With J.K. Rowling’s Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them landing in theaters this week, we are about to kick off a whole new run of flicks exploring the world of Harry Potter. Though this movie won’t feature The Boy Who Lived, it does make us think about the kid with that nasty scar on his head.
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I would have to say Prisoner of Azkaban is my favorite movie in the series. However Order of the Phoenix is my favorite book.
Ditto on favorite book (Half-Blood Prince comes in a close second), though my favorite movies are the last two. Out of the entire series, I think they were the closest to me to what the original books felt like (although I can’t blame them for leaving so much out considering the limitations of movie run times and all that).
You forgot the – I’ve never seen a Harry Potter movie choice. :-)
I don’t like Harry Potter stories very much because I find them overstuffed with magic and magic users. I just can’t reconcile that with being able to stay hidden in the Muggles world. But I have watched all the movies trying to understand why people like it.
The only one I enjoyed was Prisoner of Azkaban. The look and characters were more mature and the plotting was tight with a really good use of time travel. Directors make a difference!
There are more details in the books about how the magic world is kept hidden from Muggles, including things like memory alteration (there is even a special department in the Ministry of Magic that deals with that sort of thing in the event a wizard/witch uses magic in public or a magical creature is seen or a non-magic user stumbles on a wizarding community or whatever), magical barriers, etc. It isn’t perfect and there are some holes in the explanations, but I admire that thought was actually put into it to explain it rather than just using an excuse like “Well, muggles can’t see magic” or some other lazy excuse (like “The Mist” in the Percy Jackson series, though I do find the series enjoyable, I thought it was kinda lazy to say normal humans just can’t perceive supernatural stuff).
The problem is that I am an adult and explanations that a teen might accept just aren’t going to work for me. I might have been able to take the plunge if that first movie hadn’t turned me off with its rubbery monsters and blurry CGI. It only exacerbated what I found to be questionable logic. Thanks, tho.
I’m almost 40, so… Not a teen.
No worries. I’m actually agreeing with you on that point, it is one of my biggest pet peeves of the movies. On one hand, I can understand they had limitations with run time and executive meddling and all that, but I really think they left out more details than they should have. Don’t get me wrong, I think they did a decent job overall adapting them to film, but they skipped over so many things that could have made the movie setting that much deeper (though a few did end up showing up as deleted scenes, so I’m really looking in the direction of executive meddling on that).
I had to go with the first movie because the question was which movie is my favorite, not which movie was the best. Daniel Radcliffe’s weird eye twitch (blinking one eye at a time) is what really makes this movie for me. Chris Columbus may have tried to leave too much of the book in the movie, but based on the success of this film, the entire franchise was able to be made.
Everything was so fresh and new. In some of the later books things weren’t as awe-inspiring; we had seen it all before. The later books had lost their magic. ;)