I just got back from seeing the Harry Potter movie. The audience at the matinee consisted mainly of moms with kids, senior citizens, and lone geeky men with glasses and beards. Guess I\’m in that last category.
There was a really ejoyable special trailer for Monsters, Inc. that ran before the HP flick. And an upcoming movie with the kid from \”Malcolm in the Middle\” looks promising.
Anyway, it seems that director Chris Columbus and/or Warner Brothers put a lot of effort into making the HP movie boring. You probably shouldn\’t read any more if you don\’t want me to ruin things for you …
I just got back from seeing the Harry Potter movie. The audience at the matinee consisted mainly of moms with kids, senior citizens, and lone geeky men with glasses and beards. Guess I\’m in that last category.
There was a really ejoyable special trailer for Monsters, Inc. that ran before the HP flick. And an upcoming movie with the kid from \”Malcolm in the Middle\” looks promising.
Anyway, it seems that director Chris Columbus and/or Warner Brothers put a lot of effort into making the HP movie boring. You probably shouldn\’t read any more if you don\’t want me to ruin things for you …
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer\’s Stone isn\’t really bad, just not really good. (Well, the soundtrack music is really bad.) The pacing of the movie isn\’t great, most of the characters have very little character, and many of the CGI special effects look straight out of a 5-year-old video game (especially the quidditch match and the centaur). And did I mention that the music is horrible? I\’m also thinking that the 3 people who see the movie but haven\’t read the book might get a bit confused. And the music sucks.
It\’s not fair to fault the movie for deviating from the book in places, but some things just make no sense cinematically. For instance, during Harry\’s visit to Ollivander\’s wand shop, instead of prattling on about the specifics of each item\’s construction, Ollivander is pretty much silent as he retrieves wands from their boxes. Not especially riveting filmmaking. Maybe they paid actor John Hurt by the word. At least that scene was early enough in the movie that I hadn\’t noticed the music yet.
I did like some aspects of HP&tSS, though: on the whole, it\’s pretty faithful to the book; Snape is suitably creepy; the girl who plays Hermione is decent; Neville\’s broomstick accident is amusing; Madame Hooch and Filch are pretty good in their small parts; John Cleese has a cameo; the owls hanging out by the Dursleys\’ was a nice touch; some of the FX work well, such as the portraits and the screaming book in the restricted section of the library. And the kid from The Phantom Menace didn\’t get cast as Harry, although it seems like the director tried to make up for that.
In the end, I can\’t emphasize enough how awful the music is. If, for some reason, I end up going to see the movie again, I\’m bringing my Walkman and \”Dark Side of the Moon.\”
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