The first Harry Potter movie preserved everything in the book… except its magic
Image: Graphic: Rebecca Fassola Film Features The Popcorn Champs
Screenshot: Harry Potter And The Sorcerer's Stone
There was always going to be a Harry Potter movie franchise. As soon as the first J.K. Rowling novel ascended the New York Times bestseller list, it was inevitable. The gods had handed Hollywood a rare gift: a literary phenomenon, huge among children, that was written nearly as visually as a movie script and that already had its sequels built in. Studios get a lot of criticism these days for leaning too heavily on recognizable intellectual property, but they’ve been building big-budget films out of popular novels since the silent era. The first Ben-Hur movie, after all, came out in 1925. When a book sells a few million copies, it almost invariably becomes a movie. Harry Potter was a no-brainer.
Before Harry Potter And The Sorcerer’s Stone first went into production, the big question in Hollywood was who was going to direct that first movie. The obvious first choice was Steven Spielberg, but he turned the job down, later explaining that the task would’ve been too easy. But it might not have been that simple. According to some reports, Spielberg wanted to cast Haley Joel Osment, who’d just been Oscar-nominated for The Sixth Sense, as Harry Potter, but Rowling, who had an unusual level of control over the adaptation, insisted on an all-British cast. In any case, Spielberg was out. That year, he made A.I. Artificial Intelligence with Osment instead.
An Entertainment Weekly story from 2000 about the search for the Potter director makes for a fascinating read. The movie reportedly could’ve gone to Jonathan Demme or Steven Soderbergh or M. Night Shyamalan. Sam Mendes, Rob Reiner, and Wolfgang Petersen all reportedly withdrew themselves from contention. Rowling supposedly really wanted Terry Gilliam, the former Monty Python member and notorious weirdo who was coming off of 12 Monkeys and Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas and who was probably at his peak as a pop filmmaker. Gilliam was furious that he didn’t get the job; he later described the first two Potter movies as “shite.” Instead of making Potter, Gilliam lost years to his famously cursed Don Quixote adaptation. He didn’t get anything into theaters until the 2005 flop The Brothers Grimm.
Instead, the man picked to direct Harry Potter And The Sorcerer’s Stone was Chris Columbus. Of course it was. It’s amazing that there was ever any question. In 1990, Columbus, a Spielberg protégé who’d written Gremlins and The Goonies and who’d only directed a couple of movies, came out with Home Alone, a historic monster hit that sent kids into frenzies. Home Alone isn’t a fantasy movie in the Harry Potter sense, but it’s a fantasy in that it shows a kid successfully mauling adults, an actual childhood wish-fulfillment scenario.
Columbus cranked out family films all throughout the ’90s, and most of them, like Home Alone 2: Lost In New York and Mrs. Doubtfire, were big hits. Columbus’ last effort before the first Potter was Bicentennial Man, a weird 1999 failure where Robin Williams plays a robot butler. But it gave Columbus some experience with special effects. He was a creature of the studio system with a proven track record and a gift for working with child actors. The choice was clangingly obvious. In choosing Columbus to make that first Potter, Warner Bros. ensured that the movie would be a half-decent crowd-pleaser, while eliminating any chance that it might be great. From a sheer business perspective, this was definitely the right choice.
You can see the thinking here. Harry Potter was a potential goldmine. Terry Gilliam was a vivid, inventive visual director who might make something astonishing with Potter but who might also turn it into an incoherent disaster. The same is true of any ambitious director who could’ve been selected. Warner couldn’t afford to play around with that. The Potter books had fans, and those fans wanted to see the movies depicted as literally as possible. The studio needed a steward, and Columbus was it.
It’s weird to think about now, but most big literary adaptations of the pre-Potter era are significantly different from their source material. The Godfather and Jaws excised entire subplots from their novels. Jurassic Park changes around who lives and who dies. Harry Potter And The Sorcerer’s Stone, on the other hand, makes only the most minute and cosmetic alterations. The movie’s producers were so consumed with nailing the book as accurately as possible that Daniel Radcliffe, the young actor chosen to play the title role, initially had to wear contact lenses to change his eye color to more accurately reflect Rowling’s prose. (The lenses irritated his eyes, so Radcliffe was allowed to lose them… but only after Rowling gave the okay.) Even with its almost militant faithfulness, some people were still mad. I remember my little sister, a big Potter fan, being angry that Radcliffe’s hair wasn’t messy enough.
With a movie like Harry Potter And The Sorcerer’s Stone, the goal wasn’t really to make a great film. The goal was to avoid fucking it up—to clear the runway for future sequels and spinoffs and amusement-park rides. From that perspective, the movie was a roaring success. In casting the picture, Columbus somehow found a group of kids who could make it through a massively popular eight-film series without going nuts from all the attention or turning into weird-looking adults. He set a visual template that served the rest of the franchise well. He crammed in vast reams of expository dialogue without losing all narrative momentum. He did his job.
But god, it’s boring. Harry Potter And The Sorcerer’s Stone is a strange contradiction: a work of magic and imagination, rendered with no magic or imagination whatsoever. Columbus’ visual style is a clumsy simulacrum of Spielberg’s grace and wonder. His comic-relief characters mug and preen and gloat. His child-actor leads are forced to spend way too long laying out twisty mystery-plot mechanics. The whimsy is forced. The jokes mostly land with thuds.
Harry Potter And The Sorcerer’s Stone isn’t a long book, but it’s jammed with plot. Since the film has to set up all the sequels, it has to get a lot of plot in there, which turns it into a terribly long two-and-a-half-hour trudge. Columbus covers all the necessary real estate, but it makes for rough going. Every time my kids have wanted to watch The Sorcerer’s Stone—and they’ve wanted to watch it a lot—it’s been a chore to sit through. The movie plays a bit like a TV-series pilot. If a phenomenon like Harry Potter came along today, I have to imagine that it would become a big-budget TV show for some streaming service rather than a series of films. It would probably work better that way.
Columbus does have a few inspired moments in The Sorcerer’s Stone. His best decision was probably bringing in John Williams to compose a tingly, playful music-box score that, in retrospect, is pretty similar to the one he had done for Home Alone. (There’s plenty of Home Alone DNA in that first Harry Potter; Harry’s cousin Dudley, for instance, acts more like Kevin McAllister’s brother, Buzz, than like the Roald Dahl-esque caricature that Rowling put on the page.) I like some of the individual shots: The boats floating across the lake toward Hogwarts, the cloak looming above Harry in the Forbidden Forest. The special effects in the big quidditch match work surprisingly well, and the film takes a rare pause to let Harry feel some triumph.
Most importantly, the acting is better than anyone really had any right to expect. Columbus was smart to cram the film with absurdly overqualified Shakespearean character actors who had the gravity to sell all the ancient rituals: Richard Harris, Robbie Coltrane, Julie Walters. Maggie Smith had two Oscars when she took the Professor McGonagall part. Alan Rickman absolutely savors every bit of snarling assholism that the Professor Snape role grants him. John Hurt is in there for all of one scene, but it’s a crucial scene, and he finds just the right note of twinkly mysticism.
Those adults do most of the heavy lifting for the child actors, who definitely come off as child actors. But Daniel Radcliffe, who’d already played David Copperfield on the BBC, has enough charm and sensitivity to work in what couldn’t have been an easy role. As Ron Weasley, Rupert Grint has to do way too much gawping, but he sells his jokes pretty well. Weirdly, the only real weak spot is Emma Watson, the one of the three who became both a great actor and a movie star. In that first film, she hits her one priggish note way too hard, again and again. (She did better in the sequels.)
Harry Potter And The Sorcerer’s Stone came out into a world that was absolutely ready for it. The 2001 box office was utterly dominated by fantasy films. The year’s two biggest hits were both CGI-heavy, franchise-starting spectacles about tiny people who are whisked away from quotidian provincial lives to go on magical adventures with their friends, turning invisible and fighting trolls and being menaced by black-cloaked figures. Both movies have evils returning from generations past and kindly, mysterious wizards with giant white beards. Harry Potter only barely outgrossed The Lord Of The Rings: The Fellowship Of The Ring, a much better film, but the two sagas clearly scratched some of the same societal itches.
It’s tempting to imagine that the Harry Potter and Lord Of The Rings movies both gave a sense of escapism to an American population that needed it; The Sorcerer’s Stone and Fellowship Of The Ring both arrived in theaters a couple of months after 9/11. But the year’s other hits are mostly pretty similar in both tone and subject. By some amazing coincidence, the troll in Sorcerer’s Stone looks eerily similar to the title character of Shrek, the year’s No. 4 movie. (I have to say: The Potter kids take out that troll way too easily. The Fellowship Of The Rings troll must be embarrassed for that guy.)
Monsters, Inc. and The Mummy Returns played to the same audiences, too. Some of these were based on established properties, and some had big stars, but all of them found some balance of broad comedy and daffy adventure. I don’t think these movies succeeded because of anything to do with 9/11. I think it was just a generational thing. In 2001, the oldest millennials were 20, and the youngest were 5. There were a lot more kids out there in the world, and kids like stories about castles and monsters.
After The Sorcerer’s Stone, the Harry Potter movies remained a money machine for Warner Bros. For the next decade, they came out regularly. Columbus returned for the first sequel, 2002’s Harry Potter And The Chamber Of Secrets, but that was the man’s last big hit. Alfonso Cuarón took over on 2004’s The Prisoner Of Azkaban, easily the best entry in the series, and Columbus went on to make a series of flops: The Rent movie, I Love You, Beth Cooper, Pixels. Columbus tried to recapture the Potter magic with 2010’s Percy Jackson And The Olympians: The Lightning Thief, an adaptation of a kid-lit novel that blew up in the wake of the Potter books, but he whiffed that one big time.
He had more post-Potter success as a producer, helping shepherd things like the Night At The Museum series and The Help. (Columbus was also an executive producer on Robert Eggers’ The Witch, and it’s intense to realize that the man who might be history’s most successful kiddie-fantasy director was also involved in a film where a baby gets mashed into paste in the first 10 minutes.) But Columbus is still finding work as a director. In fact, he just came out with The Christmas Chronicles 2, the Netflix sequel where Kurt Russell once again plays a hot Santa. I just watched that one with my kids. It fucking sucks.
The contender: The big family-fantasy hits of 2001 didn’t really rely on movie stars. Within the year’s top 10, the one real outlier is a pure throwback, a movie that is basically nothing but movie stars having fun and being charming. In its own way, Steven Soderbergh’s Ocean’s Eleven is a fantasy, too, since you can’t watch it without desperately wishing you could hang out with its characters. It’s also technically an intellectual-property movie, a remake of an old Brat Pack heist romp. But Soderbergh’s film transcends its source material. It’s a near-perfect entertainment that doesn’t lose any luster after a dozen rewatches.
That first Ocean’s was the peak of Soderbergh’s brief run as a populist champion; he’d made both Erin Brockovich and Traffic the year before. Soderbergh remains a restless, fascinating filmmaker who’s done a lot of great stuff since then. But Ocean’s Eleven is a rare piece of work: a movie that forces you to fall in love with everyone onscreen. Soderbergh makes it look easy, but if it was easy, more people would do it.
