Witchcraft and wizards and wankers, oh my! I was as excited as anyone about
the upcoming, roundly British Harry Potter movie, but not for conventional
reasons. I was mainly interested because a world that accepts a film about a
kid meddling in the dark arts as viable children's entertainment is a world
one step closer to accepting my election platform of dealing with squeegee
kids and hobos with voodoo death curses. But alas, my dream of scene after
scene of Potter and his cohorts dancing nude around a bonfire, smeared with
goat's blood and shrieking reversed Bible passages at the top of their lungs
was not to be, replaced instead with a parent-friendly, pop-culture mishmash
of broomsticks, potions, and other Roald Dahl-inspired nonsense. Judging
from Warlock, witchcraft and Wicca involve a lot more boiling of baby fat,
and thus Harry Potter is a disgusting misrepresentation of high school
pagans and Marilyn Manson fans alike. That aside, the film in itself is not
all that bad, in that it could technically have been worse, in that it could
technically have been longer. In targeting the film to kids in grade three
and female drama students, the filmmakers have made a fatal error in the
letting the movie run as long as it does. Most kids, raised on Pokemon and
Power Rangers cartoons, don't have a particularly long attention span, and
girls, no matter what the age, have bladders the side of shelled peanuts,
making a two and a half hour film a stretch for both demographics.
Nevertheless, director Chris Columbus (Home Alone, Mrs. Doubtfire, and a
slew of other irritating movies) was committed to translating the relatively
lengthy novel to the big screen as completely and as faithfully as possible,
to which end he cast the entire film with British actors. This may seem like
a good idea in theory, but in practice, the more charmingly English accents
you hear, the more you feel like you're watching an episode of Fawlty
Towers, which isn't helped by the appearance of John Cleese as a character
named Nearly Headless Nick. For those of you lucky enough to be unfamiliar
with the novels, the film tells the story of young orphan Harry Potter,
played by Daniel Radcliff, who mark my words will have an extremely awkward
adolescence in a few years. On his 11th birthday, Potter discovers that he
is a powerful wizard, blessed with amazing powers, not the least of which is
his apparent ability to make the lenses in his John Lennon glasses appear
and disappear at will. He is spirited away to Hogwart's Academy, a magic
school where everybody and everything has a stupid name torn straight from a
Lewis Carroll poem. My favorite of these dumb names is Quidditch, the school
sport of Hogwart's, which, as with all British sports like cricket, rugby,
and snooker, makes absolutely no sense. Unfortunately, this lack of
coherence is carried on throughout the entire film, which takes one leap of
logic after another. I'm told the novels are slightly more sensical, but I
rarely believe anything I'm told, especially when it's told to me by fully
grown people who read Harry Potter books. Visually, the film is quite
interesting, with a gloomy, gothic look that is somewhat effective, although
it does occasionally venture into the absurd, like the irritating plethora
of computer-generated owls, who are apparently harbingers of mail as well as
doom. Unfortunately, some of the computer effects are not up to par, such as
a goofy looking mountain troll and a horrible centaur that looks like it was
designed with the graphics card of a Sega Genesis. In terms of acting, the
performances are generably tolerable, especially Alan Rickman's turn as
Snake, the sole teacher at Hogwart's who doesn't look like Gandalf, which
makes me suspect that perhaps all this magic mumbo-jumbo is related more to
delusional senility than the paranormal. Come to think of it, that would
explain the Quidditch.
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