Casey’s Literary Rants

In which I rant about a certain movie coming out this past weekend

Can you guess what movie I’m talking about? It really shouldn’t be too hard, since it’s practically the only movie everyone is talking about. Yeah, I’m talking about Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2. Now, can you guess who is not going to go see this movie? That would be me.

Yes, you read that right. I am absolutely, positively NOT going to go see the last Harry Potter movie.

Now, before you go start calling me a Harry Hater or something like that let me set the record straight. I adore Harry Potter. I grew up reading his story (and yes, when I was 11 years old I would sit by a window and wait for an owl to arrive with my letter to Hogwarts, or the American version of the wizarding school). However, in my personal opinion, I think the movie adaptions kind of really suck. As in, the movies were like a tiny bite of chocolate while the novels were like a moist, melt in your mouth delicious, triple layered German Chocolate Cake. Big difference.

In the first two movies, I have to admit that Harry, Ron and Hermione were absolutely adorable and that completely made up for their lack of acting skills. I mean, who couldn’t smile when Hermione would raise her hand in class and practically bounce on the edge of her seat in anticipation for answering the question. But then, by Prisoner of Azkaban, they had grown up and lost that cuteness and with that, it became glaringly obvious that they couldn’t really act. To be fair, their acting skills have improved slightly over the years, but I stopped watching the movies after  Goblet of Fire.

But it wasn’t just the actors that put me off from the movies. It was the way the directors and script writers cut out so much of the epic novels. Obviously, it’s impossible to fit everything from a thick novel (Sorcerer’s Stone had 309 pages and Goblet of Fire had 734 pages) into one movie. (Yes, I do realize that Deathly Hallows was cut into two movies for that very purpose.) But they left out so much in all of the previous movies that it didn’t do the novels justice. (See chocolate analogy above.) Take for example the ending of Sorcerer’s Stone. In the movie, they cut out several of the tasks that Harry, Ron and Hermoine went through in the book before Harry met with Voldemort. Um, hello?! That was lots of important, epic fighting and character development. And in Chamber of Secrets they completely cut out Nearly-Headless Nick’s birthday party. Poof! Gone from the story shown by the movies, never to be seen on the big screen.

I don’t know if cutting things out is worse than adding them. Like when they added the moving stairs in the first two movies. What was the point of that? I know that Chris Columbus’ daughter came up with that idea for them and good for her. But honestly they were annoying as hell. I mean really, if the third floor corridor was off limits, then why would magically moving stairs deposit Harry, Ron and Hermoine right there? Sure it helped with the plot in the movie, but there was a perfectly good plot in the book that led them to Fluffy.

I could go on and on for hours about everything that made me intensely dislike the Harry Potter movies. I won’t but let me say this: for those of you who are going to go see the movie, by all means enjoy your time munching on popcorn while sitting in a dark theater and watching the final movie. For those of you who are like me and not going, we can still munch on popcorn while we reread the ending to the epic story about an orphan boy who used to live in the cupboard under the stairs but just so happened to be a wizard.