Next time: Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man swings in, inaugurating the ’00s superhero-movie boom in a big way.
541 Comments
Ocean’s 11 holds up like a motherfucker. It’s just so effortless and charming and silly.Oh, yeah, Sorcerer’s Stone. Who cares.
It’s also really surprisingly funny. And fuck it’s cast is good.
Also that soundtrack! Combining cool early-2000’s electronica (David Holmes) with brassy Vegas cheeseball hits (Elvis, Perry Como, Arthur Lyman) and then ending with Debussy? Chef’s kiss.
Just rewatched it a couple of weeks ago, and can totally second that motion. It’s crazy how much of the movie is sold on the effortless-looking chemistry between Clooney and Pitt. My favorite scene is Clooney talking himself into recruiting an eleventh member while Pitt sits slumped over the bar, looking at nothing, not making a sound or moving. “Ten ought to be enough. [silence] You think we need one more? [silence] You think we need one more. Okay, we’ll get one more.”
I watched 11, 12, and 13 back to back to back a few weeks ago, and while the other two definitely aren’t nearly as good as the first, that same charm and chemistry between the actors pulls them both into “still very watchable” territory. (Hell, technically 8 is a sequel too, and I thought that was a reasonably decent approximation, mostly due to Sandra Bullock definitely seeming like she could have been Danny’s sister.)
I saw 12 and I kind of feel the opposite. In Ocean’s 11, the easy rapport between the characters invited us into this really cool world they live in. In 12, you could tell the cast was having a great time, but it felt like we weren’t invited to join in on the fun. In that, 12 is very faithful to the original Ocean’s 11, where there was always at least one Rat Pack member looking like they’re just waiting for the director to say “cut” so that they can all hit the craps tables.I probably should re-watch it, though, since I couldn’t make up my mind at the time if the scene where they have Tess impersonate Julia Roberts was brilliant, stupid, or somewhere in between.
I think that scene leans more toward stupid, but again, they sell it well enough to get past that.
My favorite scene is Clooney talking himself into recruiting an eleventh
member while Pitt sits slumped over the bar, looking at nothing, not
making a sound or moving.
Is that one of the few scenes where Pitt isn’t eating?
Is that one of the few scenes where Pitt isn’t eating?Not so much as a peanut bowl in the shot, IIRC. He’s lucky Soderbergh doesn’t demand as many takes as Fincher, or the dude would’ve been 300 pounds at the end of that shoot.
Best Carl Reiner/Saul line: “I’m dating a woman who works the ‘Unmentionables’ counter at Macy’s.” Man, I love that film.Another great throwaway scene: When Shaobo Qin asks a question in Mandarin, Brad Pitt answers him without skipping a beat. (I love the reaction on Don Cheadle’s face!)
“Waiting, sweetheart, just waiting!” became an inside joke in my family. “I’m gonna get out of the truck and drop you like third period French!”I love the “robbing a Las Vegas casino” montage Elliot Gould gives while eating the world’s biggest salad. I also love how his outfit is, in his words (though not in context) a “gaudy monstrosity”.
I love love love love that when the last robber gets shot and presumably killed outside the casino it is to the strings of “Take My Breath Away”.
The movie had a groovy little soundtrack. I love the tune playing after Danny is released from prison. I love the hippie part ofvthe montage. “This guy tasted fresh oxygen before they dropped him. Of course, he was breathing out of a hose for the next three weeks.” Another running joke in my family is “I owe you for that thing with the guy and the place, and I’ll never forget it!”
“I’d never been to Belize!”(Remaindered furniture?)
That was our pleasure/I’d never been to Belize is just such a great comeback/response to that.
I still can’t tell if that is John Cusack in an uncredited cameo as the last robber. Can’t seem to find any (credible) source on who plays the part. If it’s not him, Cusack should hire that guy as a body double.
Do you mean the guy who played the techie? “Don’t…don’t…don’t touch that.”“Why not?”“Um, do you see me taking the gun out of your holster, and just waving it around?”“Hey, Radio Shack, relax.”
Bollocks, this scene made me want to watch the movie again
I love how his three examples are just guys grabbing shit and running out of the building lol. Like no one else in history has been able to come up with a better plan than that. Low bar for them to leap over.
“Now if you guys knew someone with wealth to spread, an elaborate scheme and connections to the right people that could help you pull off said elaborate scheme, then maybe you- where are you two going?”“You know, we never thought of just grabbing the money and running. What do you say, Rusty? Should we try it?” “Definetly!”*cut to Danny and Rusty running roadrunner-style past the Bellagio fountain holding wads of cash**FIN*
I’m a sucker for movies where a large group of friends work together for a common goal. Unlike most heist movies, there is no rotten apple in Ocean’s crew. There’s some bickering but nobody isn’t completely onboard. I also like Vegas, Lord help me, and no movie captures the fantasy of the city better. It’s Vegas’ answer to L.A. Story.
Yes, see, they did not put any stupid drama in this film. Nothing for the girls, except the men.Thats how you make a movie.
L.A. Story ❤I rewatched it about a year ago with a much younger friend who’d never seen it. It still holds up, and it was a delight to get to see it with someone who was getting to experience it for the first time.
Ocean’s 11 deserves to be on someone’s top ten list.The others (12, 13 and 8) deserve to be forgotten.
8 is so fucking forgettable and it’s a damn shame because it’s got such a great cast.
It’s worse than forgetable it’s… bad. Soso bad. And it was advertized as a (corporate) “feminist movie” and at the end the twist is that they got the chinese guy from the previous trilogy to do most of the stealing for them. EMBARRASSING.I am a woman. And a feminist. And i loved 11 so on paper i was SOLD. But the director is not good. And the trailers were not good. And then the movie was really bad. So now that the backlash is gone we can all admit that Ocean’s 8 is crap and has none of the smooth charm and elegance of 11.
Ocean’s 11 is perfection. Ocean’s 8 was bad. And, for me, it was because the heist itself was so dumb. Like Tom says, 11 is a fantasy and it strikes the prefect tone sothat the twists in the heist work in the film’s universe. You buy that they could have pulled it off. It earns it. But in 8… They put phone screens in front of the CCTV cameras? Sure but what about the recorded CCTV footage showing Cate Blanchett doing exactly that? Paulson ‘finds’ the fake diamonds (I think – it’s been a couple of years) – but once they’re discovered to be fake they’re going to look at the person who found them and realise she was only employed by her magazine a month earlier and is also not a real person? And she has a connection to Sandra Bullock who has just hid a load of money in her ex’s account which, when investigated, will easily be tracked back to her because the bank will have recordings of her phone transactions? They’re all going to jail. I can’t remember all the details so I may be fudging them a little but it’s like Tom says – the first one made it look effortless. The two male cast sequels showed it wasn’t – 12 was a mess with some highlights*, 13 was an OK retread of 11 – but 8 just seemed so dumb. In a cool heist film like that you at least want the heist reveals to come across as fun and exciting, not head-scratchingly silly as if it was a first draft they had to shoot quickly.* My main gripe against 12 is that they get caught and lose the haul from 11. It’s probably necessary for a follow up story but the victory at the end of 11 feels so earned and so wonderful – that whole scene in front of the fountains with Clair de Lune – that it’s how I prefer to leave their story. They won, it was an amazing feat and an amazing feeling. Like I said, the film just feels perfect.
My main gripe against 12 is that it’s smug and we don’t really see the heist. “Oh by the way we did all that on the train. Also thank Arsenal football club for the distraction.” The least said about the very very stupid Julia Roberts double subplot the better.
13 is better than 12, but boy does it treat it Ellen Barkin like cr@p.
Oh yeah, 12 takes the cool, confident swagger of 11 and turns it into smug and self-satisfied. Again highlighting how great a job 11 did at balancing the tones and how it only looked effortless.
This this about 12.I see so many critics defend 12 as the best of the Oceans films.And im like, they lie to the audience and don’t even hint at how their plan works until after the fact. That’s bad writing.In 11, you always hint at how the plan is pulled off in the background. In 12, the plan is a duck you to the other thief and the audience.
The Soderbergh remake transcends the Rat Pack original in almost every way, but I still love the ending of the ‘60 version so much more.Spoilers for a 60 year old movie….One of the 11 has a heart attack and dies during the heist, and in order to sneak the loot out of Nevada, the guys decide to hide the money in his coffin to be shipped back home. They come back the next day for the funeral to find his widow has decided to have him cremated in Vegas, incinerating all the money. The credits roll over everyone walking down the strip in shell-shocked silence and it’s the funniest fucking thing in the universe.
God damn I love that ending as well, its so darkly funny. The whole movie is such a blast, you can tell they were filming it in the downtime during their vegas act and were hung over most of the time. I watch that movie every year on the night we decorate our xmas tree for the simple reason that it happened to be on the night me and my gf decorated my tree in my first crappy little apartment about 20 years ago.
The end is the only thing good in that film, though. It just drags and Sammy Davis Jr. apparantly only knows one line to a single song and just uses that keeps repeating it?
The ending to the original Ocean’s 11 is one of the best ever. For a fairly okay crime comedy film that ending is tip top.
Yeah I’d agree with all of that. I remember coming out of the movie disappointed and feeling like it was really, really flat. One of the things about the other three that was consistent was that they were fun, above all else and had such a specific aesthetic and identity.8 felt like a generic heist movie that got looped into the Oceans series.
As the credits rolled on 8 I thought to myself “Wow, bold choice to make a heist film with no tension.” The team plans the job, the team pulls off the job effortlessly, and then there’s like 30 minutes of “Oh, clearly they made a mistake somewhere” handwringing – nope! And not a second of the third act carries any dramatic weight.
The other’s soundtracks don’t.
“The other’s soundtracks don’t.”Oh yeah! David Holmes has a lot to do with Killing Eve’s soundtrack, which is so much awesome.
No way, 12 and 13 are good. Not as good, but still a lot of fun.
Sir, they suck
It seems we’ve reached an impasse.
12 sucked big time but 13 wasn’t bad.
I can’t help you if you enjoyed Damon’s fake nose and the discutable portrayal of that lady.
That’s just one aspect of the movie. I liked the movie because the general revenge plot was fun and the end reveal worked pretty well. I also thought the scene of Rueben waking up and reading all of the letters to find himself again was particularly strong.
13 was very fun!
You are entitled to your shitty taste i suppose
The problem with Ocean’s 11 is the not one, but several sequels.
“Might as well call it whitejack!”
“Cracker!”“Oh dear lord!”
I love Ocean’s 11. There was a few years there were it was in constant rotation on my TV when I just wanted background noise, which inevitably led to me procrastinating whatever I should’ve been doing. I need to rewatch it again. (and again and again)
I don’t think it was obvious back then, but Soderbergh would have done a great job as the Potter director. I’m sure they wanted a guy who could handle all of the train scheduling without any crashes, which is why they picked Columbus, but it’s clear years later that Soderbergh can not only deliver interesting movies, he can handle big casts with lots of effects and do it on time and in budget. Logan Lucky shows he can even direct little kids.
