Doctor.

I saw the movie today was pretty boring but I'm not a big potter fan in the first place there was a noticeable plot hole in the movie though which I found funny.

but ya William Gibson for the win now when the hell are they going to get a nerumancer movie made damn it

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Mosatii

William Gibson is an excellent author. I'm rereading all of his books at the moment. The first attempt at a movie adaptation of Neuromancer was killed, and there is another one in the works at the moment. Even though it has a $70M budget I'm extremely worried. It's being directed by an inexperienced director who's only other full length feature was a ****ty movie called Torque (if you ever saw Brittney Spears video for Toxic, he directed that too).

I will say this about Harry Potter - if it is your only reading material, as an adult ,you really need to explore more engaging works.

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Tarenth

True. That would be why it is a children's/young adult series. The light entertainment and easy reading that makes it attractive to children is what turns off people used to more engaging and heavier books. On the flip side, the more engaging and heavier books people read for their entertainment would bore or confuse children silly.

I seriously didn't think they'd make a 5th movie. I remember reading somewhere that they only acquired the license up till the 4th and were still 'up in the air' over following the rest of the installments. Guess that changed and shows how involved I am with keeping up with entertainment news. ^_^

Something to also consider is the weight (literal weight and number of pages) between each of the books has grown as the series has progressed. The themes in each of them have also matured as the characters have matured. In book one you have definate childish overtones in a short read with the shadowy 'bad guy' lurking firmly in the background. As you progress you get more mature topics and darker settings as the 'bad guy' is portrayed more in depth and things like mutilation, death, torture, discrimination, bigotry, and betrayal are brought into the books.

This is both good and bad in a way. Good because as the themes get more mature it will broaden the field of interest to more mature readers. Bad because eventually if you want to get the full impact of the book in a movie you're going to need to go into pretty obsurd lengths. I haven't seen the movie, but I've heard they cut out quite a bit from the book to keep the 5th movie as short as they did. Book 6 is even longer then book 5 and rumors have book 7 being truely massive. How true they stay to the book if they make a 6th and eventual 7th movie would be interesting to see. If they can keep it interesting without dissapointing fans of the books then it would be an accomplishment.

If you can get a child to sit down and read a 600+ page book without pictures and not have an adult standing over them or an assignment due at the end egging them on, then you truely have something worth looking into. To be honest I read the whole series and I'm actually interested in what the 7th book will be like. I actually started when I saw the 4th book and saw how large it was. I said to my self "If she can get kids to read something that big then there must be something to it".

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msdz

Tarenth, I completely agree with everything you said. The books were as I read J.K. Rowlings quote "the books are to mature as the readers mature". It was an added bonus a lot of adults enjoyed her books as well, including myself and I am also anxiously waiting for book 7.

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Uranium - 235

I have to agree. JK Rowlings' writing is terrible. Her books aren't really 'for kids' anymore, not since the first one, maybe two if I'm generous, but she still writes like a side-project of some goth kid still in Jr. High School. I won't speak on the plot as I haven't suffered the literary torture of her brutal treatment of English, but from what I gathered she's yet to break her average sentence length of 4 words. "Harry looked at Ron. He smiled. 'Don't worry, it'll be okay', he said. Ron laughed. Harry pointed. Ron looked. Ron saw Spot. Run Spot run. Ron sees Spot run."

Saying that success = quality is so very wrong it's amazing how many people believe it. Oblivion sold well, but it was probably the most bland, overhyped, contentless pile of crap I'd installed on my computer in nearly 4 years.

Commercial success has nothing to do with how good something is. Fallout didn't sell too hot, neither did Vampire: The Masquerade. Both were EXTREMELY quality titles. System Shock 2 also didn't sell very well.

On the contrary, one of the most popular shooters today is Halo - everyone whom I consider people with brains and taste recognize it as a very badly designed, unexciting, crappy shooter. STALKER was another game that sold well, but it too was every bit as terrible and void of quality as Oblivion.

You have to remember that today's society is extremely attention-deficit, undereducated, and has exceedingly bad taste. That's the trick to cash in on. A veritable tome of epic proportions the length and breadth of say, 'Atlas Shrugged', even if it were a Harry Potter novel, would find itself lacking in the hearts and minds of those who read the books as they are now. Big words, long sentences, subtle meanings, all of which are lost on the literary layman nowadays.

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Vulcan

lol you snobs!

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Uranium - 235

Kinda like how not wearing your seat belt will save your life in one in ten thousand car crashes, right?

