Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows Part One

Welcome to 2011, everybody!
Why not start the year by going to see a movie I thought I'd cleverly avoided seeing back in November or whenever it was it came out?
Okay, see, here's the thing:
I hate the Harry Potter movies. I like the books quite a lot, even if I'm not always terribly fond of the character Harry Potter (seriously? This is our hero?) but the movies are like Insta-Bad Mood for me.
The kids are good enough actors, I guess, but all of the adults seem to be phoning it in. The sets are beautiful but the scripts are awful. And I want to kick the girl who plays Luna Lovegood down a flight of stairs; she plays the character one hundred percent wrong.
So the Harry Potter movies, in general, can be summed up in three words: Pretty But Shitty.
The fifth one was by far the worst, and not just because it's the worst book. Harry Potter And The Order Of The Phoenix is physically painful to watch. Everything about it is horrile; they even managed to make the scene where Fred and George leave (the one scene that really makes the book worth reading) a stupid and disappointing letdown. You know it's a bad movie when I walk out of the theater saying "Wow, even Gary Oldman sucked." That's not a sentence I should have ever had to say.
So who knows, maybe after that piece of garbage there was nowhere to go but up. Maybe I just lowered my expectations so much that the movies couldn't affect me anymore. Maybe my not caring at all anymore works in the movies' favor.
Because I had no opinion on the sixth Harry Potter movie one way or the other. And I actually kinda liked this one.
It was too long, but I'm pretty sure it covered more than half of the book which is, itself, quite long.
They chose to excise Dudley's awesome moment from near the beginning of the book, which really bugged me. If you're going to make an extremely long movie anyway, why not leave in a formerly horrible character's redeeming moment?
The girl who plays Luna still doesn't fucking get it and neither does Helena Bonham Carter (who at least looks cool); I will never back down on my stance that neither of them play their characters as they should be played and both of them are painfully miscast. At least neither of them were in this movie very much.
Voldemort still looks completely hilarious and not at all threatening or scary. Seriously, if Captain No Nose actually tried to start some sort of evil revolution, nobody would listen to him. We'd all just laugh. 'Cause he looks silly.
In spite of all that, I'm feeling pretty good about the movie.
I don't know, maybe I'm just feeling lenient today. Looking back, there were a lot of points where it seemed like nothing was happening. But at least it was being faithful to the book, unlike all the other Harry Potter movies. Most of Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows is a whole lot of nothing.
Maybe I didn't like the movie as a whole, but it had moments I really liked.
I loved the part where Hermione reads the fairy tale that explains what the Deathly Hallows are, which was shown in a creepy animated sequence that Tim Burton wishes he came up with (but never could have because it was too cool. Bazinga!). George gets a funny moment near the beginning of the movie when he walks in on Harry and Ginny kissing in the kitchen. (Ginny, by the way, looks exactly like the woman who played Sally on Coupling, but smaller. Are they related?)
For all my talk of the movie being faithful to the book, though, my two favorite moments in the movie aren't actually in the book.
The first is when the Snatchers stop the Hogwarts Express looking for Harry. Some kid tells them "My father will hear about this!" which is a stupid and hilarious threat. But then Neville Longbottom stands up, insults the Snatchers to their faces and tells them "He's not here," and basically tells them to piss off. Neville Longbottom is my hero (and I'd actually rather read the story of his seventh year at Hogwarts more than I'd like to read the seventh Harry Potter book again).
The second moment was sweet and endearing, and ripe for mockery but I just can't bring myself to do it. There's a part (SPOILER, for those of you who haven't read the book or seen the movie) where Ron gets mad and ditches Harry and Hermione in the middle of the woods because it's boring and they don't know what they're doing. Harry and Hermione keep on keepin' on but are understandably upset and saddened by their best friend's departure. There's a scene where Hermione is sitting in the tent, staring at the floor and listening to a sad song on the radio, and Harry goes over to her and they dance. It's not in any way a romantic moment; it's just two friends cheering each other up during a hard time. And it was by far the best scene in the movie. It could have been narmy or schmaltzy and it wasn't.
It was, as far as I'm concerned, the only honest or genuine moment in the entire Harry Potter movie series.

End of line.
-Sally