I went to see part one of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows over the weekend, and I was surprised by how much I enjoyed it. I thought the last two films, both of which were directed by David Yates, who assumes helming duties for this one, were gloomy and terrible, neither faithful enough to the source material to please fans of the property nor engaging enough as films to interest people who were coming in fresh. (I suspect that latter group would also be totally lost in terms of plot.)

Looked at independently as a movie-going experience, I doubt that the first half of Deathly Hallows would be satisfying for someone who isn’t already steeped in the series. My husband has read all the books, but he’s hardly as detail-oriented as I am, and he thought people who hadn’t read the books would be completely lost watching the movie. But, again, at this point, how many people are going into the movie theatre fresh for the seventh part of a movie series based on a seven-book fantasy series? It’s interesting to me as someone who used to watch soap operas and read more serial super-hero comics, where the argument was always that every issue or episode was possibly someone’s first, so there should be a fair amount of exposition to help those newcomers get comfortable. I don’t know that this is possible with Deathly Hallows.

It’s packed in terms of event. I was surprised at how much of the novel Yates and screenwriter Steve Kloves managed to include in the movie without any drastic cuts or marginalization of the events’ import. And they still found a lot of time for moping in the back country, even though those sequences didn’t do the young actors any favors.

Speaking of the young actors, I’m always a little confused when critics talk about how marvelous they are and how fascinating it will be to see their careers evolve. I think in the case of Emma (Hermione) Watson and Daniel (Harry) Radcliffe, they were cast very well. Of the three, I think Rupert (Ron) Grint is the best actor by a fairly wide margin. Radcliffe may be more comfortable on stage, and Harry is kind of a thankless role and character to begin with, so it’s hard to tell how good he could be under other circumstances. I’m convinced that Watson has been badly directed since fairly early on in the franchise.

As written by Rowling, Hermione doesn’t have the dour gravitas Watson conveys in the films. Book Hermione is intelligent, task-oriented, and purposeful. She doesn’t seem to view the fact that she’s vastly smarter than her companions as a grievous burden, and the delight of the books’ version of the character is that she isn’t troubled by it. She’s just smarter; it’s what she brings to the table, and, more than any other character, she understands that Ron and Harry have their own strengths. Movie Hermione always feels like she’s hauling the others along, trying not to hurt their feelings with her higher skill level and more advanced understanding of their grim circumstances. It robs the audience of the fun of realizing that Hermione is hauling the other two along because of the conscious burden it places on the character.

And speaking of unsuccessful interpretations of a well-written character, when did Helena Bonham-Carter forget how to act? Or who decided that vicious, unprincipled Bellatrix LeStrange should be such a dull caricature? Of all of the dozens of characters translated from page to film, Bellatrix is the biggest failure, and I attribute a lot of that to Bonham-Carter’s bug-eyed take. The character’s purposeful savagery becomes an obnoxious stunt. There’s no passion to her cruelty, just noise. I think her performance as Bellatrix is even more unsatisfying than her portrayal of Mrs. Lovett in Sweeney Todd, which was just lazy. (I did watch Alice in Wonderland over the weekend, and I was relieved to actually like her in that movie.)

But I was surprised at how much better certain moments worked in the film adaptation than the novel. A death in the opening chase sequence is miles better than Rowling’s original writing of it. Briskness helps a caper sequence in the Ministry of Magic, along with the terrific, possibly satirical work of three adult actors playing Harry, Ron and Hermione in disguise, particularly David O’Hara as the wizard Harry is impersonating. And the earlier introduction of house-elf Dobby makes his later appearance work even better than it did in the book, though I was disappointed that he was costumed in a dishrag rather than in one of his more dapper ensembles indicating his status.

On the down side, I still like Evanna (Luna) Lynch very much as a presence, but I think the character is being marginalized. I’m not sure if there’s anything Bonnie Wright could do with the character of Ginny. If Harry is a thankless role, Ginny is even worse.

But overall, I enjoyed the movie. I don’t think any new arrivals to the franchise will find it remotely satisfying, but for a Potter nerd like myself, it was a definite improvement on previous installments from Yates.

I saw Scott Pilgrim vs. the World on Saturday and really enjoyed it. I think the best movie adaptations of other properties are ones that capture the spirit of the original material while still functioning as an entertaining movie independent of that source material. I think Edgar Wright got it exactly right while still doing his own creative thing. (There’s a great interview with Wright in Time Magazine, which is one of the many major media outlets to give the apparent flop a very positive review.)

I also loved the supporting cast, particularly Ellen (Knives Chau) Wong, Kieran (Wallace Wells) Culkin, Alison (Kim Pine) Pill, and Ben (Other Scott) Lewis. The evil exes were all fun to varying degrees, and my only major complaint would be that things dragged a little at the end. But movies almost always drag a little bit at the end anymore.