A book doesn't have to be a cryptic codex of the arcane to be good, but "See Spot Run" isn't gonna win a Pulitzer any day soon.

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CingularDuality

I don't see the analogy there with the seatbelt, but if you want to limit your reading enjoyment to nothing but award winners you go ahead and do that. Me? I've got Harry Potter being delivered to me on the 21st.

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ednos

A book doesn't have to have those qualities, CingularDuality, but the English in it has to be at least bearable. None of the Harry Potter books meet that requirement.

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CingularDuality

Millions of people, including myself, disagree with you. <shrug>

Some people just like to hate things. That's cool...

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msdz

I completely agree with you on that one. I have hated things that the majority liked just to be different. Thankfully I grew out of that a long time ago. I like what I like, not because someone else does.
Still, the books matured from the first, they might not have matured enough to please a lot of people. Maybe that is why the Harry Potter series is coming to an end, because she knows she played them out and the original younger readers are now older possibly looking into a mature book?
No matter, I still enjoyed the books and I know my children do to. For my daughter to sit down at 6 years old and start reading the Harry Potter books was completely amazing in it self. That IS a good author if she is able to captivate the attention of young children. Guess Dr. Suess was a poor author also and that would be another disagreement there. Stephen King also reads the same way, just for more of a mature crowd but hardly anyone puts his novels down.

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Tarenth

Wow. Just wow. About as subtle as a brick to the side of the head. So basically you're saying you don't like the books and anyone who likes the books is stupid because you haven't read the books and don't intend to read the books. Hummm...alright, I can accept that.
[sarcasm]Way to keep an open mind about things. You truely do know how to put forth a convincing arguement and give solid evidence to your position.[/sarcasm]

I'm going out on a limb and assume the discussion about the 5th movie has been hijacked by a discussion of the book series itself. Yes?

Everyone is entitled to their own opinion and chances are for every 1 person who dislikes the Harry Potter series for reasons of their own there will be 5 people who disagree and have enjoyed it. That is what it means to be 'popular'. Popularity does not automatically bestow merit upon something, it just means it appeals to a majority of its audience.

If you are going to state your opinion and stance then please try not to belittle the opinion of others with wild accusations or use the age old excuse of "I am right, because everyone who disagrees with me is stupid".

I must admit that was pretty impressive. I haven't been called an idiot in such a blatently obvious way with claims to subtlety in quite a while. People tend to either fence with words or pull out the sledgehammer and hit you with them. Very few people ever try for the "You're an idiot, but I'm not really calling you an idiot because you'd be too stupid to understand that." approach.

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Vulcan

This is not a book discussion thread! It's about the movie dangit!

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Zoraster

Verbosity isn't the sign of quality. Hemingway is one of the most celebrated authors in American literature, and his work is characterized by restraint. That's certainly still true in today's best literature

Still, that doesn't mean simplicity is a sign of quality either. I agree there's a lot to be said for stretching the intellectual limitations one has, and Harry Potter is not likely to do that. However, that hardly means that (1) the prose isn't good or (2) that's an actual problem.

The prose, frankly, is quite good. It serves its purpose well, and there's a lot that's clever with it. It's unlikely to increase many educated adults' vocabulary (beyond perhaps a few Britishisms and those words that make up the Harry Potter Lexicon [e.g. Muggle]), but that's hardly the point.

The point is to create a universe, identify with the characters in that universe and create a compelling story using those two things. Rowling does that admirably, and that's why it has success.

Take Ludlum. His strength clearly isn't his prose or dialogue which is actually quite a bit weaker than Rowling's. His strength is the ability to create storylines that are compelling and surprising. His prose is good enough that it doesn't stand in the way of these things, but that's all it does. Which is just fine.

I agree that everyone should read things that are hard for them. It's no surprise that people on facebook often list things that they read in classes as their favorite books . It's not just that they're trying to seem smart (though I imagine this is no small part), but rather a deeper enjoyment can be had from these things.

But that doesn't mean that reading is limited to just one thing. There's certainly room for both Harry Potter, Philip Roth, Ludlum, Dostoevsky and Dickens.

I'm not saying you have to read or like Harry Potter, but I do say you probably should be less dismissive of those who do. The same is true with something like Snow Patrol. Personally, I find them boring and mediocre, but I don't think I need to chastise those who do like them. Will I ask those people for music suggestions? No. Do I need to enter a thread called "Snow Patrol's New Album" and talk about why everyone else is an idiot? No.

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