I'm Actually Angry

Rating: 4/10 (13 December 2010)

One of the great joys of the Harry Potter movies has been that I've been able to take one of my grandnieces to see them. She loves them. However, she just turned 11 and so won't be able to go to this one. Why? -- because of ONE scene that did NOT need to be done the way it was.... the hallucination would have been just as effective in making it's point if the CGI version of those involved had been clothed, and the film could have been PG as the others have been. I enjoyed the movie, until that scene and all I could think of is "oh @#$%, I won't be able to take her to this one and she's going to be seriously bummed"... effectively diminishing my enjoyment of the rest of the film and almost leading me to walk out of the theater. That one scene took away a lot of the audience by blocking out kids who've seen all the ones before it. Shame on the producers for not taking them into account when making this one. They effectively thumbed their noses at a good section of potential audience, and I hope the box office on this one suffers for it. If you decide after making a series of PG movies that the next one in the series should be rated so that a good portion of your audience-base can't see it, you deserve to have your wallet suffer for it. There are now a slew of kids all across the country who are seriously bummed (right before Christmas no less) -- why? Because some moron(s) decided that it doesn't matter if they're old enough to see this movie or not -- even if they've seen all the previous ones in the series, they didn't count enough to take into account... idiotic, short-sighted, and even into "mean" IMO.
Add in that I paid extra for IMAX that turned out to not even be 3D... and while in many respects it was a good film... the experience was grossly disappointing.
But it could have been the most brilliant film ever made and the switch from PG to PG-13, combined with an "IMAX" version that wasn't 3D, and it still would be getting a low rating.