Well, last night, my daughter dragged me out to Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows. Actually, she didn't have to do much dragging. I'm a huge fan of the books. But up until now, not such a big fan of the movies, though I did enjoy a few of them with the irregularity of Prisoner. That was just poorly done...period. But what about the newest installment? They took one book and broke it up into two movies. Did they do the right thing? Or could they have come up with someone else epic like Gone With The Wind or Lord Of The Rings? This author is going to give his two cents on the issue.
Let me first say, without giving anyone away, that if they did have to break this movie up into two parts, they couldn't have picked a best place to end it. So kudos to them for that much. But here's the qoute I had with Deathly Hollows, and I think it comes down to Hollywood essentially feeling that it has to milk everything it can out of a franchise.
Harry Potter
While the movie, for the most part, was very intense from start to finish, with some great activity scenes, there was way too much filler time. A lot of the sitting nearby and brooding about how miserable life is could have been cut. I could surely see 10 minutes of that movie that could have been left on the cutting room floor. But then, if they had done that, it wouldn't have been long sufficient of a movie to explicate soaking me out of my per ticket. What happened to the good old days when a movie cost .50?
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But the bigger issue is, and this is something that my daughter brought up, Hollywood just doesn't feel like people have the attention span to sit straight through a four hour movie anymore. Maybe they're right. Have we reached the point where, if Gone With The Wind or The Ten Commandments had come out now, we would have walked out midway straight through the movie? I'd like to think not. But with Hollywood coming out with its "no more than 2.5 hours of screen time or we'll lose 'em" installments, you have to wonder if we're ever going to get an 800 page book put into one movie again without losing half the plot.
Don't get me wrong. I enjoyed the movie, minus about 10 minutes of sitting nearby doing nothing. But I for real would have loved to have seen the way it for real ends without having to wait until next year to do so.
See, some of us Can sit straight through a four hour movie.
To Your Movie Viewing Enjoyment,
Steven Wagenheim
Harry Potter And The Deathly Hollows - Should It Have Been One Movie?