> > The Harry Potter franchise lost me when David
> >Yates took over and turned the
> > wonderful stories of this world into
> >mechanical, not to mention gloomy,
> > exercises.
>
> You mean right around the time the books started to get gloomy?

I don't know that they did, at least not in the sense I mean it. Obviously the books got darker, more psychologically complex and mature as they went on. That's great. I love that the mood of the books grew up with the character.

But the Yates movies, if anything, have become psychologically more simplistic. When I complain that they are mechanical, I mean that they crank through scene after scene without actually stopping to explore the darker psychological undercurrent. Contrast with the third and fourth movies, which do this really well.

When I complain of the gloominess of the Yates films, I mean this strictly in terms of the visuals. They are all drab and kind of ugly. There's no ebb and flow, as the books had. No bright spots to give the darker ones more power. No primary colors to make the blacks all the more suffocating. It's just uniformly gloomy.

Yates has an appallingly awful sense of storytelling, and this is as evident in the visuals as it is with the stilted pacing. He is strictly a surface-level storyteller, checking off plot points from a list and adopting a uniform look and feel, rather than one actually married to the story he's telling.