The daughter in Logan Lucky is great but King Of The Hill really shows Soderbergh’s skill with young actors, Jesse Bradford is excellent in it (and so is young Katherine Heigl). The whole movie is great, really ripe for rediscovery.
He did a decent job directing kids in King Of The Hill. But really, the purpose of this comment is to say that it would be hilarious to see one of the early Potter movies with the score subbed out for David Holmes’ “Oceans” scores.
It doesn’t hold up, though. It’s irritating, lightweight froth. It’s a shame it exists.
Yep. Ocean’s 11 has arguably the most charm and swagger per second of runtime of any movie in the last 30 years.
Ocean’s is definitely one of the most fun movies that I’ve ever seen.As far as ridiculously fun popcorn flicks go, Pirates of the Caribbean is probably it’s closest competitor (It’s charming as all get out, and it swaggers a lot, though the swagger is definitely more Errol Flynn and less Rat Pack.). Pirates probably deserves a little more credit than Ocean’s since it manages to make Orlando Bloom and Kiera Knightly seem like two of the most charismatic people on the planet when they’re both far more hit-or-miss charisma-wise than Pitt and Clooney.Also like the Ocean’s series, none of the Pirates sequels manage to be even a fraction as fun as the original.
It’s a perfect comfort food movie. It really is just handsome, charming guys being dudes and it totally works. It’s in my “if I catch it on cable I’ll watch it all the way to the end” movie hall of fame.
My wife and I rewatch all three Ocean’s movies with startling regularity. They are both weighted-blanket comfort viewing and clever, attentive films. It’s the best of both worlds.
Dunno if you can call Ocean’s 13 the best anything, but I’ve watched it more than any other Ocean’s movie. Somehow getting this really solid cast and then sprinkling Ellen Barkin, Al Pacino, and Eddie Izzard on top really clinches it for me.
– “What, you gonna throw me off the roof?”
– “Well I don’t want to…”
13’s humor was far more goofy than 11’s, but still pretty decent.
I would watch all 3 of them as I stayed up with my kids when they were newborns.People can give the second 2 all the guff they want, but they are fantastic hangout movies and kill time more coolly than most ways I can think of.
D’s version of Solaris was very early 2002. Not nearly within hailing distance of the original but I always was impressed that he made it as bleak as it is.
One of my Top 10 all-time favorite films.Something I’ve always wondered: Early in the film, when Clooney and Pitt are “cold-decking” the young celebrities, are they speaking in code to let each other know what cards they have? My theory is that “ancient matrimonial head masks” is how they refer to face cards, specifically kings and queens.
Hey, according to the article it’s “a remake of an old Brat Pack heist romp.”Is Demi Moore or Ally Sheedy the Julia Roberts in this situation? Unlikely to be Molly Ringwald (except for the red hair). Emilio is Clooney. Rob Lowe is Brad Pitt; Andrew McCarthy, Matt Damon. Leaving Judd Nelson as Andy Garcia, with Anthony Michael Hall once again unpartnered.
Hah, I totally missed that. Bender’s Eleven, anyone? Except I’d much rather see the Futurama version of that.
What if I told you I’m putting together a team to steal the Sorcerer’s Stone.
Yup. Threw it on Netflix the other day while I folded laundry. Absolutely holds up.
Soderbergh’s catalog is full of a ton of really great films, many of which are more serious, ambitious, and/or “important,” but I would have no problem calling Ocean’s 11 (and Out of Sight) his very best.Just how wrong it went with the same director and cast in the sequels is a great illustration of how fucking hard it is to make something so perfectly breezy and fun. Degree of difficulty is off the charts.
Its crazy how from every year from 1999 to 2001 was a great heist movie. Thomas Crown Affair, Gone in 60 seconds and then Oceans Eleven. Oceans 11 was the first one I saw and from then on I was a fan of group heist fiction.
Since then there’s not really any well regards ones except for Lucky Logan (which was great).
Matchstick Men was pretty great (and from the writer of Ocean’s 11 too) but that’s more of a con man film.
it’s so good. I love Scott Schwartz fake-punching out George Clooney.
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There are some great points here about how much pressure Columbus et al was under to make as literal of an adaptation as possible. Yet it made for such an interesting contrast to Fellowship of the Ring, which came out only a month later. The Sorcerer’s Stone reeked of a studio trying desperately to make money off a potential franchise; LotR was much more of a passion project for Peter Jackson, Phillipa Boyens, and Fran Walsh, and it had the advantage of the books being published a half century earlier and the author no longer around to try to offer too much input.It’s not coincidence that the Harry Potter films started getting better (in general) once they were allowed to veer away from the source material (when Cuaron was given more creative liberty in Prisoner of Azkaban). I think Order of the Phoenix in particular did a great job of excising the excess storylines into a pathos-driven 2 hour narrative (and 5 is my favorite book) though I’d probably pick 7.5 as my favorite of the lot.I know Daniel Radcliffe hasn’t become a big movie star, but I kind of feel like that’s by design. I get the impression that, rather than chase fame, he just pursues whatever crazy and interesting project that appeals to him as an actor. And it’s one of the many reasons I really like him.
Outside the Harry Potter films I think Swiss Army Man might be Radcliffe’s best movie. I was tickled when it showed up on several best-of-the-decade lists.
It’s weird to think that Fellowship’s twentieth anniversary is coming up, because that movie came out when I was in high school and I became utterly obsessed with it. Every few years I’ll watch it again and be stunned anew by how perfectly crafted it is. The Two Towers is probably my favorite of the trilogy but Fellowship is legitimately one of the greatest films ever made.
The entire LotR trilogy is, entirely without exaggeration, far and away my favorite movies ever made.
This. A thousand times this. Fellowship is my favourite film of all time and, while I usually separate favourite and best (Gremlins 2 is one of my favourite films but I’m not going to claim it’s one of the best films ever made), I make no such distinction for Fellowship. It’s just incredible. I’ve seen it so many times on the big screen but, in the past few years, it’s mostly been trilogy screenings which are great but, obviously, long – you tend to flag. This summer my local cinema played all three on different weeks and being able to see each one as its own thing on the big screen was a revelation. They’re such beautiful films to get swept up in. By the time the Ride of the Rohirrim scene came about in Return of the King… Just amazing.
I feel like Fellowship was the strongest because it felt the most like a Tolkien movie, divorced from (but of course because of) the production around it. A rather sweet irony of the entire production is that the closeness of the entire cast and crew – the once-in-a-lifetime bonding experience in New Zealand over two years; the anthologies of which as worth watching as the movies themselves – was such that it felt at later points in the trilogy that you were watching that first and the story second.
This is not a bad thing. It’s possible that a cinematic achievement on that scale and with that level box office and human success will never happen again. Still, even as an aside to the undoubted overall quality of it, you can see the seams in the acting starting to change by the third movie (imo). When Aragorn looks back and says “For Frodo” before storming the army of Mordor – in an accent that somehow is completely different from the first movie – I always hear it as “For Elijah Wood” before storming the army of extras, and swashbuckling rubber swords with a guy named Kieran.
God, I wan to rewatch this trilogy so badly now. Because of College I was unable to see Fellowship in the theater but you better believe I was there for the rest. I can still remember the epic Gandalf/Balrog fight that starts off Two Towers. Over the Summer the Cleveland Orchestra was going to perform the score during a showing of the film at an outdoors venue, and I was looking forward to it so much. Alas like everything 2020 it was cancelled. I should sequester myself on a long cold weekend and watch these great films.
Aw, that sucks. I really hope it gets rescheduled for you. I was lucky enough to catch Fellowship at the Royal Albert Hall in 2009 with the London Philharmonic performing the score and it was beyond incredible. Before the show Doug Adams (who writes the linear notes for the CDs) and Howard Shore came on stage and talked through the huge variety of instruments used (like chains being used on giant drums for the Uruk-Hai theme). And then I got to meet Shore afterwards and get my soundtrack signed and make a tit of myself trying to explain my love of the Shire theme… But it was still great! (They did Towers and King the following year, minus Shore, both of which were as good as you’d think). I’d love to experience the film’s like that again so I really hope you get your chance. And, if not, that Fellowship gets a 20th anniversary re-release next year and you get to see it on the big screen. (And I too still have a vivid memory of seeing that Gandalf/Balrog fight for the first time. I can still feel the grin on my face when the camera titled down and travelled past the bridge into the chasm and kept going…)
I do hope it is rescheduled. The past few years they’ve done Star Wars, and Empire Strikes Back, and I loved the experience. Return of the Jedi was another cancelled show this 2020. I did watch half of Fellowship a year or so ago when it was on Netflix. I tried to get my daughter interested so that we would watch all of them. She didn’t bite though. She does love Harry Potter and has read and reread them multiple times. I’m pretty sure the orchestra were doing that series as well.
A friend has been watching the Harry Potter orchestral screenings over the past couple of years at the Royal Albert Hall. I think they were up to Phoenix this year, so that’s been gutting for her. Fingers crossed it comes back – and your Return of the Jedi (they must have been amazing! The only other ones I’ve seen are Jaws and Jurassic Park). Shame about your daughter’s reaction – hopefully she picks it up later in life! I’m thinking of showing my son them next year – he’ll be six soon and he’s currently been playing the Lego game of the trilogy, which I’ve found in the past (with Star Wars and Indiana Jones) is a great way to introduce him to stories, characters and mythologies. I’ll be very disappointed if he doesn’t like it – but that’s why we had a back-up with his little brother!
I can’t wait for 4 weeks from now when they cover the top grosser of 2003, Return of the King, which remains my all-time favorite movie.
Me too! (And mine too.)
The LOTR trilogy is what turned me from someone who really enjoyed music as my side passion/preferred form of entertainment to someone who became waaaaay more into movies. I had never tried to read LOTR (because I tried to read The Hobbit when I was younger and thought it was so dull) and I didn’t have much of a stake in the movies. But a friend talked me into seeing FOTR in the theater, and I walked out a changed person. I’ve since read LOTR and the Silmarillion, and I still find them kind of dull and very repetitive to read (I enjoy the stories themselves, just not the way they’re written). But the movies, even with some of the silly flaws in TTT and ROTK, really take that source material and make it shine.
Amazingly, the buzz around FoTR left me completely unfazed, and I didn’t get to see it in theatres for that reason. My family convinced me to watch it with them (on VHS!!) and I remember loving it right away, all the way to ending with most of the theatre sitting through the entirety of the credits to RoTK (and if you’re familiar with the multiple endings, trust me, these people had to piss).
freaking agreed. they are an immediate source of comfort and nostalgia for me as they came out when i was in college, and just hearing them on in the background on a sunday afternoon is like putting on a warm blanket. but more than that, they are so damn well made that they hold up on their own as great movies in their own right outside of the nostalgia factor. absolutely love them.
It hasn’t been milked dry like Star Wars….yet. It’s also a more detailed world and story that Star Wars can ever hope to be
People can hem and haw over the greatest movies of all time. But anyone who says that trilogy doesn’t belong among them is kidding themselves.
I enjoyed Radcliffe’s performance in A Young Doctor’s Notebook. He and John Hamm played well off each other.
Although they didn’t have any scenes together, both were highlights in the Kimmy Schmidt interactive special.
