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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.
I think a lot of that is down to JK Rowling's insistence that a lot of this will matter in later years.
The first half hour is pretty much Harry finding out whats in the wizarding world.
Warlock is etymologically "oath breaker" implying one who broke his holy oaths to God to make pacts with demons for unnatural power. As such it's considered offensive. References to "good warlocks" are rare, and essentially self-contradictory.
Witch, on the other hand, comes etymologically from wikken, meaning "to predict". So, despite any negative connotations that have grown on it, it was salvagable. References to "good witches" are common, and the word connotes strangeness, but not necessarily evil.
Witch has only gradually changed to referring primarily to women, most likely because women have been accused of witchcraft far more often than men. While most men went out into the world each day to work, women often stayed in the home and worked in secret, where they had no responsible witnesses and were naturally vulnerable to accusations of private crime (it should be noted that the vast majority of accusers were historically also women; witchburning was largely a woman-on-woman crime).
The gender-neutral applicability of witch has weakened, but never gone entirely away. Consider "witch doctor." Do you picture a man or woman?
Fantasy literature is particularly prone to using (and in some cases reviving) archaic meanings and choosing etymologically appropriate words rather than the most standard and well-understood words. So are fruitcakes who like to play at old religions. Don't try to apply normal language standards to either, it's frustrating and pointless.
I might be wrong, but I believe the term "Witch" is reserved for the female variety. I always thought "Warlock" was the male reference.
You are indeed wrong. Witches can be both male and female (I'm actually a male witch). Warlock means 'oathbreaker' (it's an Anglo-Saxon word).
HH
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Nice to see one of my comments get a 5 rating *WHEN SOMEONE ELSE POSTS IT*.
1 226 is my original comment.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?cid=2248277&sid=2
I am guess that is what you mean by "Reminds me of this classic prose"?
If you notice, my signature says that I claim a copyright on each post (in addition to the disclaimer at the bottom of each Slashdot page which says that comments are property of the poster).
You did not give me any credit for the post, nor ask my permission.
To follow-up *to my own post*, I purchased the third book in paperback and read it, along with a borrowed fourth book, and saw the movie yesterday. I will post another original comment elsewhere on the thread.
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Jokes are by their nature off topic. If it isn't funny then it shouldn't be rated up.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Witches have more or less to do with "magic". Things floating, weird effects, and almost shamanistic in rituals etc. Wizards are more like scholars and they usually control the elements such as fire (merlin usually seen with this), ice, and others.
The word "philosopher" doesn't have any supernatural connotations here as far as I know (I'm British), but the Philosopher's Stone does (well, if you count alchemy as supernatural). It was (at least mythically) what medieval alchemists tried to find, and depending which version you read, it either turned lead into gold, or gave you eternal life (occasionally both).
To answer that question, you sort of have to go back to why they renamed the book Sorcerer's Stone when they brought it over to America. Because I expect that in the end, they renamed the film simply to rhyme with the title of the book, so as not to confuse all the people who didn't know what's going on.
When the book was being brought over for America, they changed a lot of British slang terms. For instance, "bogeys" became "boogers" (though I noticed they kept the uses of the word "bogey" in the film--probably too expensive to reshoot _all_ those scenes). (Interestingly enough, both "bogey" and "booger" have another Harry Potter connection--they come from the same root word as "Boggart," a monster Harry deals with in book 3!) "Jumpers" became "sweaters," and the new word Dudley learned in Chapter 1 was "shan't" over there in England and "won't" over here in the USA! Dumbledore's favorite candy, the sherbet lemon, became the lemon drop (though when Harry goes to Dumbledore's office in a later book, the password is sherbet lemon, with a reference back to Dumbledore liking them!). The list goes on and on.
Anyway, the revisions included the word "Philosopher" to "Sorcerer". I have no idea why; I can only assume it's because they thought American kids might not be familiar enough with alchemy-lore to recognize the Philosopher's Stone, and would end up wondering, "But where's the philosopher?"
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Furthermore what Tolkein was up to was recreating the mythology that Britain had once had before the Romans and Christianization. The whole point was that the mythology was to be used by others.
It is only plagarism if the ideas are stolen without attribution. Tolkein made it clear where he took his ideas from and so does Rowling. I doubt that the Tolkein estate executors are unhappy with Harry Potter, since he came alone interest in TLOTR has soared, they have finaly made a decent film of it.
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"The Potter books are derivative (some say plagiarised, and with good reason)"
Would you care to back up this claim?
Go look for "So you want to be a Wizard?" By Diane Duane, first published in 1983.
Plagiarism? No, but changing the setting from an american jr. high school to a british boarding school is not the epitome of creativity either.
Now, as I'm thinking about this, you may mean "British Schoolboy Story" as the title of somebody else's book, but I can't find that anywhere else on the comments page right now. If you do mean it in this sense, and it really is plagiarismically close to the original, I believe there are some legal issues to be cleared up, but that doesn't necessarily discount the success of Rowling's works. She must have done something different if her books are selling millions, and few people have heard of the other title.
It's not a title, but a genre, and one well known to the pre-television generation in Britain, now only known to a few booksellers and students of literature. Here is my other post.
"Tom Brown's School Days" is the title of the book i think he is referring to. Hey, just trying to be helpful :)
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