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Yes, I do.

But director David Yates, although very good at churning out ripped-from-the-headlines, Law & Order-style television dramas, is rubbish at adapting Harry Potter.

Alright, he's not THAT bad...

But he is in NO WAY as good as the trailers for Order of the Phoenix (2007), Half-Blood Prince (2009), and Deathly Hallows (2010) encourage us to expect.

I have a 'fool me once' mentality when going into the recent HP flicks. Not one of them has lived up to the animation and intimacy of the Alfonso Cuarón-directed Prisoner of Azkaban (2004) (let alone the tone and quality of the books themselves), and it doesn't look like they're going to, hype or no hype.

Cuarón's Potter may have got mixed reviews, but it was a more sophisticated offering; not to everyone's taste, but definitely a living, breathing, work of art, as opposed to the flat, rushed, slide shows we're treated to by Yates, or the hot mess that was Mike Newell's contribution, Goblet of Fire (2005).

I still don't understand why anyone thought Newell was a good choice for the HP franchise. Unless you've got some weird ideas about SPOILER! Alan Rickman's character fucking his own kid in An Awfully Big Adventure (1995), I'm stumped.

As far as I can tell, Newell seems completely lost if he has any goals other than framing Hugh Grant so that the actor looks attractive in a "cheeky" sense of the word.

His success, in other words, is almost entirely built around a "Hugh Grant" character piece. Like a poor fisherman, who in a stroke of luck, caught a rare fish in it's (questionable) prime, Hugh Grant never looked better (or more cheeky), than he did in Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994). (Everything after the tranny bust is, needless to say, not in that vein.)

And Newell, for his part, never seemed more competent and sure of himself as a filmmaker.

But while Yates may be a slight improvement over Newell, much of his success stands on the shoulders of elements put in place by Cuarón, and Cuarón's vision for the series.

Such as...

* The casting of Gary Oldman as Sirius Black, David Thewlis as Professor Lupin, Timothy Spall as Peter Pettigrew, Emma Thompson as Sybill Trelawney, and Michael Gambon as Albus Dumbledore.

* The gorgeous, lived-in, triple-decker Knight Bus, a Leaky Cauldron that gives Jamaica Inn a run for it's money, the clock tower, the covered bridge, and the ominous, shuddering Shrieking Shack.

* Professor Lupin's fantastic, otherworldly transformation into a gangly, not-crap-looking **cough**Chris Columbus**cough**rubber children**cough** werewolf, the eerie, hauntingly "fluid" Dementors, and the beautiful rendering of the hippogriff, "Buckbeak."

The ONLY thing I take issue with in Prisoner of Azkaban is that terrible freeze frame at the end. Sorry Alfonso, but it puts one in mind of a Mentos commercial.

My hope was that either Cuarón would come back and direct Hallows, or my other favorite Mexican director, Guillermo del Toro, would take some time out between Hellboy sequels and give us a "del Toro" Potter. Now, after all the fuss and raised hopes, we're not even getting a "del Toro" Hobbit, and Yates is closing out the HP series...

Fuck!

I WANT TO BELIEVE - but I can't.

View the official "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows" trailer on Youtube. For not living up to it's potential.

This is a show where nothing happens. Like someone took one single scene from the books, stretched it out into a mediocre set of polished promos, and called it Season One, Two, and Three.

No more! I say. No more will I be duped by this vampire version of the Sims.

The musical (and I use this term loosely) equivalent would be, "It's gettin' hot in here, let's take off all our clothes," and then nobody takes off their clothes.

Yes, I know that Anna "tits" Paquin does, in fact, "take off her clothes," but that's hardly the point.

Watching this show is intensely frustrating; like hearing snatches of a vaguely interesting conversation, only to have the people you're spying on move away, just as the "plot" starts to thicken, again and again.

Then there's the added insult of shock value vulgarity in place of story, dialogue, and character development. Every scene, in every episode, plays out like some bratty kids running around saying, "Does this shock you?"

No Alan, it doesn't.

"But... but....

"There are naked people! And strippers!

"And tattooed vampires power-fucking strippers!"

Well, la-ti-da. Fuck off.

I tuned in (originally) for the story: Southern (as in Deep South) vampires solving murder mysteries, with a side of sex/sexual tension - not this juvenile, too-good-for-tv, "tune in next week - I might fuck you this time" crap.

The only "mystery" here is why anyone's still watching this garbage.

(Psssst: Alexander Skarsgård) Watching a few minutes of 17 Again (2009) on upper level HBO is like seeing Matthew Perry's career go through a shredder.

Scratch that: like seeing Matthew Perry go through a shredder.

I don't give a fuck about Matthew Perry, but I'm curious to know why he's clearly decided to end his career, and on such pathetic terms.

Was it the drugs?

I also don't understand what Brendan Fraser thinks he's doing with his career - or why a sequel to Journey to the Center of the Earth (2008) is in the works.

Although I did enjoy it, Journey looked to be extremely low budget, and very, very stupid. At one point, the cast slides down the side of a mountain on the jawbone of a t-rex, and it's not surreal, or absurdly funny, like similar scenes in Land of the Lost (2009), just a little hackneyed, like the writers got tired of writing.

I'm not sure, but I think it went straight to video.

Inkheart (2008) was also not bad (and also, I think, went straight to video), but not entirely good, either. In it, Fraser plays a man who can bring fictional characters to life when he reads aloud from books, but the catch is that living people get sucked into the book-verse whenever this happens.

The cast is actually a little bit impressive, boasting Helen Mirren, Paul Bettany, Jim Broadbent, and Andy Serkis - just kidding! No, it's not very surprising to see Andy Serkis surfacing in some low budget crapfest, despite that he's a very talented actor... the guy played Golum, for fuck's sake!

Anyway, the story is poorly realized, the effects are cheesy, the score is overly sentimental and leading...

All the hallmarks of a straight-to-the-shelf-and-soon-to-be-forgotten shit-flick, ala Dinotopia (2002). (Though I believe that was a television miniseries, not a film. I'd have to check with David Thewlis to confirm, as I'm certain he'll never, ever, forget it.)

All of this is unfortunate because, as I said... I kind of liked it; and I think I could have liked it a whole lot more, if not for the terrible handling of the material.

Finally, there's Extraordinary Measures (2010). CBS films debut release, which looked to be Fraser's, and costar Harrison Ford's, attempt at a safe, heart warming money-grab, but audiences, in an unprecedented moment of good taste, cried, "Nooooaaaahhhh..."

I didn't see that one.

More importantly, I didn't need to see that one. And apparently, I wasn't alone in my thinking...

Measures seemed destined, from the very start of it's semi-ambitious ad campaign, to be left on the doorstep of the February dumping grounds like an unwanted baby audiences decided to drop-kick off their collective stoops with brutal, steel-toed resolve.

In conclusion, I have no idea what goes through Brendan Fraser's mind when signing on to these projects...

And I think it's safe to say that Matthew Perry didn't look anything like Zack Efron at 17. In fact, I'd wager Zack Efron himself didn't look anything like "Zack Efron" at 17, but whatever.

View trailer for "Journey to the Center of the Earth."
View trailer for "Inkheart."
View trailer for "Extraordinary Measures."