Yes,
entertaining was the question. How often do you laugh watching LOTR?
I like the fantasy, the scope (of that particular fictional world) and the heroism of the Middle Earth adventures, and visually it's absolutely sumptuous, but it takes itself a wee bit too seriously - and the music is pompous, typically.
Now beyond considerations of entertaiment value, like comedy, action and rhythm, where I'd say HP wins on most fronts, let's make a little comparison of content.
All the manicheism in LOTR is annoying. The adaptation managed to leave out most of the racism from the books (about how the 2 armies are composed, and how superior and nobler the tall blond elves and the tall, darker blond horsepeople are to the darker, shorter, more southern peoples, including their own allies), but it's still good characters against evil characters, and when one character is tainted with evil, it's always a contamination from the outside, from Sauron (with perhaps the exception of Boromir and, briefly, Galadriel).
Harry Potter, when it tackles its more serious themes, addresses identity, the evil needing to be faught within oneself, should it be acknowledged, etc. "Can I be good if my genes are tainted?" "How much am I going to be corrupted by power", and so on. Harry fights his demons alone and it doesn't do him justice with his peers... I'm sure I'm leaving out a lot of stuff. I think it beats "let's round up all the good guys - and the ghosts - and march for months and have a couple of humongous showdowns and crush the ugly monsters".
[Edit - I admit Aragorn has probably been staying away from power precisely because he fears the corruptive nature of power, or feels uneasy claiming it, disregarding old regime considerations of blood line (I think that's the official reason. Unofficially, he just doesn't want to take on the responsibility), but in the end, he does want his crown. (Because he thinks he'll do a better job than the previous ruler and because as a king he can finally marry his love.) Just trying to be fair here.
]
LOTR was good enough for the 1940's, but if today all we do to adapt it to the screen is just sift it through political correctness and make all the enemies non-human, instead of developing current themes beyond fear of a distant and powerful enemy that can contaminate people close to you, it loses its political impact. So yeah, it's entertaining.
It's beautiful. But if we are talking about the movies, I'm not that sure they will go down so well in history.
The most interesting character in LOTR would be Frodo, who carries the weight of evil - carrying the weight of the world really - literally!
, or rather, Smeagol, with all his fundamental duplicity, but although their respective delirious scenes are interesting, there isn't that much nuance to Frodo (paranoia vs self-sacrifice and, er... paranoia vs self-sacrifice) and frankly, you don't see the end of his journey.
The symbolism is well-labeled and heavy-handed - maybe that accounts for the wide success of LOTR.
Harry Potter is a dark
roman d'apprentissage (how can I translate this? coming-of-age novel), not just fantasy, so it speaks to everyone. You can compare it with the Star Wars themes, except the happy outcome is less sure. (Sign of the times.)
So yeah, it's a bit childish in the first volumes, but quite honourable - deep and modern.
PS: those comments are coming from someone who read and taped LOTR but not HP. I was quite engrossed by LOTR, but that allows critical distance, and I'm told the HP books are very rich (by my mother who is a literature teacher. She read them).