Outside the Harry Potter films I think Swiss Army Man might be Radcliffe’s best movie. I was tickled when it showed up on several best-of-the-decade lists. I loved Swiss Army Man. Great movie. Totally got snubbed by the Academy. It deserved nominations for Best Supporting Actor (Radcliffe), Best Original Score and Best Original Screenplay. Exactly the type of movie the Academy should be interested in, but it had fart jokes, so no dice.
I really like that Radcliffe doesn’t seem to care about being a movie star. He never has too work a day in his life ever again, if he doesn’t want to, so it seems like he’s choosing roles based solely on whether they’re interesting to him or not. Look at what he’s done other than Harry Potter: that Equus play, Swiss Army Man, Miracle Workers (season 1 was really good, season 2 was meh) and that Guns Akimbo movie that I haven’t seen yet (but plan to).
The Two Towers is clearly the best because of Bernard Hill. Fight me.
Are you talking about within LotR trilogy or Bernard Hill’s overall career? If it’s the latter then may I point you toward 80’s BBC drama Boys from the Black Stuff, which I was too young to be watching as child, where Mr Hill played the classic Yosser Hughes.That would be the best of him by a long long way.
It’s the former. My love for Bernard Hill is inseparable from my love for his performance as Richard, Duke of York in the BBC Shakespeare Henry VI plays. He turned me into a dyed in the wool Yorkist and he will always be the York in my head when I read the plays or really anything about the Wars of the Roses.That said, I will take your recommendation and try to track down Boys from the Black Stuff. If you haven’t seen the BBC Shakespeare Wars of the Roses quartet, all three Henry VI and Richard III with a single director and cast, you might want to try it. Even Antony Sher, who watched it while researching his legendary Richard III, said Hill was mesmerizing as York.
I will try and do that, thanks for the suggestion. Regarding BFTBS it is very much a product of it’s age, by that I mean it’s a very Thatcher’s Britain drama. Though with the way things currently are, one could see parallels with today’s Britain.
I don’t have a problem with that, for the most part, and I see it’s on Britbox, so I’m glad I just re-upped for another year.
The Two Towers is my least favourite of the trilogy but how about we don’t fight because a) that doesn’t mean I don’t love it to a ridiculous degree and b) I absolutely agree about Bernard Hill. He is fantastic in those films and Theoden’s arc and struggles are brilliant and heartbreaking and rousing in all the right ways – summed up perfectly in the Ride of the Rohirrim scene. It’s between him and Sean Bean as Boromir for my favourite character/performance in the trilogy. Guess I’m just one for strong men struggling with doubts and weaknesses in a northern accent
It’s hard to say for me, I think Fellowship is still my favorite because it had the simplest story and was the intro to it, much like the first Star Wars. The whole prologue and beginning with Hobbiton is just perfect in every way for me. It also was the most faithful adaptation. As great as the other two were there are verrry slight nitpicks I have to things they changed. Also in the theatrical version they completely forget about Saruman in the third one, the EE thankfully has been imbedded in my memory now.
Agree that Fellowship is the best. Feels like a proper film. Think the other two were about spectacle and a lot of waking, while fellowship was about character. I always feel like i should like the other two more but always come back to fellowship
Swiss Army Man completely broke me for like, a solid month. It’s such a sweet, weird, lovely film and the soundtrack fucking rules.
I didn’t start reading the Potter books until after Goblet of Fire was released in theaters, so the first time I saw Order of the Phoenix, it was as someone that hadn’t read the book yet, and it felt like whiplash at points. It felt almost too packed, and there were details that we were SUPPOSED to care about that weren’t really fleshed out. For example, the films never tell us exactly WHAT happened to Neville’s parents or that they’re still alive. Neville tells us they were tortured for information and that he’s proud of them- the Neville of the books is embarassed when the trio encounter him in St. Mungos, and we get an understanding of why. The film also makes Harry less of an asshole. He’s jealous of Ron (as he’s used to being the recognized one) and he treats Cho like absolute garbage for a few examples. Order upon rewatch felt like a better film AFTER I had the context of the book.Order is my favorite book, mainly because there’s this slow sense of dread building throughout it. We know something really bad is going to happen but we’re in the dark like Harry until the last minute. IMO, Half Blood Prince was a better paced film that built up the sense of foreboding more effectively.
Goblet, IIRC, really tried to lean into the adolescent moodiness that kids their ages experience and took it a bit too far. But I do applaud the books for being written for kids the same age as the characters. Sorcerer’s Stone is basically an advanced children’s book written for 11 year-olds. By the time you get to the end the main characters are seniors and there’s massive amounts of death and other traumas that are more appropriate for teens.
Potter treating everyone like shit was one of the better and more realistic touches – he’s a hero and the Chosen One, but he’s also a 15 year old boy and even the best of them are gonna be a bit of an asshole at times.
Yeah, I had read the books long before the movies came out but I did wonder if, say, my parents were ever able to make sense of them. It’d be like wandering into a conversation between old friends and almost but not quite picking up on all the shared references and inside jokes.
I HATED the HBP film – it’s my second favorite book (after PoA), and they excise everything sad and scary and angry about it in favor of the romantic subplots.
It’s odd to say Emma Watson is the “one of the three who became both a great actor and a movie star” when she hasn’t had a breakout role outside of Harry Potter yet either. She and Radcliffe have both been in good movies but I’d say their careers are about even at the moment, probably by choice. They’re also both still young and seem solid and smart so I’m sure their best work is ahead of them.
It’s odd to say Emma Watson is the “one of the three who became both a great actor and a movie star”Yes, i think it betrays the reviever’s flawed idea about what a movie star is like. Radcliff do a lot of weird little movies that would have trouble being done without his ginormous fame. He takes risk and seems eager to plays with his image. His movies are not fascinating and he does do really bad projects (Now you see me 2? Maybe it has to do with England’s tax policy) But he tries stuff and takes risks. To make it sound like he his somewhat a failure next to Watson is misguided.
Watson’s career has been more safe. She plays the “starlet game”, endorse luxury brands (Burberry, Lancôme) and does mainly ingenue roles. And she always carries with her that air of condescension that worked as Hermione but not really in other roles. To call her the better actress is a bit of a stretch: she hasn’t proven that she has a lot of range. She was fine in the Bling Ring but she also doesn’t pick super interesting projects. She seems very eager to be a “role model” and that’s a nice sentiment, she is surely a lovely person, but a “great actor”? Not yet.
Agreed – and it’s odd Tom highlights her as the weakest because I remember reviews at the time doing the opposite. And I think she’s gotten… not worse since the first films but less of a standout. I find her to be a fairly bland actor overall. Every role I’ve seen her in outside of Potter – Bling Ring, Beauty and the Beast, Little Women – she’s just been fine, nothing more. Which stands out in the latter when the other three March sisters are played by phenomenal young actors. (That movie is great but I wish Emma Stone had been able to play the Watson role as was the original plan. That could have been amazing)
I bow to no man in my admiration for Emma Stone, and going from Emma Stone to Emma Watson undoubtedly a huge downgrade, I’m not sure she was a great fit as Meg. I don’t think the contrast between Meg and Jo would have been there.
I think Meg would have at least registered as a character. As it was, the film felt obligated to check in on her – and while she’s the least interesting in the book as well, Stone could have brought her to life at least, much like how Pugh gave Amy new shadings.
You’re probably right, having a much better actress would naturally make the film better, even if she wasn’ta great fit. If she were a few years younger, she’d have killed as Jo or Amy.
Oh, definitely. She’d have been amazing as either.
To be fair, I think Gerwig designed her version of Little Women to give Amy new shadings. It introduces us to her when she’s more mature rather than just a brat.
I think it’s hard to tell – at least for me – how old Amy is when we first see her. I started off assuming she was late teens at least but then she goes to school surrounding by girls of 14 and 15 and she’s in the same class. The non linear timeline helps a bit though.
Would’ve been a bold choice to cast an Asian actor though
Rupert Grint gives far and away the best performance of the Potter movies and Watson gives far and away the worst. She doesn’t completely shed her weird, over-enunciated, playing-to-the-back-row, most-precocious-child-actor-in-the-community-theater-ensemble-ishness until around the 4th or 5th film. Grint, on the other hand, is a gifted comic actor pretty much from the start. Radcliffe is…fine throughout, but it makes sense that post-Potter he’s found more of niche portraying various weirdos and oddballs than as a leading man.
Radcliffe has also branched out (successfully) in some major stafe performances (I count at least four relatively long runs on stage in New York and London) something I’m not sure Watson has done. Which is fine—but like others have said I wouldn’t say one is having a more successful career than the other.
I would say that the distinction is that I could see Emma Watson having eventually become a movie star without Harry Potter but can’t see Radcliffe having done the same.
I don’t think Watson (or Grint) would even be actors today, much less stars, had they not been cast in the Potter films. Neither of them seems particularly interested in acting as a pursuit, they just find themselves in the odd position of a childhood hobby having become a lucrative career, if they want it.Radcliffe is the only one who really seems to be interested in digging into the work of acting. Watson’s interests appear to be more wide ranging, with acting take a back seat to activism and fashion. Grint seems to mostly just want to have a good time.
Daniel Radcliffe hasn’t been the lead in a billion-dollar Disney remake.
True, but that movie didn’t make a billion dollars because anyone went to see it for the cast… (My apologies to my beloved Luke Evans)
Well, maybe, but I don’t think you get to be the lead in a billion-dollar movie without being a “movie star”. (The one exception I can think of is last year’s Aladdin, which due to (very correct) public pressure had a relatively unknown actor of Egyptian origin in the lead, but also had megastar Will Smith as well.)
Fair enough, and Watson and Dan Stevens were part of the marketing. But still, the main selling point was absolutely “live action Beauty and the Beast!” That said, the cast of Little Mermaid isn’t filled with megastars either (well I guess McCarthy as Ursula… But I can’t imagine people going to The Little Mermaid to see McCarthy play Ursula…)
Emma Watson is a considerably bigger pull than Melissa McCarthy for younger audiences, and BaTB was also released at a much better time when live action moives weren’t saturated or seen with disparage, people were hopeful for them turning out good. I remember people talking about how an entire generation of kids was going to see Watson as Belle instead of Hermione.Also, bold assumption that young, rabid Hamilfans aren’t going to run to see The Little Mermaid for Lin-Manuel Miranda and Daveed Diggs
eh they can fuck off and let others do things. they have money enough.
I have to assume they’re all financially set for life, which would be an odd experience for a 19 year-old. Watson went of to Brown for four years and made maybe one movie during that stretch.
“I have to assume they’re all financially set for life, which would be an odd experience for a 19 year-old.”Not quite the same thing, but: http://www.achewood.com/index.php?date=09042007
I prefer Lyle’s Potter fanfic (“Harry Potter and the Hanoi Hilton”)
It wasn’t critically acclaimed but the live-action Beauty and the Beast was a MASSIVE hit for Disney and Watson.
She was in that Beauty and The Beast remake. It was a big hit but that had nothing to do with her.
