37 days before - He still sucks

I saw the Harry Potter movie for the second time earlier today, and my conclusions on it haven't changed that much.

The directing was (mostly) fantastic.

The acting was the best I've ever seen in a Harry Potter film.

Up until the last half hour of the movie, I was thinking this was all pretty good (with one notable exception.)

But by the end of the movie I realized the three fundamental flaws of Steve Kloves' writing.

1) Bad characterization. The characters he writes have very little nuance or subtlety, as evidenced by Super Hermione, Sidekick Ron, "Why's it always me?" Neville, Interchangeable Fred and George, and Ladies Man Harry, though this isn't so much evidence of a lack of nuance as it is just a bad choice for the character.

2) Inability to write a series. Kloves seems to be unaware that this movie is a part of a series, ergo it would be nice if there was some connection between the story. Like, more than a passing reference to the rather traumatic events of movie five, and maybe something to set up the major climactic events of movie seven. But he doesn't write series, he writes individual movies, and tries to wrap everything up neatly at the end, which isn't the way this movie should end at all.

3) Inability to write subplots. Admittedly, he did better with subplots in this movie than in movie, when just kind of threw random bits from random subplots in with little or no connection between them. Again, for much of the movie, he was introducing subplots and weaving them together quite nicely. Then he just dropped most of them. Let me make this very clear, because people seem to misunderstand me when I criticize the movies: I DON'T CARE ABOUT CANON INACCURACIES. I really don't. Some of my favorite scenes in this movie were not canon. If things have to be cut, things have to be cut. If things have to be changed or added then, as long as they actually add something to the story (unlike a particular scene that we won't mention here), that's perfectly fine. HOWEVER, if you're going to cut a subplot, then just cut it. Don't introduce it and then drop it. That leads to a little something we call anticlimax, which is very bad.

So, while Steve Kloves did improve slightly in this movie . . . he still sucks.

-Matt