Harry Potter Franchise (2001-2011)

[Roger Ryan]

...I mean seriously, look how terrible Emma Watson is in the Columbus movie, it's painful to watch,

There's a moment in DEATHLY HALLOWS 1 where Ron returns after a long absence and Hermione confronts him. Knowing she had developed a significant emotional attachment to him, I feared the worst in how the scene would be handled. What you see on-screen however is a pitch perfect demonstration of conflicted emotions and exhaustion. The scene ends on an ambiguous note and the resolution you expected doesn't come until the new film...in a lovely moment that had me smiling. While the HALLOWS 1 scene appears relatively simple, I am continuously chagrined by similar moments in purportedly adult dramatic films that play these kind of emotions too on-the-nose. I was pleased Yates/Kloves handled it the way they did and that Watson was up to the challenge.

[jojo]

Most of the gripes I have with the series stems mostly from the books and Rowling's own tendencies and weaknesses as writer. The films take her material and make mostly solid mainstream entertainment. I also never bought into the "darkening" of the series, unless one is talking about cinematography. Even after the last book, I still felt like I just read a children's series. The more "serious" tone of the later books and movies really haven't convinced me that this is ultimately dealing with fairly simplistic stuff. Some of the gushing the critics have bestowed upon these movies is pretty ridiculous. Not to get all Armondian about it.

[domino harvey]

Why did you read all the books if you didn't like them?

[jojo]

Why did you read all the books if you didn't like them?

I didn't say she was a BAD writer, I basically said as a writer, she had tendencies and flaws that annoyed me. Her prose is fairly impressive by almost any standard, and though she completely dominated her editors when she became FAMOUS, she is rarely outright DULL. It's just her other tendencies--her heavy reliance on caricatures, her somewhat loose grasp on human relationships, her almost total inability to understand the male psyche--those kind of things were like annoying speedbumps in an otherwise reasonably fun ride.

I also liked her early books better when they were slimmer, less self-consciously "big event" affairs. (I began reading them about 2 years before the franchise exploded) One could say I became a fan enough early on that I was committed enough to the series to finish it, even though the series really sorta fizzles down around book 4 or 5 (the one after Prisoner of Azkaban--while Cuaron added to it, I totally believe people like this movie the best because the book itself was the best of the series).

Honestly, the series just went on too long.

[knives]

Really, because I though most of her problems stem from her prose which is essentially proficient. It works perfectly well for children's entertainment and has none of the ethical issues of something like Twilight, but impressive is not a word that comes to mind with these books.

[jojo]

Really, because I though most of her problems stem from her prose which is essentially proficient. It works perfectly well for children's entertainment and has none of the ethical issues of something like Twilight, but impressive is not a word that comes to mind with these books.

I don't know. I think her prose is good because she's always fairly clear and concise, unlike most fantasy writers whose sentences just go on and on and on. Most of the confusion tends to stem from her confused plotting rather than the words themselves. I'll grant you that she began to get more long-winded when she was able to exercise her power over her editors, but I've never tripped up on her prose.

[knives]

That's why I said proficient. There's nothing essentially wrong with it, but she's no Faulkner nor even a Pratchett.

[jojo]

That's why I said proficient. There's nothing essentially wrong with it, but she's no Faulkner nor even a Pratchett.

Yeah, I think I'll agree with that and probably I overstated her skill initially to give myself a reason to say "Hey, I did still enjoy it."

I can't objectively point to one thing I can say about Harry Potter that is actually "great", but ultimately I had a fun time with it, at least for the first few books. I guess that's really all I wanted to say.

[matrixschmatrix]

That's why I said proficient. There's nothing essentially wrong with it, but she's no Faulkner nor even a Pratchett.

I always think the closest analogy for Rowling is Philip Pullman, who wrote the Dark Materials trilogy- they're both ostensibly children's authors who wrote fantasy books with a lot of adult themes around the same time (and also, I think they've both been banned in various schools for anti-Christianity, which I imagine must have pleased Pullman.) I think in that comparison, we see that Rowling's strength is also kind of her weakness- her books are very well outlined and professionally constructed, with each plotline having a clear rising action/resolution kind of thing, but they also never take any of the risks or leaps that Pullman makes all the time. The result, to me, is that I enjoy the Potter books (particularly on tape, as listening to Stephen Fry talk is a treat unto itself) but there isn't anything in them I take particularly seriously- they feel like children's books, however much they tackle adult subjects, because they're built like them.

Pullman, though messy and liable to go off on wild tangents, is also capable of much stronger intuitive connections and wilder ideas. (It also helps that he didn't start constructing his world with a bunch of "in your world you have x... in ours we have wizard's x shit that Rowling never managed to get fully away from.) Children's books though they may be, there are parts of his trilogy that stay with me.

[Mr Sausage]

Really, because I though most of her problems stem from her prose which is essentially proficient.

I can't imagine what it's proficient at considering how clumsy it is and how much it relies on cliche. I guess her prose is meant to be read quickly and with little attention, otherwise you're bound to notice the sheer level of incompetence (my favourite being the way she'll sometimes describe characters in ways that contradict each other).

The average movie these days has a much higher level of professional craft than the average book. Certainly mass market films like blockbusters tend to have a very high level of craftsmanship in their productions, where a mass market book will often be horrendous on that same level. The Harry Potter films are, to me, anyway, a good example of this trend. I know if I start on the final Harry Potter volume I'm going to find it near unreadable, but if I see the final movie, I'm pretty certain to get a competently made product.

[colinr0380]

Really, because I though most of her problems stem from her prose which is essentially proficient. It works perfectly well for children's entertainment and has none of the ethical issues of something like Twilight, but impressive is not a word that comes to mind with these books.

