Pornokitsch

Least favorite book: Order of the Phoenix.  Harry's angst is really difficult to deal with, as a reader, primarily because HE SHOUTS ALL HIS DIALOGUE BECAUSE HE IS ANGRY GRR.  Yes, obligatory "Voldemort was in his head; it's part of the plot" defense; yes, obligatory "Rowling's merits as an author" debate; whatever. The long and the short of it is that Harry's an insufferable brat in this one.  But Order suffers on other counts, as well.  Umbridge is an over-the-top caricature of a villain in a grindingly serious world; the Order itself reads as a lame, tacked-on addition to side of good, the prophecy thing makes no sense, and the entire problem with Dumbledore, which in large part drives the novel, could have been avoided if Dumbledore had just fucking talked to Harry from the beginning.  A number of these issues are muted in the film adaptation, though not entirely done away with.

Honorable Mention: Deathly Hallows. Book needed a serious edit.

Favorite film: Prisoner of Azkaban.  Thoughtful directorial choices, stunning cinematography and a well-considered, pared-down screenplay make Prisoner the stand-out film of the series. The film reigns in the twinkly, silly excesses of the previous two adaptations without indulging in the wallowing grimness which characterizes the final five. Cuarón decorticated the plot, coaxed remarkably good performances out of the child actors, and gave the (far more interesting) adult actors something to do.  I mean, really: the cast list for the franchise is fucking staggering, and for what?  So Maggie Smith, Jim Broadbent, Michael Gambon, Emma Thompson, Gary Oldman, David Thewlis, Kenneth Branagh, Brendan Gleeson, Imelda Staunton, Fiona Shaw, Richard Harris, John Cleese, Timothy Spall, David Tennant, Bill Nighy, Ralph Fiennes, Helena Bonham Carter and Alan Motherfucking Rickman can stand around in the background while Ron and Harry and Hermione wail about their feeeelings. 

How did it come to this?  I played Richard III.
Five curtain calls. I was an actor once.

Hey! Let's all go watch Galaxy Quest.

Least favorite film: Chamber of Secrets. A slavish adaptation that clocks in at approximately a billionty hours and, like a very dumb dog, takes unseemly pleasure in rolling around in its own steaming excesses. Even Kenneth Branagh's delightful turn as the villain can't save this over-long, undercooked, incredibly boring movie.  There must have been a way to make Dobby less intolerable, but Chamber failed to realize it.

Favorite Dumbledore: Michael Gambon.  I never really read Dumbledore as twinkly and mischeveous, so Gambon's dark, angry, and infinitely sad take on the character suited both my interpretation and the increasingly dark tone of the post-Columbus films.

Favorite character [tie]: Hermione.  The only useful party member. In real life she'd have been an anorexic over-achieving burnout by age 17. But hey, this is fiction!  In the end she gets to be a total badass with the Hogwarts equivalent of a 4.0 despite skipping out on her final year. (I don't love Emma Watson's performances - girl really likes to act with her eyebrows - but I don't hate them, either.) Hermione's the first major character to question her world's rules and wrestle with its principles - all this while her best friends are busy hitting each other over the head with rolled-up quidditch posters.  While she does their homework for them.  Oh, Hermione.  You deserve so much better.

Imagine a film starring all these actors.
Now imagine it's not a Harry Potter.
Hurts, dunnit?

Favorite character [tie]: Snape.  Snape's journey was one of the more interesting in the series, and I must be right because the entire internet agrees.  I felt, however, that it was underplayed in the films (people who haven't read the seventh book have apparently interpreted the final film's big reveal to mean that Snape is Harry's dad).  Despite being criminally underused in the movies, Rickman strolled away with every scene he appeared in. What really got me, though, was that the film [SPOILER] changed the final battle with Voldemort, but didn't change the bit where Lord Lizardnose dies without knowing that Snape betrayed him.  There wasn't so much as a single sentence about how Snape, you know, spent his entire adult life as a double agent and saved the fucking world.  Harry doesn't even tell Ron and Hermione.  Or McGonagall.  Or anyone.  Instead, Snape's reward is to have some asshole name his kid after him.  Middle-name his kid after him.  His second kid.

Anything else? Adam Roberts has written about Harry Potter a few times, and you should go read everything he has to say right now.  Also, he totally agrees with me about the most important takeaway from the whole damned mess: "But best of all... is Alan Rickman's Severus Snape: and in particular the way he delivers his lines, namely in an extraordinary, thespy, fruity, thrumming, very very slow manner. I could listen to such superenunciatory excessiveness all. Day. Long. I really could."

One last thing: I loved the set design for the Ministry of Magic.  The films weren't exactly exercises in artistic experimentation (parts of Prisoner, and the animated sequence in Deathly Hallows pt 1 aside), and their set designs were about as unexciting as everything else.  But, gah, the Ministry of Magic.   It's wonderfully cold and dark and claustrophobic and modern and clinical and ugly, very Metropolis by way of Leslie Green, and very different from the au courant, comfy, charmingly aged design of the rest of the films: the Weasly granny-chic, the Dursley Cath Kidston-and-pebble-dash aesthetic; even Hogwarts' awesome but comfortable Oxbridgian-cum-Scotland composition.  Everything else is so predictably cozy that the scenes set at the Ministry are like a blow to the face.

The Tube station... in Hell. (Northern Line.)