Now I know I've already ranted about this to you for hours, but...you know how much I HATED how Harry didn't show any remorse at the end of the movie; Dumbledore said "I only avoided you because I was trying to protect you" and Harry's pretty much like, "OK." (GRRR!) But I've had 24 hours to philosophize, and here's my two cents: like I said, any movie that attempts to adapt a book has to include its crucial plot. The first HP movie worked because the crucial plot wasn't so *epic*, like in the 5th, so it could accomodate more fun other stuff that gave it a good balance (CLASSES, quidditch, feasts, etc.) The 5th movie is not to blame for being too cursory, because it stuck to its first priority- the main plot line. Now, it was dissatisfying in many ways; why is a HP movie with a truly epic, complicated storyline (HP5) dissatisfying when other movies with equally epic and complicated (if not MORE epic and complicated) storylines- Lord of the Rings is an example- succeed? Well, Harry Potter thrives on including a childish (and, at times, teenagery-ish) sensitivity in its stories that its readers feel familiar with (vs. LotR, which doesn't depend so much on that familiarity)- in a sense HP depends on the real world, because we like reading about balls, teenage-type romance, and the general school-like setting of Hogwarts. When the HP5 movie can only accomodate a huge, complicated, epic storyline (a la 4 or 5, not 1 or 2, which were wonderful movies IMO) at the expense of all that other stuff, it just can't really work well. Lord of the Rings, on the other hand, doesn't thrive on any of that stuff- it can be 3 hours of pure epic fantasy overdrive and you still don't feel a strange sense of nostalgia at the end because you haven't been robbed of a cruciual part of what makes Harry Potter so fun: the characters' social lives, *jokes* (Weasleys, anyone?), high school comaraderie, etc. All that stuff isn't IN LotR in the first place. It doens't need that, so it works being purely epic; the epic Harry Potter books (4 and 5 are examples) don't work as movies because Harry Potter can't be just epic- they have to have all that other stuff.
And also, the writing just sucked.
Whaddya think?
Have a good weekend in Boston!