My own self

Urgh, Harry Potter movies. The only I actually like is tPoA; the rest I can only stomach to the degree that I can sit through them with a rising level of irritation. It all usually culminates in me vowing never to see another one Ever Again, which is a promise I always seem to forget, and then I have to suffer through another travesty. Good gods, I can almost feel the bile rising.

Clearly though, I'm quite heavily biased here so you're probably more on the money than I am.

What is it you loathe so much about them? To my mind, they're perfectly adequate adaptions of the books. Most of the ones which have read being, admittedly, rather unimpressive, but I seem to recall your liking them somewhat more than me. Anyway, I feel the movies were much like the books: overly flashy, with a few interesting twists along the way and some amusing and engaging sequences, but on the whole rather unoriginal and in the vicinity of boring. Hence my grades being around 7-7.5 - they're good, they're not great. The movies get a little more leniency because I feel they should be awarded for feeling close to the source material.

Oh, there's so much I dislike about them that I could write entire books on the subject. But in the bitter end, when all the pettiness and fanboy-railing has puttered out, it would all boil down to this:

I grew up with Harry Potter. I read every book upon its publication, so the story matured alongside with me, much like there was this magical world with magical friends that I could visit whenever I felt like it. I remember I spent three months reading all five books that were currently out, over and over again until I could practically recite my favourite bits. I didn't just _read_ Harry Potter. I damn near _lived_ it.

Fast forward to the movie release of the Philosopher's Stone. Mind you, I was still pretty young when this hit, but I still remember being unrecognisably grumpy for a long time after watching it. It was like someone had taken this awesome movie with my some of my favourite people in the world, and remade it into something very similar, but yet different enough from my vision that I somehow felt betrayed. I wanted to run up onto the movie screen and tap it, just so everyone could hear the hollow sound of this film. It was an... abomination is too strong a word. Imposter is perhaps more fitting. Nearly the same, but still no way close.

I've never watched that movie again.

Then came the second film, and this one I liked a bit better because I was getting used to the actors. But it still wasn't MY Harry Potter. It still didn't have the feel of the work that I so dearly loved, and I still felt like watching the movies was like watching someone recolour and remodel your childhood bedroom. It was nice, but it wasn't the way it was supposed to be.

The third film I actually really liked, and was practically overjoyed that they'd manage to make a good movie of my favourite book in the series. The thing was though, that The Prisoner of Azkaban film isn't just a movie adaptation of the book; it's the movie _version_. It didn't reMAKE, it reFITTED. It was brilliant.

When the fourth film hit, I had high hopes that it could continue the positive trend the two previous films had shown, even though they had changed directors (again...). The fourth book is quite good, and it's also the one that, perhaps, is best suited for the movie format.

But I was fooled, I was wronged, I was betrayed yet again! The fourth film is a foul version of what should've been made. It has none of the magic of the third film, and by the end I was literally sick to my stomach. It was so utterly, utterly bad.

The fifth film? It's based on what might be the weakest book in the series (perhaps a bit better than the last, depending on whether or not you like the ending of the series). The movie version did, of course, suck as much as I had come to expect.

So yeah, I'm heavily biased, and I am aware that a lot of fans like these films. I'll never be one of them; I don't know if I'd even like the books if I reread them, but at least I feel like I honour their memory by Never Fucking Liking These Fucking Films.

Ah, I see. I might have had a tad similar experience with the original "Kaptein Sabeltann"-movie/act, seeing as I'd spent a year or so listening to a cassette with the same story, and nobody looked like they should. At least, though, they sounded like they should, and the picture of the title character on the cover made certain that he, at least, looked like I expected. So I never felt any anger, just some slight disappointment.

Of course, by the time I read any Harry Potter (the first two books in one weekend when I was either sixteen or seventeen, I believe), I was far too old to get any relationship to them on the level of yours. I _DID_ grow up with Tolkien, but I had drowned the memories of the Reading Tolkien And Little Else Over And Over-years with five years or so of reading a dozen other fantasy authors by the time the first movie came out, and thus I was probably just easy-going enough with the memory of the book to enjoy it. (That, and, you know, that movie was bloody perfect) Tolkien was a finished chapter of my life at that point, and the movie rejuvenated it rather than tarnish it.

