To think the acting in Harry Potter is just awful?

[LookingForAlaskas]

Not watched the films in ages and the third one was on tonight.

It honestly felt like some parts were like a drama class in school. Very cringe.

I have been watching the behinds the scenes videos of the first one and it's hard to forget that they were just little kids.

I don't think it was a case of bad acting just the writers changed the characters from the books.

*easy to forget

Bad acting is easy to spot, no matter how much screenwriters change the plot from what was in the book!

Look at the Bridget Jones films: plot changed (dumbed down, in my view) and the characters of Jude and Shazzer watered down, but Shirley Henderson and Sally Philips are still entirely believable as real people and are amongst the best things in it. Yes, I know that neither were children when the films were made but the principle stands: don’t blame the writers for bad acting.

They weren’t pandered to or treated like “stars” at all, just like normal children. They attributed the fact that none of the child cast went off the rails to this

Hasn’t Daniel Radcliffe admitted to being an alcoholic?

Obviously I love the Harry Potter books. The films are ok but I do think they watered down some characters probably because the actors chosen couldn't portray the characters properly. Esp Ginny. In the book she is feisty, independent etc but in the film she just seems to be there to tie shoes and shove mince pies in peoples faces.
In regards to how the books are written I find a lot of adults seem to forget they are aimed at children, I was 9 when the 1st book came out so grew up with them. I think JK Rowling portrays the angst of teenage years quite well tbh.

Emma Watson is cringe AF in them all but aside from that, I think the first three are the best and it went downhill from there- books and films.

YANBU.
Dobby out acted the lot of them.

The hat stole every scene it was in, of course.

I agree.

It’s fucking atrocious in some cases but I suppose it almost adds to the charm of the series (except the second Dumbledore ) and I think I would be quite sad if they remade the films.

I hate the way it’s all about Harry. He’s so attention seeking.

Yeah bloody hell, when we all know it’s called Hermione Grainger and the Philosophers Stone

@TSSDNCOP
Yes, that pesky Harry always getting in the way of the main characters.

Yeah bloody hell, when we all know it’s called Hermione Grainger and the Philosophers Stone

Someone did actually rename all the books after: www.bustle.com/p/these-harry-potter-book-titles-reimagine-hermione-as-the-main-character-its-totally-brilliant-30634

The most annoying thing is that the HP films had a huge, huge budget and the popularity of the books meant that nearly every child in Britain would have loved to audition for films - so how did they end up with the crock of shite they got??? You could understand it if it was something unheard of made for 50p for channel 5, but it wasn't!

What's confusing is that all the directors, JKR, etc. all have said that EW basically is Hermione. So how can she be so, so bad at playing a version of herself?

@overnightangel - how is Harry a 'working class' kid in the books? Although he's not treated well by the Dursleys, Vernon is a MD of a company, and they send Dudley to his old private school, which is described as being pretty posh/well established - straw boater and stick as part of the uniform which all adds up to suggest fairly upper middle class to me. From his actual parents, there's nothing to suggest Lily/Petunia were particularly w/c - the fact that Petunia married Vernon suggests the opposite, and the Potters were pretty much wizarding upper class - very very well established purebloods who left Harry a small fortune.

people have mentioned outnumbered, but just thinking off the top of my head of other good, British child stars - all of the four youngest Starks were under 13 when cast in GOT, as was the girl who played Lyanna Mormont in the more recent series, also the actress who played Shireen Baratheon was really good.

Both boys in the boy in the striped pyjamas -Asa Butterfield in particular has done a lot since. Nicholas Hoult in About a boy and subsequent work. The kids in the Narnia films weren't amazing but were certainly better than the HP cast. Thomas Brodie-Sangster from Love Actually and the Nanny McPhee films, where again the quality of the actors....varied! Millie Bobby Brown from Stranger Things is actually English....it's certainly not impossible to find vaguely convincing child actors, particularly if, as I said, if you had the budget, casting reach, and appeal of HP!

How good are the children acting in Miss Peregrine’s home for peculiar children? I thought some of the teenagers such as Emma (lead shoes) sounded forced, but perhaps that’s how she’s meant to be, as they’re adults in children’s bodies.

I found reading The Order of the Phoenix very hard going. 90% of it was really depressing. Even if it isn't the best writing they are amazing stories.

I have to disagree about Prisoner of Azkaban, I thought the acting was excellent by then and Alfonso Cuarón a great director.
My personal favourite.

Totally shit films. As for 'well it's children so what do you expect', I'd simply point out that there are a shit load of good films with good child actors. Potter films are just rubbish.

The films would have been instantly improved by the continuity of maintaining the same director throughout. The styles are just too different, and very jarring to consider as a whole series.

The first two are very twee and wondrous, the third is suddenly somewhat artsy and enjoys the darkness, the fourth is just bizarre and kind of cutesy high-school, the fifth and sixth I have no memory of even watching, and the seventh starts to include bizarre sections of Tim Burton style animation and shit that was never present before.