She was absolutely cast in Beauty & the Beast because she was Hermione, and it definitely helped make the movie a bigger hit.I’m a middle school librarian, and you wouldn’t believe how many bookish kids were buzzing with excitement about it for that reason. I heard chatter about it constantly that spring.
Checking her imdb, I was shocked to see how few post-Potter projects she’s actually done.Even Grint has a much more robust and eclectic recent resume than she does by far.
Beauty and the Beast was a huge hit. Maybe not a breakout role but a very successful movie, and her starring in it had a lot to do with that success.
Yeah, they’re both doing the “I have Harry Potter money so I’m going to do whatever film I want” thing pretty well.
I don’t know whether you can call it a “breakout role”, but her being cast by Disney in the lead for their gigantic push into remaking their old movies surely is more “movie star” than any of Radcliffe’s post-Potter work (without commenting on the merits of either, both of whom I like).
I mean, Emma Watson was the lead in one of the biggest box office films of all time and was second-billed in one of the bigger Oscar-nom’d (which was also financially successful) pictures last holiday, so she’s very much head and shoulders above the others right now, although also by design with Radcliffe purposely going small and weird with his career choices.
Think she became star more than movie star.
Emma Watson is definitely the movie star: Beauty and the Beast, Little Women are movie star roles, and even her failures are mostly in the “Hollywood prestige picture” genre (The Circle, Regression, Colonia, Noah). Even her indie cred features are largish flicks – The Bling Ring, Perks of Being A Wallflower – and she’s very good in them and well critically regarded. Radcliffe biggest film in terms of post Potter success was Woman in Black, and his biggest in terms of budget was Victor Frankenstein, and his most critically respected was Swiss Army Man. We could talk about the reasons for the difference but in terms of size and critical respect, these are very different careers.
The trouble with OftP is that it’s pretty incomprehensible as a book, and unintelligible as a movie unless you’ve read the book. Admittedly, that last point is probably a bit moot.
Unlike LotR, the only people attending these movies who hadn’t read the books were probably there unwillingly.
I disagree. (Points to self)
100% this. My sister’s husband saw the movies without reading the books, and thought they were okay, but not great. He started reading the books last year or so, and she told me the one thing he consistently brings up is how many connections and how much background info the movies assume viewers have, which leaves an uninitiated viewer with gaping plot holes.
I wouldn’t say it’s incomprehensible but it does definitely go against my comment above about what I said the books are like in that it does have a real mood to it and seems more like a novel than movie script, unlike the others. I can’t imagine anyone watching those movies who hadn’t read the book, particularly the way they split it into two. It would make no sense
radcliffe and elijah wood have had similar paths. leads in massive, game-changing 2000s franchises, yet both seem like well adjusted dorks who just want to have fun making weird shit.
Elijah. Wood.
I think the Lord of the Rings movies suffered a lot of the same problems as the Potter movies, only with even stronger fan expectations taking the place of an ever-looming author.I think Jackson did a remarkable job hacking together a script and especially in pulling together the effects and logistics. But a lot of the casting is weak, the directing of scene after scene is poor, and I think it’s mostly a dancing bear — it’s more impressive as a movie adaptation of the Lord of the Rings than as a movie.
Who in the LotR cast is weak? I honestly can’t think of a single main actor who did a bad job with their role…
The gigantic eye they got to play Sauron’s gigantic eye is so one-dimensional. Get some range, gigantic eye…
The four hobbits, for starters. Although in their possible defense, it may well be a situation like Lucas and the prequels, where actors were given lines with no real clue how from the director what they were supposed to be going for. There are a bunch of the supporting characters that are in the same boat. There are long stretches of The Two Towers, in particular, where I get the sense that the direction must have been sketchy and contradictory, and the actors were too deferential to break through on their own.
Man…to each their own but I just don’t agree. I thought the hobbits were all portrayed well and the supporting cast was solid as well. I can understand the point on direction as I do think Jackson’s long shots of characters faces and reactions are not great. But that has nothing to do with the actors. But not looking to start an argument so we can disagree.
Have to disagree, there. Setting Meri and Pippin aside (who I thought carried themselves well, throughout), I thought Sean Astin was robbed of a Best Supporting nomination for RoTK, along with Andy Serkis.
The movies are good enough to sustain this and then some, but Orlando Bloom as Legolas is as one-note as it gets. I can’t think of any other bad performances, though I see Viggo Mortensen as more of a workhorse actor (well-earned) than someone wth a lot of range.
But a lot of the casting is weak
This take on LotR is so very, very wrong, I don’t even know where to begin.
I liked Imperium. It really has something to say about the white nationalist movement and why exactly those guys are dangerous. Might be my favorite post-HP Radcliffe role. His American accent is flawless.I think the the HP films might be the first time in modern history where everyone going to see the literary adaptation had already read the books. If I had a dollar for every time I’ve seen someone freak out over the way that in the fourth book Dumbledore asks Harry calmly if he put his name in the Goblet of Fire whereas in the movie…
That was the moment that really broke the Goblet of Fire movie for me. Since when does Dumbledore manhandle his students??Sadly, while LotR had Ian McKellen doing a pitch-perfect Gandalf, Harry Potter never really had a very good Dumbledore.
Maybe it’s just because I hated the books, but I have no problem with that change. Dumbledore is just way too perfect. He lets Harry and his friends get away with everything and he always has the right thing to say in every situation. I’m glad the movies showed him losing his cool.
I’m always annoyed when people rave about the character of Dumbledore b/c JK Rowling basically took Gandalf and the version of Merlin in the Sword and the Stone/The Once and Future King, put them in a blender, and called it a day.
You’d be surprised. A friend of mine is a bartender and told me he’d waited on Matthew Lewis and I asked him if he’d read the books. He said no (had only seen the movies) and I said Neville has a huge, rock star moment in the last movie. Also when I was standing on line for the last movie, there was a family behind me who’d only seen the movies. As I watched the movie, I realized the script had left out the scene in the hallways when Lily reads Snape for calling her mudblood in Snape’s Worst Memory—and when I ran into the family afterward, that was the first thing the kids asked me. “Why did they stop being friends?”
Considering Radcliffe chased the Harry Potter movies with doing Equus for a long time, it’s safe to say he knows he’s made enough money and can just do whatever he wants.Honestly, it’s kind of a miracle that every single one of the kids from the Harry Potter movies has seemingly turned out okay. There was a brief period where it looked like Grint might go off the rails, but he seems like a fairly normal dude nowadays.
Honestly, it’s kind of a miracle that every single one of the kids from the Harry Potter movies has seemingly turned out okay. There was a brief period where it looked like Grint might go off the rails, but he seems like a fairly normal dude nowadays.Maybe this is me projecting what “life on the set” is like and also projecting about wanting Alan Rickman to be my dad and Maggie Smith to be my mom, but it makes you wonder if there was efforts made by the established actors working with these kids through their entire childhood to guide them through the insanity.Almost…like…their…teachers.
Oh shit, IIRC Rickman in particular was active in keeping in touch with the kids or at least giving them space to be kids. That man was taken entirely too early
And also that none of them aged awkwardly, particularly as adolescents!
‘I know Daniel Radcliffe hasn’t become a big movie star, but I kind of feel like that’s by design. I get the impression that, rather than chase fame, he just pursues whatever crazy and interesting project that appeals to him as an actor. And it’s one of the many reasons I really like him.’Absolutely. Radcliffe’s become a fantastic stage actor, and I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that’s where his passion is.
I think Order of the Phoenix in particular did a great job of excising
the excess storylines into a pathos-driven 2 hour narrative
I really liked Order of the Phoenix when I first watched it. It felt tight & streamlined. But every time I watch it I like it a little less. It just cuts too much from the book, while keeping Umbridge on screen too much. In the book, she’s off-screen (off-page?) quite a bit more than in the movie.
It’s been years since I’d read the series, and I was stunned by just how much the movies cut out when I re-read it a few months back. I’d completely forgotten about the scene where Petunia opens up a little about Lily’s death & her fear of Voldemort. It really makes you see the character in a different light, but in the movies she’s just a hateful person from start to finish.
Spot on about Radcliffe. He just follows his own strange muses and why not? He already has a lifetime of fame and money. Good for him!
Of the three leads, the person with the LEAST interesting/impressive career is easily Watson. Calling her a “movie star” almost feels like a stretch.
And if nothing else, I think Watson has turned out to be a really cool person.
LOTR is made so much better thinking of how much worse it could’ve been by a more cocky director/studio, or if it were made in the mid-90’s when shitty catchphrases were in swing and special effects weren’t quite where they needed to be. I also will never buy it in 4k, I’m afraid Jackson will turn it into what the HFR Hobbits were and it’ll look like a soap opera
Absolutely agree about Radcliffe. I’ve seen several of his stage productions, and he is SO MUCH BETTER. He really does light up on stage in an entirely different way than on screen.
I think another factor is quite frankly it feels like the Potter books were written with movie adaptations in mind from the beginning. There’s so much expository dialogue very little internal monologue or anything that’s difficult to visualize. It’s very much like “this happened and then this happened” almost more like a movie script or something than a novel
I slept through most of the first Harry Potter movie during a high school class and had zero interest in the rest of the books or movies, BUT I am happy they were successful for two reasons:Giving Radcliffe the financial/career stability and clout to make Swiss Army Man, one of my favorite movies in many years,AND for giving Brad Neely the source material for his amazing “Wizard People, Dear Reader” where he narrates over the entire first movie with his own words. I nearly hurt myself laughing the first time I watched/listened to it.
“I know Daniel Radcliffe hasn’t become a big movie star, but I kind of feel like that’s by design.”He was a child actor that grew up in the spotlight, but never really embraced it. I was watching an older episode of QI and he was one of the panelists, and I didn’t even realize it was him until he was called out for “well, you know that magic” basically. I appreciate the fact that he knows he doesn’t have to keep acting (‘cause, ya know, the Harry Potter thing) but he does and he’s selective and pretty good. The way it should be.
My wife and I, pre-kids and even pre-marriage, spent a couple weeks working our way thru all eight Harry Potter films, too old (late 20s at that point) to have the same magic work on us, but young enough to appreciate a good fantasy saga when we see it. We both agreed that while films 2-8 all had their strong points and were generally rewatchable, #1 was an avowed kids movie, with almost zero compelling material for an adult. We didn’t exactly hate it or even really dislike it, but knowing it was so desperately marketed towards the elementary school crowd made it less appealing to us.
This came out about a year too late for me – I was a massive fan of the books through 1999-2000 but by 2001 a lot of shit had changed for me and I’d moved on. Lord of the Rings was out around the same time and it was so fucking good.This movie just felt so rote and lifeless in so many ways, despite its incredible cast.But good call on Ocean’s 11. I watch it at least twice a year and it goes down so smooth. It’s just a blast.
Noel Murray wrote an essay a few years back ranking all the Harry Potter movies: https://film.avclub.com/raise-a-butterbeer-to-harry-potter-the-most-underrated-1798254653
Prisoner of Azkaban is doubtless the best movie in the series but I’m with Noel in finding Goblet of Fire to be my favorite. It absolutely nails the sense of being a teenager and feeling hopelessly awkward and lost, and there’s a real aura of danger and foreboding. Mike Newell, the director, said he deliberately fashioned it as a British mystery film, and the scenes leading up to Voldemort’s return where Harry wanders the castle stumbling upon various half-understood hints and clues have the feel of a show like Inspector Morse or Midsomer Murders. In retrospect I can see that this movie, along with Hitchcock’s Vertigo, were my gateway drug into mystery fiction.
