I watched a few with my kids this weekend: Porco Rosso, Big Fish, and Oceans 11.

Beautiful animation in Porco and a fun adventure story.

Big Fish is a pretty great movie, probably Tim Burton at his best.

Oceans 11 was a fun romp, but the teens didn’t really care for it.

Just watched Supergirl. Others were series, such as Lanterns and Stuart Fails to Save the Universe. In the big screen, I will be watching Forgotten Island this weekend.

I have always had a complicated relationship with Harry Potter. Long before it was cool to hate that franchise, I was very critical of it for many different reasons and I never managed to get past the fifth book. Not at 15, not at 25, when I tried again and now that I am in my late 30s I have finally decided to bypass my old rule that I wouldn’t watch the movies before finishing the books. The fifth book is my nemesis.

So, I watched the movies this week. All of them. Have been very down and sad about stuff in my personal life and thought I might as well watch these films to get my mind off my own bs.

First three films are still the best ones. I will always say that Chris Columbus was the only director who actually understood and gave a fuck about the world and the atmosphere in it. Alfonzo Corone did a fantastic job of bringing the darkness into the world without sacrificing the whimsy and he managed to tell the story really well and make you feel the themes of grief and hope.

And then there’s the fourth movie and onward. What. The. Fuck. I think I hate the fourth movie about as much as I hate the fifth book. The fifth movie, ironically, actually managed to tell the story in a tolerable manner and it bothered to build Sirius’ and Harry’s relationship while the fourth movie couldn’t care less. The sixth movie is a mess, though not as bad as the fourth movie. It is unfocused, storywise. It should have prioritized Snape as he really is the heart of that story, based on what I could glean from the sloppy storytelling in the movie, but he drowns in all the other bs that the movie seems to waste more time on so when you get to the cringy line “yeth, I am the Half-Blood Printh” I am over here like: Oh yeah, there was a book or whatever.

The Deathly Hallows should have just been one movie. Figure it the fuck out. Part one was a slow, boring mess and Part 2 was pretty entertaining even if it explained itself rather poorly. You have two movies to communicate your shit to me, and you still glance over all these different characters and concepts as if you expect every motherfucker watching your movie to have read the books. I also think it’s pretty lame that the movies, when they get to have two of them, skip over several important character deaths while wasting I dunno how long on Harry, Ron and Hermione going camping in the woods and having pathetic teen drama that doesn’t lead anywhere.

But seriously, fuck the fourth movie. What a total mess of incompetent film making.