No ethical issues? I'm probably going to sound like Nothing here, but isn't this a series about the elevating of a boarding school experience as a wondrous place where the most privileged (or lucky, or ordinary until they become "the Chosen One") children are taught the secret rules of the world and the battle for control over the levers of such power? Where even as the action expands, the emphasis gets placed much more on the interrelationships formed in the first few years to the exclusion of anything else, despite occasional disdainful glimpses of the outside world (i.e. London)? Much of this seems the fantasies of someone standing at the gates of the Establishment, making up wondrous delusions about what kind of arcane and wondrous repositories of knowledge are contained within, far more pernicious (and revealing) stuff than softcore abstinence fantasies like Twilight.

(And I'm sure the awful Jamie's Dream School, in which Jamie Oliver tried to get famous people in as teachers to run a school is just a ham-fisted attempt to 'do a Hogwarts' in the real world, sprinkled with a little bit of David Cameron's 'Big Society' stardust)

[matrixschmatrix]

That is a huge understatement about how screwed up Twilight is, man

[colinr0380]

To be fair, I drew the line at watching anything to do with Twilight (didn't the Buffy TV series do all the same kinds of plot beats a decade earlier anyway?)

[matrixschmatrix]

I've watched the movies and read some deconstructions of the books- though actually reading them was further than I was willing to go- and they're really problematic- the central relationships are full of rape culture issues, insofar as the metaphor for the vampire guy is essentially 'men are animals who can't help themselves', the portrayal of Native Americans as loyal dogs, a protagonist who wants nothing more than to be knocked up and married before she gets out of high school, etc, etc, etc.

Harry Potter has some issues, but they're mostly borne of unreconstructed repetition of earlier problematic material (a huge amount of the boarding school parts are part of a long, long tradition of School Stories, like Wodehouse's Psmith books)- they're messed up the way Indiana Jones is messed up, in that they don't consistently re-examine the ideas from the older stories they're recycling. Twilight is horrible, reactionary, fundamentalist gender (and racial) politics wrapped up in a fantasy story with nothing to redeem it.

[colinr0380]

Wow, that doesn't sound very good at all. I'd better tell my mum to stick to reading Anne Rice and not to go near that series!

[knives]

What Matrix said essentially. As bad as the boarding house stuff gets (and since the concept is so foreign to men it might as well be fantasy anyways) at least it doesn't have baby brides.

[domino harvey]

I'm being convincingly cajoled into watching all of these now. I've only seen the first one when it came out and it was cute. I'm not going to want to kill myself by the time I finish is what you're all telling me, right?

[knives]

You'll at worst be left with an overwhelming feeling of meh.

[Tom Hagen]

I would trade watching a bunch of Harry Potter movies for having sex, if that's what you're getting at.

[mfunk9786]

The third one is the only bad film of the bunch

[Tom Hagen]

Isn't that the Cuarón one that everyone loves?

[karmajuice]

Does anyone else feel like Rowling's prose style improves significantly after the first few books? Glancing back over the first two or three, I found them virtually unreadable. They're as bad as Sausage makes them out to be. The later books may be overlong and grandiose to a fault, but they are much more competently written. It almost feels as though two different people wrote them.

I'm not saying the prose style is exceptional in the later books, but I wouldn't go so far as to call it bad. Proficient is a good word.

As an aside, I find the books most compelling when they focus on the characters, the routines of school life, clandestine moments -- the spaces between the plot. The plot itself is fine, as these sorts of plots go, and it lends itself to some nice moments and some solid emotional currents, but it's a secondary concern for me. The movies may be competently made, but they're forced to focus on the plot and those elements of the books which most charmed me fall by the wayside. I'm not saying I necessarily prefer the books, my feelings on that fluctuate. But the books have something that the movies don't entirely tap into.
I do detest Rowling's insistence on forcing drama between the primary characters at least once in every book. Even if it's true to life (and I don't think it necessarily is), it becomes tiresome to read the same dramas being played out over and over in some pitiful attempt to generate tension we know won't last.

Domino, it couldn't hurt to watch them but I would avoid a marathon viewing at all costs.

[mfunk9786]

Isn't that the Cuarón one that everyone loves?

Fans of the books almost universally hate it, me being one.

[matrixschmatrix]

Isn't that the Cuarón one that everyone loves?

Fans of the books almost universally hate it, me being one.

I'm certainly more a fan of the books than a fan of the movies, and it's more or less the only one among the movies I thought was actually good- several of the others are pretty watchable, though. I thought the first two nigh-unwatchably awful.

[cdnchris]

My wife is a big fan of the books and movies so I've seen them all. I liked the third one only because it felt like a lot of BS was cut out of it, something I felt plagued the first two, which for me were torture to sit through. It was also visually far more interesting and the characters were better fleshed out. Still, I didn't find the story terribly interesting for that one. The fourth one I barely remember other than Fiennes showing up quickly at the end.

I actually didn't get into the films until probably the fifth one, which I'm surprised to see seems to be pretty hated here. I found myself more intrigued by the characters and the story was far more engaging (I actually wish Imelda Staunton's character was in more of the movies.) Since that one I've actually been fairly pleased with each movie thereafter and that may have given me an inflated opinion of the director.

I liked this last one but it really is just a big climax, like you're walking in on the end of a movie (which I guess is what it is.) Sadly I never really invested myself in the characters until the last few films and never read the books so maybe I didn't get the full impact (a lot of people in the audience were far more into it than I, including my wife) but I'm tempted to actually go through each one again if I can bring myself to sit through the sheer hell of the first couple.