Azkaban is probably the best movie of the series but as an adaptation it made some odd choices.
It’s such a tiny thing, but I’m disappointed we never got the scene where Sirius Black is standing over Ron looking for (unknown to us at the time) Scabbers aka Peter Pettigrew.
The film version just randomly reveals that Scabbers isn’t what we thought he was in an ‘Agatha Christie style’ random third act reveal. It would have been good if we had that slight pointer towards the reveal of who really betrayed Lily and James.Also the film is 10 minutes too short. A much better book than the first two and yet we’re given less of it on screen.
I love Azkaban, but I’ll always be disappointed that it didn’t delve into the Marauder’s history. At the time I remember people saying they’d get to it in a later movie, but that never happened. That plot point was meant for that particular story to introduce- the rest of the novels had their own exposition to take care of.
“This map, the thing that is central to the narrative of this entire story and ties 4 characters together at the end of the 2nd act? Turns out to be a direct connection between Harry and his father? We’re not going to spend a second explaining its origins.” That decision is baffling.This, of course, also leads Harry to come across as a right git in the third act when he screams, “MUST’VE BEEN ME DAD THAT SAVED US!” He doesn’t know the map was his father’s, and in turn, he doesn’t learn that James could turn into a stag (I’m pretty sure that’s the case, but I haven’t watched it in years.) He just decides out of nowhere that, clearly, his extremely dead father saved the day.
They don’t even reveal who Mssrs Moony, Wormtail, Padfoot, and Prongs are. It’s never noted why Lupin (or Sirius) knows so much about the map. And a lot of this is, “If you’ve read the book, you’ll know,” which also means, “If you didn’t read the book, you’ll never understand.”My general reviews of all the movies are, “the roles were well-cast, the effects were great, but the writing left too much out from the books.”A lot of this is understandable, since the books are 98% from Harry’s perspective and thoughts, which are hard to film. You can count the number of chapters on one hand (five?) without him and his thoughts. (B1C1, B4C4, B6C1, B6C2, B7C1. I think.)I’d love to see the whole book series as an animated show. Heck, someone posted on youtube a stop-motion of Book 7 narrated word-for-word. It was not the greatest, but a few million dollars would make a brilliant cartoon.
It reached a point where I was asking myself who the movies were for; book fans didn’t get to see a lot of beloved moments make it to screen, and I’ve got no idea how a movie-only viewer managed to follow anything when some of the most important narrative bits were either left on the cutting room floor or left out of the script entirely.
“the effects were great” Some were. Other looked oddly cheap for such a box office phenomenon. Hagrid’s half brother in Half-blood Prince is terrible.
I’ll give you that one.
It’s frustrating, because by and large I do think the movies did pretty good jobs of adapting the main plots in order to fit in a 2 hour film. They just always seemed to leave out a bit of exposition or character building that would fully connect the dots, and in each case it always felt like just a line or two of dialogue would’ve been enough. But the movies still made $$$, so what do I know?
Several omissions affect the logic. In DH1, they go to 13 Grimmauld Place and can get in and Kreacher obeys his master. What? When did this property exchange take place? Oh, yeah, you’ll have to read Book 6 to find out that Harry owns the house and is the new master of Kreacher.
Funnily enough, when Spielberg was offered the role of director for the first film one of his conditions was that the movie be animated, which Rowling was not happy about.
Except the Pettigrew reveal in the movie is hilarious. Oldman’s reaction to Ron thinking he’s accusing him of being Pettigrew is perfectly acted.
I thought Azkaban was the best book as well, and I think it’s telling that it was the last one released before Potter mania really took off (Goblet of Fire got a midnight release and was for sale everywhere; the sandwich shop at my office was hawkng it). The remaining novels all seemed to contain an annoying level of fan service.
And that’s around the point that they start to get really, really fucking long,The first four are the only ones which feel like they had editors actually telling the writer to dial it back or tighten it up.
Oh Christ indeed. Goblet of Fire was one of the books assigned for a children’s literature course I did at uni and it was absolutely unbearable. I bailed out halfway through during yet another goddamn Quiddich match.The movie, however, I found really engaging. A lot of cruft was chopped.
True, but I think long can be good when dealing with maturing readers. Simple, 250-page stories like Sorcerer’s Stone are great for a younger audience, but the idea of settling into a lengthy Potter story probably made slightly older readers feel more invested and immersed. My kids have each read the entire series probably five times front to back. They simply love the experience.
You can usually the tell the exact moment a writer goes from “quite famous” to “ridiculously famous” because their editor becomes less of a person that fixes their book and more someone whose job it is to keep them from going to a different publisher.
Then there’s the point where the authors essentially start writing their own fan fiction (which Rolling totally did with her website although she did have her series planned out from the start so she at least waited until after the series was over for the most part).
The same thing happened with her “Robert Galbraith” books. The latest one was nearly 700 pages long or something, which is absurd for what is supposed to be a snappy, propulsive, whodunit.
The thing I appreciate about the earlier Potter books is that they’re a lot more about the friendship between Harry, Hermione, and Ron than they are about Voldemort and Harry’s hero’s journey. The best parts of the Potter books are the parts that reveal unusual aspects of the invisible wizard world (HP 1 is especially good in this regard since Harry is new to the world of magic and is thus a perfect audience surrogate) and the hang-out portions of the book where the characters are knocking back butterbeers in Hogsmeade or chatting in the Gryffindor common room or something. The length of the last four books really gets in their way since a) the plot is mostly incidental to the fun, and b) the action sequences are far too long. The Quidditch cup isn’t that interesting. Ditto the Triwizard tournament, the fight in the Ministry of Magic, etc.
I for one find Azkaban fairly over-rated. I think the Alfonso Cuaron name leads a lot of people to assume it’s more of an improvement than it actually is. There’s still a lot of weird things held over from Columbus’ take on the series and it generally feels like something of an awkward transition film for the series between the lame first two movies and the good stuff that came after. To me Goblet of Fire is where the series fully found its footing.
There are a lot of great visual flourishes in Azkaban that aren’t present in the later movies, like the tree shaking off snow. Cuaron’s movie is the only one of the series that really feels like a work of art. However, my favorite adaptation is 5, since it does a great job of trimming what is my least favorite of the books. In second, by a hair over Azkaban, is 7.1 which does a great job of being dark and bleak, but also very exciting.
Obligatory ranking of HP movies5
7.1
3
7.2
4
6
2
1
I was sitting here critiquing your ranking when I realized that I’ve caught segments of each of these movies so many times on Sunday cable that I can’t remember which is which. The only ones I can for sure put in their right places are Goblet (pretty distinctive given the tournament) and the two Deathly Hallows films. If I settle in then 1 and 2 can be separated but otherwise look very similar.
I liked Prisoner best until I saw The Half Blood Prince. Magic is fun and all but we see that the characters are playing for blood and the movies start creeping close to horror by this time.
HBP has some seriously stunning, gorgeous sequences. My favorite is the one starting with the Ron/Lavender kiss at the post-match celebration—the noise and the jubilation leading to Harry following Hermione out to the hallway, their conversation with that lovely, melancholy underscoring, the Ron/Hermione/birds exchange and then we get an exterior shot looking into the Tower and we see Ron and Lavender kiss and then it segues into Draco brooding on the parapet. Just absolutely stunning. I always thought HBP was the most beautifully shot of the movies—the sequence in the cave is visually brilliant as well. Not to mention all the students lighting their wands in grief at the end.
You’re right, and that’s a very accurate description. The sound, the echoes, the dreamlike visuals… It’s all very poetic.
With a movie like Harry Potter And The Sorcerer’s Stone, the goal wasn’t really to make a great film. The goal was to avoid fucking it up—to clear the runway for future sequels and spinoffs and amusement-park rides. From that perspective, the movie was a roaring success.This is really all you need to know about the first movie.The first movie was all about guaranteeing there were more movies and as aby-the-book adaptation it did what it had to do. When I watched it I just assume there wasn’t a screenplay, just a worn-out copy of the book. Then Azkaban-Goblet, there were some people that tried to make actual movies and not just slavishly adapt the book, then they had this “well, let’s just get these finished until the kids hit thirty” for the last few movies.
I will die on the hill that Goblet of Fire is the second worst movie (just after the rom com trash that was HBP). Quidditch World Cup buildup with no actual match? The ridiculous dragon fighting scene where the dragon breaks free but no teacher stops him? The book had 3 main mysteries- Who put Harry’s name in the cup, What happened to Crouch, and what was the deal with the dark mark? They revealed David Tennant way too early and ruined the Crouch mystery, and didn’t even show the actual backstories.The director added unnecessary Yule Ball scenes and the McGonagall dancing scenes , talked about almost burning the Forbidden Forest down, and a bunch of weird stuff. He talked about how he had to change the tone because PoA had already gone through an artistic dark tone which he wanted to do, and he didn’t want to build on that and instead wanted to do something radical.it’s a case of wasted opportunity for me, they could’ve actually visited things that would help the plot instead of exaggerating the Tournament and the world cup buildup. Obligatory ranking of the movies: 3> 7.1> 1 >5 > 7.2> 2> 4> 6
I’ll never understand the love for Prisoner of Azkaban other than it was directed by Cuaron. I didn’t get it then and I still don’t, unless the only metric that matters is that it’s more stylish in a way the first two weren’t. Starting with Goblet of Fire, the movies continuously get better while rarely surpassing the books, because of course they don’t
I love the Harry Potter movies. They’re one of the few things from my childhood that I have a modicum of nostalgia for—which I haven’t been able to say for the books for many years. I can’t defend the first movie as good—although, I will go to the bat for Chamber of Secrets, which is good and people will figure out. But it establishes a ton of the style and iconography that we associate with Harry Potter. The cast here, especially the kids, is legendary. Hell, the Williams score alone makes it at least a film of note. Seeing that all as a kid who loved the books is still a fond filmgoing memory. There are better Harry Potter movies, but even the weakest ones are quite special—unless we’re discussing the Fantastic Beasts movies, which fully blow.
I think Chamber of Secrets is stronger then the 1st one. It’s a bit long but does feel like a novel on film. Visually it’s stronger and has much better visual effects.
Chris Columbus himself said that he wasn’t happy with some of the special effects in the first film. He deliberately shot the effects heavy sequences first in the second movie so that VFX artists would have more time to do postproduction work, something that he wasn’t able to do on the first one for scheduling reasons.
I have a distant recollection of Ebert and… Roeper(?) saying in their review that Harry Potter was less a ‘film’ and more a ‘processed film product’, like a hot dog. Or words to that effect. It has been a long time.
It was probably Roeper. Ebert loved the first two Harry Potter movies.https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/harry-potter-and-the-sorcerers-stone-2001
🎶 My baloney has a first nameIt’s H-A-R-R-Y!My baloney has a last nameIt’s P-O-T-T-E-R! 🎶
Hot Dogs, Potter Hot Dogs. What kind of kids eat Potter Hot Dogs?
