An awful director, an awful movie, an awful bit of foreshadowing for HBP

Rating: 1/10 (11 July 2007)

I just got back from the midnight premiere, and I'm completely disgusted. The movie was a bland, sepia-toned mess! Hogwarts has apparently shrunk. The Grand Hall was pathetic, and it seems roughly 50 students attend Hogwarts now.
The scenes were pasted together in clumsy montages that you assume must surely end sometime. They don't. The movie jumps from one area to the next. Obviously, some things need to be left out of the movie, but =everything! Where was Quidditch? Where was the rest on the Pensieve scene? Where were the classes and the students and the people? We saw more of the Muggle World than the Wizarding one! Where did the money go? Those special effects were definitely sub-par for what we've come to expect. Grawp looked far too cartoon-like, and, good gods, don't get me started on the pathetic blue-screen.
I just sat through +2 hours of Harry being angst-ridden. Granted, that happened in the book, but that wasn't all that happened in the book. It had redeeming qualities, but apparently those needed to be left out.
HBP is, by far, my favorite book of the series. If we allow this director to massacre it too, I'm going to throttle someone. You might as well hand the series over to Uwe Boll and throw away the franchise.