I don't get it...

I just saw Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince today, expecting to be at least midly entertained.

I was wrong.

I was bored out of my skull. Bored with the moodiness, the lack of humour the damn teen angst. Has Twighlight even scared the makers of the HP movies?

I love the books. Can't read them enough. Have read them all at least twice, as I recall. I love the humor, the adventure and the not so hidden Christian message in the whole series. A scholar of children's literature, Jack Zipes - Marxist and athiest - said after only three or four of the books were out that this series was following the pattern of the Christian knight. I didn't believe it then, but after book 7, I saw it loud and clear. This profound idea is lost to the idea that we need to just show a string of scenes from each book.

The movies? Don't own or want to own any of them. I find they're more to appeal to fans who want to see "certain scenes" on screen. Unlike Jackson's The Lord of the Rings trilogy, I feel the makers of the Harry Potter movies have lost touch with the spirit of the stories. Jackson added, deleted and manipulated the key events in the story to fit cinema and illustrate his own interpretations, but I don't feel that we lost Tolkien's original themes and ideas. Harry Potter tends to be scenes from the books, without the ideas that propel the story. I guess, in a sense, I felt the same way about Star Trek (2009) - something was lost in the translation to the big screen.

Although, like ST, perhaps in 20 years we'll get the "reboot" of the Harry Potter movies. I wonder what Jackson is doing after producing The Hobbit?

EDIT: Yay! Here's a review of the movie that I agree with! And it's from Philly!