I'll watch them if they happen to come on TV.

Aside from that I wasn't an 8 or 9 year old when they came out so I've not grown up with them like most of the fans so it obviously doesn't have the same appeal.

Yes - and she wasn’t happy about the darker tone as the series progressed. I just felt that the stories were no longer than the first one, but the volume of padding and name checks increased.

The good thing, as she noted, is that children read them. Kids in primary schools were (and still are) lugging even the bigger volumes around.

My biggest problem with the films is that they chop-and-change the characters and their motives willy-nilly.

For example, in Goblet of Fire, Dobby wakes Harry and gives him the Gillyweed on the morning of the second test, because Harry didn't confide in Neville and the false Moody prodded Dobby into action. In the film, Neville tells Harry he needs to use GIllyweed, how the heck did Neville know that, when Harry never spoke to him about the test?!?!

Not to mention the catastrophic reworking of the Quidditch World Cup sequence or the first test...

The girls watched the series on TV a month or so back (Vox or Pro.7 were doing the series) and I got up and left the room, because I was getting so annoyed with the films total disregard for the storyline.

It is one of the reasons why I rarely watch a film based on a book I've read.

One of the few which was any good was the TV film "The Bourne Identity"; but the Matt Damon version shouldn't have used the Bourne name, it was an ok spy yarn, but apart from the amnesia, a bit of name dropping (Treadstone, Bourne) and the concealed bank account number, the film didn't have anything in common with The Bourne Identity storyline... I might have actually enjoyed it, if it hadn't called itself Bourne Identity, as it was, I just spent the time getting more and more frustrated...

I watched the Bourne Trilogy first and loved it all. Then rather recently, I read the first two books. You're right, apart from a training programme/assasin and amnesia, there's very little in common. But then again, the books were set twenty years earlier.

What the hell has that got to do with making a film?

I have all the previous Harrys on BD at home, but then, as I can't watch Hallows 2, it's all rather irrelevant. And Dave, if you haven't read the books and you're capable of paying attention for longer than the average 10yr old, the films make a lot of sense and there are very few plot holes. Everything is explained well, if you have the patience. There are obviously a few exceptions, but on the whole I find that people who have read the books are incapable of simply watching the film. They always insert their own knowledge from the books subconsciously and make the films seem worse than they are.

I have read the books, that is the problem.

I used them to help learn German, so I've read them all several times in both English and German, mainly because they were easy to read in English, so I used them to learn German, because I could remember what a sentence should mean in English, so could fill in the words I didn't understand in the German, without having to resort to the English version of a dictionary...

That means I know the book plot backwards, I know which characters do and say what. Given that the lines and actions are given to different characters in the film, that is just frustrating. Goblet of Fire was the worst (I haven't seen the more recent films), in removing such great chunks of the film and either ignoring them completely or re-telling them with totally different motives, in order to compress the run time. That makes it even more frustrating.

They should have given it the mini-series treatment, it would have been much better and could have had more to do with the actual stories.

Like I said above, films of books are almost always disappointing.

I agree. Which is why I don't watch movies of books that I've read. OR, if I do, I expect them to be crap.

Well I've taken the plunge and bought the LOTR BR EE boxset off amazon. I hope it's good.

Pfft, unless it's in 3D it's all been for nothing

Since when are the extendeds available on BD? Did I miss that??

27 Jun 2011, apparently...

Oh.

But do they come in [LIFTED] off boxes with little collectables in?

What, like the animated Turtles DVDs I have?

1980s or 200x? PoiDH