Harry Potter, while I liked it a lot during the initial read-through of the first three books, never made an Impression on me. It fell vastly short of my memory of The Belgariad, which I suppose is directed at a similar age-group and that I grew up with the Norwegian translations of much like you grew up with Harry. Narnia as well, with my watching the BBC-series actually preceding my reading the books, was a distant memory when I read HP - and compared to this young-adult/children's fantasy I'd actually grown up with, reading HP in my mid-teens just didn't have an impact. It was fine. It was fun. It was alright. And then came the fourth book, and I for some reason never really warmed to it. Haven't read or reread any of them since.

I agree the third movie (and, of the four I've read, the third book) is by far the best. I might have been a little too lenient in my grading of 4 and 5 here based on never having seen them before after a seven-hour-watch-through of movies I'd seen based on books I remembered well. Possibly they should be put down .5 each.

Let's see. I'd bump CoS down .5, GoF up .5, and OotP down at least 1.5, but apart from that I agree with your ratings. And OotP gets such a rough treatment mainly because it has the ungrateful task of adapting what might not be the best of the books, but most certainly is the most eventful. What it does handle, it handles very well, for the most part, but there are so many things it doesn't handle, I had some fears about it not making sense to people who hadn't read the book. (A hypothesis which my previous data supported, but which you has made me doubt, although the fact that you are much brighter than both my mum and my dad has to be factored in, somehow. )

Also, as someone who doesn't quite have the relationship to these books that Amras does, but who can still sink into a pool of wistfulness when contemplating that the Harry Potter saga is a closed chapter in the history of Western literature, I (as is pretty obvious from my ratings) think that the movie adaptations are fairly adequate; two of them are even quite good. (In fact, the ending of GoF, which caused Amras so much distress, made me cry a bit when I first saw it.) Granted, the first two are a bit on the childish, "American" side (quite light, shiny, dazzling, but more concerned with quidditch than with the characters or the plot), and the fifth one a bit short (how they could decide that DH was worth two movies, but OotP only one is beyond me), but apart from that, they're pretty much just what I require them to be.

Also, Loki, considering your almost uncharacteristic dislike of the books, I'm surprised to see you rate the movies this high. I believe I have rated all the movies but PoA lower than this on occasion, and I'm quite the uncritical fanboy...

I am much too free with my 8s, that's the thing... it's this ill habit that I can't seem to shake.

And thank you for an extensive comment. On OotP, all I can say is, well, I DID watch it with Sarah, who has read all the books and seen all the movies at least once before. We did pause to talk about stuff (where we know that actor from, how this little scene cleverly tied into a previous movie, etc) every now and then. I can't recall feeling confused about anything she had to clear up during those pauses, but that doesn't mean it didn't happen. And I'm sure I'm not smarter than your parents. After all, they've survived longer than I have.

Ah, being too free with one's 8s. A disability with which I am only too familiar...

(I mean, if I like a movie, 7 or even 7.5 feels so vanilla, you know?)

It's crazy, though. I almost NEVER go under 6, and almost NEVER go above 8.5. Everything I watch is "pretty decent" or "rather good", you know? I'm too hooked up on nuance, that's the thing, I can always find something redeeming in a movie - usually whatever aspect of the movie that made me want to watch it in the first place. My mere sitting down to watch something usually guarantees it has enough going for it to get at least a 6...

But I think we could probably penalize all these movies with .5 and my ratings would still be something I can vouch for. However, since I wrote this post much closer after actually watching them than I am right now, I feel I can't change them now without rewatching the movies first. Thus, I'm letting them stand. But with the caveat that I should probably have been a little stricter, yeah. I was being lenient on purpose, though, to try to reflect an added enjoyment for feeling the movies were pretty close to the source material.

"My mere sitting down to watch something usually guarantees it has enough going for it to get at least a 6..."

That's the case for me, too. I know my own taste well enough to know what kind of movies I like, meaning that I don't watch too many which receive law ratings, and I also usually award movies that manage to pull me in and forget the world for a few hours -- which isn't really the most difficult thing in the world...

As for the differences between our ratings, they're marginal enough to be almost ignored, aren't they? At least if we keep OotS out of the equation, and I believe I have explained my reasons for penalising that one.

I AM to free with my 8s, though. Sigh.