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Review: Harry Potter
I'm a latecomer to the Harry Potter phenomenon. A few friends recommended the books to me, but it wasn't until the local town of Zeeland, Michigan decided to push to have the book banned from school libraries and local book stores that I decided I had to read it. I read the first book and was just amazed. Here was a story that was fun, easy to read, had involving characters and a simply wonderful imagination. Quite simply, "The Hype" was warranted. In this era of the Internet, and playstations and old fashioned TV, this was just the book to get kids reading again. Hell, this was just the book to get me reading again. My schedule doesn't give me much free time to enjoy a book, but I made time, and read the first 3 Harry Potter books on my next 3 flights (I'm saving the 4th book for next time I fly ;) I don't read much. But I'm glad I read these books. They were great.
Of course by this time, the movie was already under construction so I kept a stray eyeball on it to see what would come of it. I wept when I heard Chris Columbus was directing (Home Alone? Mrs. Doubtfire? Stab me please). Why not Terry Gilliam? I thought he would have been perfect, except that I have no clue if the man could direct swarms of kids. Columbus could. And I'm glad to say that he did.
I won't belabor the plot. You know already unless you live in a coffin that Harry Potter is the witch hero brought from the world of Muggles to his true destiny at Hogwarts, a traditional English boarding school ... for witches. He meets up with a variety of friends including the giant Hagrid, the little-miss-perfect Hermione, the Headmaster Dumbledore, his best friend Ron. He also meets some bad guys, Professor Snape (played by Alan Rickman, who I always dig), Draco Malfoy. If you've read the book, you know the characters. If you haven't, you either don't care, or haven't been paying attention to every AOL Time Warner media outlet which has been relentless hyping the film for weeks.
The story is simply epic. Orphan Boy learns of true powers. Boy goes to train to master his powers. Boy fights monsters, comes face to face with true evil, and defeats it. Think Star Wars, but with broom sports instead of x-wing battles.
The kids are dead on. Harry, Ron, and Hermione are almost exactly what I'd expect. They are convincing actors and do an excellent job. And they actually act. Not like Phantom Menace where Jake Lloyd brings every scene featuring his dialog to a crashing halt with his wooden delivery, or The 6th Sense's Haley Joel Osment who just has to make that look at the camera half the time and this is somehow interpreted as being a great child actor. The grownups are good too. Robbie Coltrane's Hagrid is really excellent. Likewise the Dursley's are spot on. I would have liked to get a bit more of the teachers. Especially Dumbledore and Snape, but this is the story of the kids, not the grown-ups.
Since this is a special FX blockbuster kind of movie, I'll go into it a bit. The look of the whole movie is dazzling. The casting is right on the money. The architecture is skewed and bent, just like it should be. Hogwarts itself is dark, but the grounds are beautiful and colorful. Everybody visualizes books differently, but I gotta say they did a fine job creating a convincing world for our magical trio to get into mischief.
Many of the effects are subtle and seemlessly integrated. Keep an eye on the paintings and watch them move in the background. Where the effects really collapse is the people during action sequences. The troll battle. Kids falling off brooms. They cut back and forth between real kids and CGI kids. And the CG kids just don't cut it. They just look wooden and their skin has no flesh texture to it. Most of the shots are short, but at least for me they really pulled me out of the fun. Especially during the Quiditch match. I wanted to cheer and be excited, and certainly the seen as a whole was brilliant. But every couple shots it would be so obvious that the child on the broom was animated that I kept having the illusion spoiled. I kept thinking I was watching a Playstation 2 cut sequence instead of a feature film.
What got sacrificed from the book to make this a 2:30 movie? Well not much. The biggest thing is the details in classes. The books love to have little anecdotal stories in classes that often tie together at the end. A spell. Some child doing something that seems irrelevant, but later matters. But the kids are almost never shown in class. But thats ok. Things also seemed a little more slapsticky, but I guess Mr Home Alone couldn't pass up on that. And I'll forgive him. This is a kids movie. A few sub plots are axed. Many plots are narrowed down (notably the dragon sub plot which is reduced to one short scene)
In short, this the best for-all-ages movie I've seen since perhaps Toy Story 2. And I'll be there opening night for The Chamber of Secrets too.
Well, I certainly hope that you snuck into the theater to avoid paying money to the eeeeeeevil Warner Bros. I'd hate to see your money going to the ongoing hassles from the MPAA.
Which viewed in isolation is admirable. It's just a shame that the books themselves are so plagiaristic, unimaginative and slackly written and edited - you don't just "forget" a character's name half way through a book.
Dianne Wynne Jones and Susan Cooper, for example, write truly imaginative and challenging fiction for children and young adults; Potter is Muzak in print. There's very little to dislike (other than Harry's bumbling idiocy) but since when was mediocrity to be praised or aspired to?
Further to that, the books are now well and truly subsumed into the Cult of Potter, and will in future just form a spearhead for the major marketing assult. JK Rowling (who has consistently misrepresented her background in biographies, by the way) has sold all rights to her creation, has no say in Harry's further direction or in what constitutes "fair use" of the Harry trademarks, and is now little than a marketing droid for the Beast. I'd suggest reading some of Bill Watterson's thoughts on this issue.
So sure, let's acknowledge the good, but let's not lose track of the bad. It's also possible to argue that Pokemon trading cards are a great thing because they teach children to interact with each other and use their brains for something more than learning all the "Bone Krunch 5" combo-moves.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Bloody hell, that's harsh. Still, bearing in mind that Potter is plagiarised from several sources anyway, it's pretty apt for this discussion.
Oh, wait, I meant "allegedy plagiarised". ^W^W^W^W^W^W^W^W. I'm sorry, I must have been muggled, er, muddled up.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.