Posted by jkm822 at michigan.mgmt.rpi.edu on June 16, 2003 at 15:27:47:
In Reply to: don't judge a book by the movies based upon it posted by DRD #37 on June 16, 2003 at 14:19:05:
: Compared to the books, the Harry Potter movies are total shit.
Well, that I DO agree with. Mind you, I like the movies. The books are just way better. But that's pretty much as it should be.
: Although I do agree that Tolkien is deep, I think Harry Potter is just as deep, once you excuse all the shitty merchandise that Warner Bros. made after the movie deal was cut.
I DON'T agree with this. Tolkien is way, way, way, way, way deeper than Harry Potter. But I don't think that necessarily makes it BETTER than the Harry Potter series. Tolkien is WORK to read. I don't know, most of the time, I don't want to fight my way through the prose just to get to the story. I don't want to have to figure out where, within the last 10 pages, the plot occured within all the flowery descriptions of elvish writing, the smoke rising over the hillside, the deep dark dismalness of the bad guys. Sometimes I just want to know what's ACTUALLY going on in the story, without having to turn back a few pages and say, "OH! OK, so THAT's what happened there! I got lost in all the fucking descriptions!"
Harry Potter is nothing like that. It's got all the fun, adventure type stuff of a Tolkien-esque work, without all the hard work. It has no pretensions to being fine literature, it's just enjoyable. And that works for me.