Getting it right in the films (Was: Question for parents)

[Carol]

Carol earlier:
> >  But the films have been altered in various ways, especially from
PoA  onward--scenes added, scenes cut, scenes altered, lines given to
a  different character.
> 
Valerie:
> I still don't have to like it, even though I understand why they do
it, for the most part! :-)
> I was watching GOF again yesterday, and it bugged me how much they
changed the plot (Crouch Jr. with Voldemort in the beginning, him
casting the spell, instead of Winky (or am I getting that wrong??) 

Carol:
Barty Jr. did cast the spell ("I isn't knowing how to do it," says
poor falsely suspected Winky in the book), but you're right that he
isn't present with Voldemort at the beginning of the book. The film
has eliminated the whole subplot in which Barty Sr. is Imperiused and
cut out Winky (and Percy) altogether. They've also merged the three
Pensieve scenes so that Karkaroff names Barty Jr. as a DE, making him
seem, IIRC, to be solely responsible for Crucioing the Longbottoms
(which must confuse viewers who see Bellatrix Crucioing Neville in OoP
if they haven't read the books). 

Valerie:
And what the heck would he have been doing in the Ministry of Magic?
He didn't work there did he? Was he just hanging out watching 'Daddy'
work?? 

Carol:
That I didn't get, either, or the tongue-twitching, which I found
annoying and unnecessary. (And what was that reference to, "the last
time a boy entered the Ministry of Magic, he didn't come out again"?
Barty Jr. is no "boy" during his own trial, if that's what's referred
to, and he certainly didn't witness Karkaroff's testimony since he was
either dying in Azkaban or already "dead." I guess Kloves et al. were
trying to give Crouch!Moody a motive for killing his father, but it
didn't come across clearly at all to me. (Obviously, I need to watch
it again, but I still think that the writer and director sacrificed
clarity and coherence with their cuts, yet they expanded the dragon
scene way beyond what was in the book, with the poor dragon ending up
dead. Weren't the dragons tormented enough just by being taken from
their homes and having their eggs threatened?)

Valerie:

> And was it both him, Bella's husband and Bella that tortured 
Neville's parents to insanity? Crouch says he did it, in GOF; then 
Bella says she did it, in OotP?? 

Carol:
Not to mention the ever-forgotten Rabastan Lestrange, Rodolphus's
brother, the fourth man in that Pensieve scene in the book. Yes, Barty
must have been a party to the crime (though, in the book, far from
admitting that he did it, he begs his father not to send him to
Azkaban. And he's a boy of nineteen, not a man in his thirties, in
that scene, which occurs some twelve or thirteen years before the end
of Book!GoF.

Valerie:
Neville with the gillyweed instead of Dobby. 

Carol:
Right. Since Dobby is eliminated along with Winky, it looks as if
Neville broke into Snape's "stores" to steal the gillyweed!
("Detention, Longbottom, and five hundred points from Gryffindor if I
catch you in my stores again!")

Valerie:
OK, I'll quit whining now...I do love the movies, even though the
writers/directors change more than I'd like them too. The special 
effects are phenomenal; the acting usually first-rate. Not a shoddy 
production that's for sure!

Carol:
I like the actors, the sets, the music, some of the costumes (not
Gambon!Dumbledore's!). I don't like having the kids and some of the
teachers in Muggle clothes or some of the alterations to the plot.
Some lines (for example, Neville's desire for vengeance against
Bellatrix in the OoP film) seem out of character. As for the
filmscripts, I think that the writers were at a great disadvantage
writing them before the books were all out, especially regarding
Snape. I think that Steve Kloves has always had an accurate sense of
where Snape's loyalties lie, but the substitute scriptwriter in OoP
seems to have downplayed Snape's importance, perhaps concentrating on
keeping him ambiguous. And from what I've read, it doesn't sound as if
he's going to be a key player in his own eponymous book! (Except, of
course, for DD's death scene. But suppose they cut "Spinner's End" or
"Flight of the Prince"?

Carol, who thinks that the films will have to be remade in about ten
or fifteen years (with one director and one scriptwriter for the
entire series) to eliminate inconsitencies and gaps from one film to
the next