I’m a little shocked at all of the schadenfreude over the movie’s box office performance, like coming in fifth – out of all of the movies in current release in the United States – is a bad thing. It doesn’t strike me as an instant blockbuster by design but as a movie that gains in reputation over time. Maybe Hollywood just hates sleeper hits or cult hits or whatever it is that I suspect the movie will become, but I don’t think the people who made the movie have anything to worry about in the long run. Shaun of the Dead didn’t rake it in right out of the gate either.

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Speaking of movies adapted from other media, I could barely sit through Peter Jackson’s adaptation of Alice Sebold’s terrific novel, The Lovely Bones. It was painfully overwrought and grindingly slow at the same time. I did appreciate the presence of Susan Sarandon, doing that thing where actors of a certain stature give a performance that would fit the kind of movie they’d rather be making than the one they happen to be in.

Maybe it’s the fact that I don’t really watch very many movies that randomly results in me seeing ones from the competent-to-awful end of the quality rainbow. The Proposal certainly could have been worse, and it certainly could have been better.

Right up front I’ll say that I almost always like Sandra Bullock. I haven’t seen every movie she’s made, because some of them look perfectly terrible, and there’s not that much free time in life, but she’s a comforting presence. She’s fine here as a brittle book executive who faces deportation to Canada because she’s let her visa paperwork lapse. Because that’s what demanding executives do… put major aspects of their professional life in jeopardy because they’re so bad with details.

She tries to bully her executive assistant, Ryan Reynolds, into marrying her so she can get back on the citizenship track. It isn’t quite that simple. He wants to be a book editor, so he’s got his own set of demands, and he also wouldn’t mind a little payback for putting up with three years of her bitchery. He brings her along to a family weekend in Alaska so they can prep for the upcoming interview with the mysteriously vindictive immigration agent who suspects their motives. (The agent is played by the guy who’s really good at playing off-their-meds crazy people and mild-mannered racist conspirators on Law and Order. Updated: I should have mentioned his name; that was just lazy of me. He’s Denis O’Hare, and he’s a very accomplished actor beyond his ability to bat kook clean-up on police procedurals.)

In Alaska, we meet Reynolds’s controlling father, played by Craig T. Nelson, who wants his son to give up this damned fool book editor dream and come back to Alaska to run the family empire. There’s also Reynolds’s mother, played Mary Steenburgen, looking composed and beautiful and just slightly quirky enough to keep you alert, which is what you hire Mary Steenburgen to do, because there’s really nobody better at it. And… sigh… there’s Betty White, forced to move through a bunch of “rapping granny” set pieces where old people are portrayed as being hilarious because they don’t sit in chairs and talk sentimentally about “the war.” I love Betty White, don’t get me wrong, but the nicest thing I can say about her character here is that she looks younger than her son. Props to Nelson for not succumbing to a Botox-addicted culture of youth, but wow, dude looks rough.

Here’s why the movie is just kind of competent for me. It feels like it was originally written to be about a woman and her gay male assistant concocting a sham marriage instead of a woman and her straight male assistant falling in unlikely love. It doesn’t seem like anyone made much effort to shift the narrative from straight-gay frenemy picture to opposites-attract romance. I have no idea if this actually happened, but that’s how it reads on screen, particularly Reynolds’s relationship with his parents. He resents his father for not supporting who he is, and his mother is angry at her husband’s inflexibility for necessitating so much distance from their son.

I’m not really sure what to make of Reynolds. Lots of reviews talked about the great chemistry he and Bullock had in this movie, and I didn’t really see it. They were amiable enough together, but Bullock can muster chemistry with just about anyone. Also, Reynolds’s eyes are kind of strange in that emotion doesn’t seem to reach them all the time. They’re a little dead. On an unrelated but gross note, there’s a line at the end where some background character urges Reynolds to “show [Bullock] who’s boss,” which almost manages to undo the fact that the rest of the movie didn’t totally degrade Bullock’s character for being a competent if aggressive professional.

As everyone knows, he’ll be playing Green Lantern in a big action movie. I don’t really have an opinion about this, because super-hero movies are almost always boring, and I’ve never had much interest in Green Lantern to begin with, unless we’re talking about the dive-y, bear-friendly bar in Washington, D.C. Speaking of Green Lantern’s trip to cinemas, I think that’s pretty much one of the big two accomplishments of DC’s Diane Nelson, which is among the big comic stories Tom Spurgeon identifies for the next few months. Well, that and hacking away at DC’s imprints and product variety, but that’s a topic for another day.