’ve read all the books (including reading the leaked copy image for painful image of deathly hallows so I wouldn’t get spoiled), seen all the movies more than once (going to the premieres of them all), attended more than one HP trivia (never won). All the complaints in this article are valid and well articulated.
You clearly are the smartest in the room. Do you want your prize? Look, the article does make some good points, but the lazy snark is shitty and mediocre.
I mean he brilliantly deduces that a children’s movie, based on a children’s book is for children. Also, doesn’t understand that the books got darker and more serious because the audience was growing up, not because the author was growing as a writer.
Please, pay me! I’ll shill so good for you, magic child.
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Half Blood Prince pulls in flashbacks and memories from lots of different people (you see more horcrux origins as well as Voldemort’s backstory), so Harry’s mission is just about tying that concept together and placing his “victory” at the end of that. It works on a pacing level. Around book four the films started to be more like companion pieces to the books than true adaptations, which i enjoy though I understand why some people don’t. Surprised you didn’t comment on that weird Hermione/Scabior (the punkish snatcher) throughline in Dealthly Hallows 1. I’ve always wondered how that made it into the film, because it’s not in the book.
A fair assessment on all counts. Well done, sir.
Sometimes never is better than late.
Nobody should need an excuse, but on analysis I suppose having actually been packed off to shitty, non-magic Hogwarts makes watching the population of the entire world somehow being convinced that childhood at an old-timey boarding school is a delightful experience a tad galling. Certainly enough for my refusal to engage with any of it to be slightly more active than my simply not being all that bothered about in the way that I’m not all that bothered about, oh I don’t know, The Witcher, maybe.
That’s not what reactionary means, FYI. Reactionary doesn’t mean “acting in a purely responsive way” or the opposite of measured/proactive. Reactionary is a political word meaning someone with an extremely conservative, anti-revolutionary ideology. You likely meant to say reactive.
This seals it, I am never watching these fucking movies
It’s funny, there are lots of small things that are just silly “because magic!” in the movies that are a bit more earned in the books. Also a lot of random things like Hagrid’s brother are whole subplots in the books, but just kind of come out of nowhere in the movies as well.But there are absolutely loads of confounding things that are absolutely confounding in the books as well. I know schools in the UK have houses, but yeah there is a bold kid house, a smart kid house, an evil kid house, and a miscellaneous kid house.There’s a time machine, which the school pulled out to help a random student take extra classes, but then decided oops too strong a plot device put that away.Quidditch….JFC…she doesn’t get sports. It’s fine, but such an easy fix it almost feels like she just thinks sports are dumb and she likes sticking it to people it bothers.
First off these reviews were hilarious to read!! I wish I could experience the movies without having read the books. Also, after reading this I am glad to learn that there is much to be appreciated in the work of Cuarón, Yates and Newell from a film lovers’ perspective. As an adaptation of the books, however, they are raggedy, hollow, and almost literally impossible to watch (I mean I can’t see them because there’s hardly any light or color). I have read the HP series more than 10 times and I absolutely abhor films 3-8. As entertaining and eye-opening as I did find your review it has also solidified my opinion that the movies (after Columbus) failed miserably at adapting this world and story to film. The books are richer than I could have asked for in terms of character development, world building and sociopolitical commentary. That’s why I keep coming back to them. The problem with the films isn’t that the books aren’t good enough, it’s that the films are telling a different story. The films are about nothing more than a boy defeating a dark wizard. But that’s not what the books are about. It’s about a lonely and abused child who finds a home and family in a fantastical world just out of reach of our own. We get to watch him grow up, people my age grew up with him, and along the way he happens to encounter incredible obstacles. Though most readers don’t have to face life threatening fights like Harry he still teaches us how to fight, how to be brave and how to fail. The films could have been a lot more like The Truman Show than Lord of the Rings (or whatever Warner Bros. tried to make them). Further, Harry Potter is a mystery not an action novel. Another reason I think the movies failed.I don’t see how anyone could read all seven book and not be changed forever. Especially if they started in adolescence. However it is perfectly obvious to me why anyone could watch all 8 films and walk away from the series unscathed. And that’s a travesty.
First off these reviews were hilarious to read!! I wish I could experience the movies without having read the books. Also, after reading this I am glad to learn that there is much to be appreciated in the work of Cuarón, Yates and Newell from a film lovers’ perspective. As an adaptation of the books, however, they are raggedy, hollow, and almost literally impossible to watch (I mean I can’t see them because there’s hardly any light or color). I have read the HP series more than 10 times and I absolutely abhor films 3-8. As entertaining and eye-opening as I did find your review it has also solidified my opinion that the movies (after Columbus) failed miserably at adapting this world and story to film. The books are richer than I could have asked for in terms of character development, world building and sociopolitical commentary. That’s why I keep coming back to them. The problem with the films isn’t that the books aren’t good enough, it’s that the films are telling a different story. The films are about nothing more than a boy defeating a dark wizard. But that’s not what the books are about. It’s about a lonely and abused child who finds a home and family in a fantastical world just out of reach of our own. We get to watch him grow up, people my age grew up with him, and along the way he happens to encounter incredible obstacles. Though most readers don’t have to face life threatening fights like Harry he still teaches us how to fight, how to be brave and how to fail. The films could have been a lot more like The Truman Show than Lord of the Rings (or whatever Warner Bros. tried to make them). Further, Harry Potter is a mystery not an action novel. Another reason I think the movies failed.I don’t see how anyone could read all seven book and not be changed forever. Especially if they started in adolescence. However it is perfectly obvious to me why anyone could watch all 8 films and walk away from the series unscathed. And that’s a travesty