12 Films At Christmas - 9 & 10

We next come to two adaptations from children's literature and this gives me an excuse to vent a bit of prejudiced steam at what constitutes good reading, as if you hadn't had enough of that through Advent.

The Harry Potter novels have much to answer for. I did my English degree with members of the Potter generation and if they got their taste for books from Potter then I'm all in favour. As plain story-telling they are great - a ripping good yarn. And yes I did read them all because like everyone else I cared what happened to the characters. However the later books in the sequence have no sense of self-control. Had Rowling become too important to be edited? These books are hundreds of pages too long. There is another problem - magic can cover-up any number of implausibilities of plot and circumstance. It is a lazy device if not treated carefully. But on balance I very much approve - something about which the author will I'm sure give not a damn.

All of which very long-windedly brings me to Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. Second in the sequence and not  a bad film if you like that sort of thing, which, on the whole, I do. But it works like this - I prefer the Potter books to the films, whereas I prefer the Lord of the Rings films to the books. Does that make me a bad person? Final word on this film - it includes Dobby the house elf, a great creation, and it contains next to nothing of the Weasley twins thus sparing us from surely the worst sustained cinematic acting of all time.

Our staircase walls are adorned by twenty-one framed reproduction Herge prints from the Tintin books. They look great. I grew up with these books; my older daughter has a set of the books bought for her by an attentive and wise godfather. So I came to the Spielberg adaptation with trepidation - these books deserved a heady mix of reverence and chutzpah. I need not have feared. Bloody great film even when seen in boring old 2D. I am thinking of adding Spielberg to my Christmas card list. Boy done good.