Obviously, it’s a lot to ask a director to commit to seven years of working on the same project, but Peter Jackson did it for LOTR (five years of production including pick-up shoots) and TV directors regularly work on the same show for multiple years.

I reckon the directors knew it was going to be quite shit, and didn’t want to put their names to the entire series.

Emma Watson is the most wooden, irritating, unbelievable actress I've almost ever seen. Even in the Burberry editorial adverts she looked like a wooden robot. Awful.

The films would have been instantly improved by the continuity of maintaining the same director throughout. The styles are just too different, and very jarring to consider as a whole series.

I think if they'd started by writing down the bullet points of the key plot points of all 7 books and stapled them to the director's foreheads it would have been an instant improvement.

The books were famous in their own right before the films started. It's all very well arguing (as some have elsewhere) that everyone seeing them already knew the plot.

That was the point - they were going to the cinema to see those plots unfold on screen. Adding in a spurious mish-mash of 'dramatic' scenes (the attack on the Burrow, Harry and Hermione dancing, the ridiculous dragon chase scene in GoF and the fucking ridiculous final showdown between Voldemort and Harry) should have always, ALWAYS come second to telling the story correctly.

There was a very similar thread to this much earlier in the year calling for HP to be remade as a TV series.

I lost count of the number of posts calling for it to be remade as a ‘Game of Thrones’ style big-budget show.

Well, here we are in the year where Game of Thrones died. To quote, it was like a solid gold toilet that doesn’t flush.

So, what sci-fi/fantasy book series do people think have been adapted well? Book purists despise both LOTR and ASOIAF (although that doesn’t count as seasons 6 onwards aren’t an adaptation)?

Please don’t say Dune...

The hunger games trilogy was brilliantly done as films.

@BentNeckLady - I agree.

I'm not really a book purist - certainly not for Lord of the Rings! I just think people, the directors especially, underrate the importance of the story to people, and on telling that story well.

LOTR books and film are very different beasts, and I think that the films tell the story of the events well. A film about the theme of melancholy for a dying world of artistry and simplicity to the wheels of progress wouldn't be very interesting. The only thing I disliked was what they did to Faramir.

They did some necessary fleshing out of parts of the story, adjusting parts so that pretty much everyone got where they were supposed to be on time. Aragorn getting the sword later is a good example of making a change that is supportive of the narrative of his personal struggle of the weight of his inheritance, and Arwen being shown to give up her mortality within the screentime rather than treating it as a given based on a song sung by a campfire is also better visual storytelling.

The Hunger Games make similarly sensible choices about things that didn't really matter to the plot - e.g. Peeta not losing a leg.

Another good adaptation was My Cousin Rachel. Some changes to the book, even changing the ending! But the changes pulled together that made sense to the reader, and even if they didn't, they were coherent for their own storytelling.

Harry Potter just picked seemingly at fucking random what they wanted to represent on screen or imagine. There seemed to be no coherence at all between changes they made, and what it meant to the overall plotting.

I agree with many opinions that I have read, but in my opinion: all young actors are insufferable and unbearable, but looking beyond the horizon I could say that:

-Daniel Radcliffe was bad as HP, but outside of the saga he is a great actor that today I can see him outside of the character's skin. He is very charismatic and has a certain versatility that shows through, of course he has to be more independent and firm with certain things, but I like him.

-Rupert Grint seemed irritating to me as Ron Weasly, but seeing what Steve Kloves did in the scripts I give him a pass, but outside of the saga he has become a very limited actor, in short he is still in the Ron de Las air. Deathly Hallows.

-Tom Felton fulfilled his role as Draco Malfoy, but outside of the saga this guy has no life. He is just like Grint, he is still in the air of the Draco from The Deathly Hallows, and above all he has become an example of failure and mediocrity that did not succeed, which is vastly painful and sometimes unbearable.

-Emma Watson was obnoxiously unbearable as Hermione Granger, but what surprises me most is that she is the one who has done the best in terms of opportunities when she is one of the worst millennial celebrities, literally, she ruins every movie in which she appears so badly. , exaggerated and ridiculous that it is. She has no charisma, no versatility, no character, no commitment to any project she has done, it doesn't matter if she studies acting at Oxford, she was not born to be an actress. Why do they keep hiring her? I don't understand. She has also become a false, hypocritical, self-interested and lying human being, which irritates me and the fact that many defend her after so many controversies makes me classify her as one of the most famous celebrities. overrated and worst in the Hollywood industry.

Otherwise, all the other young actors were quite mediocre: especially Bonnie Wright. The only worthwhile actors in the saga were the adults, of course I gave them all a pass because we are all aware that they were young and that David Yates ruined half of the saga in every way, but outside of this one no There are excuses.