Hating Harry Potter

It's no secret: I really don't like that little bastard Harry Potter.

I'm sure someone will be appalled at this notion, and that irritates me even more. It's always difficult to hold an unpopular opinion, and hating Harry Potter is no exception. I might as well be declaring war on the Easter Bunny or Santa Claus; the general public reaction is the same: I'm either a bad guy, or an idiot (some would say both).

I tried liking Harry Potter, I really did. I'll go so far as to say I wanted to like him. I mean really, what's not to like about a young man who is clearly a "good guy" and is training to be a Wizard? Harry Potter makes an almost ideal protagonist for the masses.

What JK Rawlings misses in her story telling, however, is common sense. Yes, I know that Harry Potter is supposed to be a children's story. Still, I find the movies annoying to say the least, and I couldn't even make it through the first few chapters of the book.

We're expected to believe that Harry is some sort of prodigy, yet he stumbles and bumbles around nearly getting himself and those around him killed time after time. In this sense, I find Rawlings much kinder than Darwin -- a little too kind, in fact.

Sometimes, you have to choose the lesser of two evils. I found myself in that old conundrum yesterday when, as part of a plea bargain with my wife and daughter, I agreed to watch the third in what seems an endless supply of Potter movies, "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban". (For the record, I note that I did so under duress only as a way to avoid watching Napoleon Dynamite, a movie I hate worse even than Harry Potter, but that's a story for another post.)

Although I found the third movie predictable, childish, and moderately annoying, I don't think it was quite so offensive as the first, which, incidentally, left me begging to have bamboo shoved under my fingernails as a distraction from that torturous drivel with a British accent. So my hat goes off to the director -- improvement is improvement whether you go from good to great, or from excruciating to only painful.

In the meanwhile, I think the Harry Potter series is running out of steam, and I'll only have to weather this storm for another movie or two. That punk will grow up one day, and when he does, they probably will not make a movie about the wretched alcoholic who failed as a Wizard but was supposed to be become something great one day. That would be too much like real life.