Half bloods, mud bloods, kids with Vernon’s socks. Elf kids, George Bailey’s kids, even kids with dragon pox!
It was Roeper; we lost Gene in 1999.
I have to agree, the first two Potter films reek of being made by executive committee.
You may be misremembering. Ebert’s print review gave it 4 stars and compared it favorably with “The Wizard of Oz”.
https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/harry-potter-and-the-sorcerers-stone-2001
I think there’s some foresight to the idea that Radcliffe gives a good performance in this movie. Radcliffe grew up to be a good actor, and it starts to show once Columbus leaves the series, but as someone who hadn’t fallen for the books by the time I saw this movie with my Potterhead friends, I thought, “Wow, that sucked, and they’re really stuck with that kid in the lead.” At the climax, when Voldemort’s spirit flies through Harry, Radcliffe’s pain acting in that moment drew laughter in the theater. It also would’ve been long odds at that point betting that Emma Watson would grow up to be a very good actress.So, on the one hand, this is a rather brutally directed movie. There are parts where every line seems to be followed by a mugging reaction shot from every character in the scene, almost like it’s the Teletubbies communicating to a pre-verbal audience. Dame Maggie Smith has to repeatedly do these static photobooth-style closeups where she scowls and follow it with a sly grin, to let us know she disapproves (but secretly approves) of whatever Harry just said. I honestly worried the kid playing Draco was going to give himself a stroke with all the Snidely Whiplash emoting his role required. But yeah, Columbus was dealing with a lot of stuff—little kid actors with all the limitations that implies, having to stuff 10 pounds of book plot into a 5-pound bag of a movie. So it’s kind of a miracle the movie simply exists, so that the series could continue and (eventually) tell better stories.
If memory serves at the time the general consensus seemed to be that Rupert Grint was the best actor of the three.
There’s an Ebert review of one of the early films that says Emma Watson is “on her way to babehood” and…yeah, I know he didn’t necessarily mean it in the very gross way it comes across, but, well, it’s still very gross.
I think he was talking more about the way the audience (and market in general) was going to come to view her.
yeeew, it was…. a different time….God, remember the Olsen Twins countdowns?!
Just found it – “Early stages of babehood,” in his Chamber review…she was 12. Yikes.I do remember Goblet, when my friends and I were all breathlessly talking about how hot Hermione had gotten…but I’m a couple years younger than her, haha.
Big fan, and Rest In Peace, but Ebert had some gross observations over the years. If I recall, when Reese Witherspoon had appeared topless in a movie, after years of being vocally against the idea that she seemingly was supposed to for some reason, Ebert took special enthusastic note of it, almost to say “finally”. Ditto Sandra Bullock, if memory serves.
I think Rupert was considered the most natural of the three. Which I think is still true. I haven’t seen in him much post HP, but he does seem less mannered in his performances compared to Emma at least. Radcliffe is probably the best. He has done some interesting and varied work post HP and he’s the one who is the most improved of the three by a distance. Emma just seems too bland. There’s nothing dreadful about her work but nothing stands out either.
Grint is definitely the most natural, but something weird happened with his performance as Ron from…I’m gonna say the fourth movie onward? It just felt more muted. He wasn’t mugging as much and he still had strong comic instincts, but it felt like he mumbled his dialogue more.
He was definitely the most natural.But seriously, can you imagine trying to direct the actions of a room full of hundreds of child actors?
Rupert has still got a shot! He’s fantastic on Servant (Apple+).
That was always my opinion, but mostly from the second film. What struck me was how genuinely terrified he looked when they were in the tunnels.
To me, Emma remains kind of plain as actress. There is nothing overtly wrong with her acting, but she always ends up being the least impressive parts of the movies she’s in, be it BATB, Noah, Little Women etc… Radcliffe was probably the worst of the three up until OOTP. I think he bloomed as an actor under David Yates and he did some really good work in OOTP, HBP, DH1, and DH2. Steadily improving throughout those films. It kind of lines up with what Radcliffe himself says about when he started to take things seriously and started to closely observe the great adult actors in the series. He’s been pretty impressive post HP. Swiss Army Man, Imperium, Horns, Jungle… all smaller movies with some excellent work by him. None of which seems to be anything like the other. Grint has only recently gotten back into acting a bit more. I quite loved him in The ABC Murders and now on Servant. He’s definitely trying to move far away from Ron Weasley.
OOTP, HBP, DH1, and DH2 I’m just going to pretend that these are all Out of the Park Baseball references so that not only is he associated with DeadspinDefector but also that video game, too.
The number of child actors who are legitimately good (or even solid) actors is incredibly small. Realistically, all you’re hoping for from them in showing up, knowing their lines, hitting their marks and providing a recognizable version of whatever emotion they’re supposed to be conveying. I re-watched the first season of Game of Thrones a couple years back, and it’s striking to see how bad Maisie Williams and Sophie Turner were back then, and they’ve both evolved into damn good actors (Williams, in particular, is great). The best example of genuinely good child acting that comes to mind is Hailee Steinfeld in True Grit, where she might well give the best performance in a movie that has Jeff Bridges, Matt Damon and Josh Brolin.
Agreed. I mostly was “meh” about a True Grit remake. But she was an incredible improvement over the original version. (which is not to say I disliked the original).
And the original True Grit had an adult playing her character.
I didn’t like it as much as I expected, as an unabashed Coens fan and appreciator of Jeff Bridges, but Steinfeld is a 1,000% improvement over Kim Darby at Mattie (who was annoying as all hell).
Has Williams done anything good outside of Game of Thrones?
I think a huge problem is also that it is hard to find kid actors who aren’t ruined by doing 100 commercials and bit parts in sitcoms by the time they are seven, or else grew up watching Disney TV and Nick at Nite and whatever the British equivalent is.I think you probably have a better hope that a genuine kid can grow into an actor than an overpolished kid actor can ever appear genuine.And I am sure they were also carefully scrutinizing parents to avoid Lindsay Lohan situations.
From what I understand of the casting process, they did exhaustive interviews with the kids’ families, looked at childhood photos of the parents and siblings to get an idea how the kids would would change as they aged, and all sorts of other due diligence. Picking adolescents to play roles into young adulthood in an undertaking of this magnitude had to be nerve-wracking.
Based on interviews I’ve read with the young leads, I suspect part of the casting for the adult roles involved finding actors who were patient with kids. I am sure they did not want anyone like Jim Carrey or Mike Myers in Grinch and Cat in the Hat, or some method freak who refused to ever drop character off camera, and kept threatening Emma Watson with torture spells for laughing too loud between scenes.
Hadn’t thought about that. Filming those dining hall scenes had to be a complete zoo.
At least the kids didn’t leave any Starbucks cups on the tables.
The way I hear it, that’s just what went down. Columbus vetted the parents of the child actors and they were all good people. I’m sure the Kit Culkin situation left him with battle scars.
As someone who doesn’t have HBO, my first exposure to Turner was in X-Men Apocalypse, and I was honestly bewildered after hearing people rhapsodize about how awesome she is on GoT that this was the same actress. I thought it just might be that she’s one of those UK actors who should never be burdened with an American accent.
Hm, I don’t agree. There are too many outstanding child performances to name. Christian Bale in Empire of the Sun, David Bradley in Kes, Anna Paquin in The Piano, Tatum O’Neal in Paper Moon, Jean-Pierre Léaud in The 400 Blows, the kids of De Sica’s Shoeshine, Osment in The Sixth Sense. More recently, I’ve been wowed by Conner Chapman in The Selfish Giant and Evan Rosado in We the Animals and Zain Al Rafeea in Capernaum. I think Max Records in Where the Wild Things Are is maybe among the greatest kid portrayals ever. I could go on!
I didn’t have time to say this before, but I think this take is a little too harsh overall. I think child acting is just a different thing from adult acting, in a checkers/chess way. There are a fair number of good entertainments built around children acting, and they usually rely on the child actors interacting mainly with each other. When a child actor has to be in a movie where they’re mainly interacting with adults, that’s when you see if they can switch from checkers to chess (this applies both ways: adult actors acting with children is a special skill, and you sometimes see good actors completely biff it when given a child scene partner).A relative few child actors make the jump to adult acting, but often that has less to do with acting skill than the fact that good-looking kids sometimes don’t grow up into conventionally attractive adults. In particular, the entertainment industry selects child actors who are slight and undersized, so that they can play younger than their actual age, and those kids are often limited in their adult careers because they often don’t grow up to look like potential leading men.
(this applies both ways: adult actors acting with children is a special skill, and you sometimes see good actors completely biff it when given a child scene partner)Robert Downey Jr., of course, being the perfect example of an actor who makes working with kids look miraculously easy. His stuff with the kid in Iron Man 3 is basically that movie’s saving grace.
Very much yes. To lesser extent, also in Endgame, where he’s famously adorable with the girl playing his daughter.The counterpoint is Ewan McGregor, who looks at Jake Lloyd in The Phantom Menace the same way he looks at Jar Jar and other CGI characters: “Oh, I’m supposed to pretend there’s a person here? Sure! Why not?”
The movie is not great, but both the music and the production design were absolutely exactly right. I can’t think about the Harry Potter franchise without thinking of that theme song, and the look of that film.
“Weirdly, the only real weak spot is Emma Watson, the one of the three who became both a great actor”[footage not found]
I haven’t seen enough of her work to say she’s never been great, but someone who did all these HP films yet went on to be a smarmy void in the “Beauty and the Beast” remake…yeah, that’s not encouraging. It’s telling that aside from “Little Women” she hasn’t done anything since the one-two punch of BatB and “The Circle” in 2017; it’s like there was this sudden realization that “No, she isn’t It.”
She was the weak link in Little Women, though in fairness Meg March was sort of bland and forgettable even in the original novel and Emma nails that.
She was in that flick about Noah’s ark. Forgettable.
She really wasn’t the issue in Beauty, besides not being the best singer, but she wasn’t awful at it either.
Check out The Bling Ring.
She’s not great in that either. She’s OK but it’s a very flat role and she doesn’t do much to elevate it (sadly – I was looking forward to the film as a showcase for her and as a new Sofia Coppola film).
She’s gorgeous – but the girl can’t act!
You also have to remember that these kids made a fuck ton of money. They don’t have to be in every movie after HP. They can pick and choose their own pet projects. Or, just move on with their lives.
Sure, and that’s great. And it seems that’s what Radcliffe has done with some weird ass movies and great theater. But I fail to see how being mediocre in Beauty and the Beast is a pet project.
It’s weird that they chose Chris Columbus to helm a movie about magic when his house style is “Spielberg without the magic”.
I’ve long had a suspicion that Columbus got the directing gig because of his script for Young Sherlock Holmes (1985), from which Rowling seems to have cribbed heavily when writing Harry Potter. Watching it now, it plays like a Columbus-helmed Potter film set in late Victorian England with a dash of Indiana Jones mysticism. There are so many parallels between the two stories that Columbus himself once said he was afraid to ask her if she had watched it.
I remember first time I watched Young Sherlock Holmes and thought “…HEY WAIT A MINUTE…” when I saw the similarities.
And Columbus tried to rip off the formula a third time for Percy Jackson, which obviously didn’t work.
one of the AV Club writers once said Columbus has made a whole career out of making sort-of Harry Potters.
Although since he apparently wasn’t Rowling’s first (or 2nd or 3rd, maybe) choice, that kind of hurts the theory.
Yeah, it almost feels like if you’re going for a Spielberg protégé for a fantasy-ish movie, Zemeckis makes more sense than Columbus.
I do get the feeling that this era is when I really started disassociating myself from the blockbuster world compared to the ‘90s. I saw this film, the first sequel, and “Fellowship of the Ring”, but wasn’t interested enough to sit through either series from there. (I’d already read the books, years ago in LOTR’s case.) While I went to the movies pretty regularly through 2009 (when I got a night job), I was starting to tire of the blockbuster releases. I think the fact that I was a Johnny Depp fan was why I saw a bunch of them at all, and as I fell out of interest with him starting with “Alice in Wonderland”, that was the death knell for going to theaters. I just don’t feel like keeping up with Superhero X Part 3.5, kidlit adaptations, Star Wars, or big-studio animated features anymore, and don’t care for jump scare horror franchises. In my part of the Midwest, that doesn’t leave a lot of options.
I never saw the sequel to this, but I did see all the Lord of the Rings movies. There were only three of them and knowing the books were all good made that an easier choice. I never saw any of the Hobbit movies, and since I wasn’t a Depp fan I’ve still only seen the original Pirates of the Carribbean (I can’t remember why I saw his Alice in Wonderland, but I definitely didn’t want any more of that). I never got on the MCU train though, and that’s been the elephant in the room for a long time. There’s just too many movies, which seem to be mostly the same, so if I’m going to watch that much of an ongoing series it’s going to be a TV show.I normally take pride in avoiding bad movies or seasons of TV, but my sense of completionism is nagging me in the case of Rise of Skywalker. I figured I’d rent the DVD when it hit Redbox, but that never happened, so I’ll just have to take everyone else’s word about how bad it is.
The Hobbit movies make the terrible misstep of turning a brisk, crackling adventure story into a drawn-out, overly serious LOTR companion piece. It’s a 300-page book turned into eight hours of movie.
Completely agree. Also, I don’t like hobbits.
Hell, there’s barely any hobbit in the Hobbit. Everyone else steals the spotlight from an excellent performance by Martin Freeman. The Dwarves are kind of the problem, mainly Thorin being turned into a sexy action hero instead of a grumpy old man played by Brian Blessed. Then they added too much Gandalf side-quests that make him look even more incompetent in preparing for Sauron. As much as I love Ian MacKellan you can tell how miserable he was on the CGI sets.
Hahaha! You really are a credit to the commentaiate here, Norm.
A hobbit once burgled my hoard too.
Yeah, I thought that was a bad idea from the beginning. Of course, I had (and still have) a similar view of Mike Flanagan’s recent miniseries but I watched them anyways because I like his movies and they were on Netflix.
I was hoping Jackson would make a fan edit of his own and create a “book version” with all the excess cut out, but I think he just doesn’t have it in him.
Pirates is overrated, LOTR is definitely well worth the hype and then some, the Hobbit movies weren’t as bad as the Star Wars prequels, but also are completely unnecessary save watching the Gollum and Smaug scenes on YouTube
In terms of Rise Of Skywalker, it’s bad depending on what you want out of it. It’s essentially (kind of) a retread of a Return of the Jedi just as The Force Awakens was of the original. If you have the nostalgic association with RoTJ that I do, and realize that no Star Wars film will ever bring back your childhood, it’s just fine.
I take a lot of the points about playing it safe, but I think that’s way too harsh a review. The giveaway line is “Every time my kids have wanted to watch The Sorcerer’s Stone—and they’ve wanted to watch it a lot—“ Of course they have – it’s great fun. The early books are pretty lightweight themselves so I wouldn’t expect anything different. The books and the films grew up alongside their audience over the subsequent years. We must have watched it as a family at least 20 times over the years – and the films led my daughters to the books, which they eventually loved even more than the films (mainly the later, bigger books that provide a lot more background).
Philosopher’s Stone.
This. Absolutely this.
I never understood why it was “Sorcerer’s Stone” here in the States.
They think people will assume it’s about some sort of professor of Socrates that has a stone for some reason
They thought that American children wouldn’t pick up a book with the word “Philosopher” in the title. I am sadly not joking, that is the actual reason.
Lame.
Quite patronising really. (Translation for American readers: this means talking down to you.)
Has anyone ever commented retroactively on that in the years since. I’m Canadian, and I remember even as a teenager thinking that was strange and borderline insulting.
“In 2001, the oldest millennials were 20, and the youngest were 5. There were a lot more kids out there in the world, and kids like stories about castles and monsters.”No, that’s not how generations work. Except for the baby boomers (hence the name). The cut-off point separating Generation X from millennials is just arbitrary — it has nothing to do with a spike in the birthrate.
It’s not the primary thing that differentiates millennials but the birth rate going up in the early 80s definitely factors into how the generation is worked out.My general definition is anyone who was in school on 9/11, but I think the author is right that the sudden uptick in fantasy films in late 2001 didn’t really have anything to do with it.
I”m not trying to cause a big sensation.
I wonder if I’m the only person in the world whose only full Harry Potter, sorry!, I mean Wizarding World experience is The Crimes of Grindlewald?
Sorry but I LOVE it. It contains my favourite Chris Colombus traits: he is tied by the Rowling pressure but he gets the child’s view as few others. The most important part of the movie are the kids getting introduced to an elite world that is full of surprises and difficult to grasp, and HP1 also has strong ties to the Colombus writtenYoung Sherlock Holmes.There is a magical moment that I love in this one: in the first dinner, when Dumbledore or I cannot remember who does a magic trick, and all the kids smile, surprised. All of them. Even Draco Malfoy, who is still allowed to be a boy before being totally screwed up by his education and influences. Colombus never loses that focus, the focus on how you see the world when you don’t fully grasp it. It may be my favourite movie from him.
I’d just started working at a cinema when this came out and enjoyed the film – but the waves and waves of children who came to see it *loved* it. Not just watching-a-film kind of enjoyment that kids get with most kids films – but proper loved it. It was magical to them in all the right ways. Sure, they stuck to the book – but they nailed it. The cast, the look of the world, the tone – and that score. It was basically announcing “Look how wonderful and magic this is!” for every scene but that is exactly what the kids in the audience – and Harry in the film – felt. Could Gilliam have made a more interesting film? Sure (though, as his spotty hit rate shows, he could have made an awful film) – but those kids wanted to see Diagon Alley and Hogwarts and Quidditch and the film nailed those aspects. Philosopher’s Stone did what it needed to do and did it well, especially setting up the wizarding world – which left plenty of room to experiment in the sequels.
I think this is the key thing a lot of the discourse around this film tends to forget — it’s a kid’s film. Of course I, a cynical twenty-something who wasn’t that into Harry Potter to begin with, wasn’t particularly engaged with the film and can see all the flaws and joins and Chris Columbusness of it all. I’m not in the intended audience for it. Now, perhaps it might have been a better film for me if someone else had done it (though, hand on heart, I’m not that into Gilliam either). But it wasn’t made for me and I’m perfectly fine with that TBH. I don’t need to be in the target audience for everything.(And to be honest I do often think that that modern over-18s could back off a bit and let kids have more things that are for them instead of trying to force childhood stories into adulthood with them as they grow older, but I think that’s a different conversation. See also: a large part of modern superhero media.)
Honestly, working those films could be hell – it was packed, the film’s were long so the turnarounds between shows were tight to pack showings in, it was on multiple screens so it always seemed to be busy and the screens afterwards were carnage – but every now and then you’d catch the sight of a six year old dressed up in Hogwarts costume and realise just how amazing this was to them and it really was a fantastic feeling.
this reminds me of when i saw ice age in the theatre as a cynical teen with my gf at the time. obviously a middling movie, but there’s a point at the end where denis leary’s sabretooth tiger returns after it’s implied he died saving the other two and a kid in front of me who’d been quiet the entire time just started uproariously applauding. and i thought ‘oh right, this kid’s maybe never seen a movie where something like that happens!’ it must have been such an amazing moment for them.such a small thing but it’s stuck with me a lot.
This is my epiphany about the way the first several books rely a lot on mysteries with big solutions; they’re books for people who have not (yet) read a lot of books. Which is fine! (Having said that, #4’s big reveal is pretty good. The “skeeter” thing telegraphs itself about 1000 pages in advance though.)
Now that I think of it… “skeeter”…. of course she’s a bug!!! I knew that 2000 pages ago, now!
That’s fantastic.
You should check out Potter World at Universal Studios. It’s flat-out amazing. The attention to detail probably made Disney say “damn!” The number of kids running around in robes is off the charts. There’s an Olivander’s (sp??) where they sell wands (via a matching process like the book) that when pointed at shop window and things like that create magical effects.
That sounds amazing. I’ve been to the Potter Studio tour with my nephew a few years ago and there’s some stunning, similar stuff like that. Spoilers but just when you think you’ve peaked by walking down the actual Diagon Alley, you go through some production design stuff thinking it’s winding down – only to enter this huge room with the Hogwarts ‘miniature’ in. And it’s astounding. And you could see people wiping their eyes free of tears of amazement. I like the franchise plenty but getting to experience people loving something so much was great.
I should mention that the butterbeer (non-alcoholic, sadly) is fantastic.
I’ve just remembered the non-Hogwarts highlight – I went on a creature week and got to ‘meet’ a real Hedwig. Not the original, obviously, but one of the later ones. I can’t wait until my sons are old enough to get into Potter (my eldest is five and has the first book for Christmas) so I can whip that photo out to impress them.
It’s an interesting difference from Home Alone, which was filled with bits designed to draw in smirky teens and adults. Culkin is so much more polished and capable in Home Alone than the kid actors here, but that level of polish probably would have broken the movie’s relatability for kids. Not to mention all of the self conciousness. I’m curious if the pick of Columbus as director got a lot of grief at the time from people worried he was going to have Harry suddenly addressing the camera like a wiseass 16 year old.
I agree on the kids part. Rowling intended readers to progress with the characters in the book as they aged, publishing one a year. Sorcerer’s Stone is very much written at a middle-school level. Anyone complaining it’s too simple a story (the book or movie) is bringing their own expectations baggage. Of course it’s fairly linear – it’s written for 11 year-olds.
I think the tone shift works perfectly too, where as the films go on they get more mature, as the viewer/reader would presumably do back when it came out.
There’s no doubt Gilliam would have been a MASSIVE risk for kicking off this kind of property. He could have tanked the whole thing. Even if he was able to pull off making a children’s movie – which the first couple of Potter films certainly are – it would have looked more like Time Bandits and certainly not have been as big a hit. I also can’t see him taking direction from Rowling.
Yeah, Gilliam wouldn’t have made the foundation to a franchise the undoubtedly wanted, but it wouldn’t have been dull.
I don’t know – I can’t think of a Gilliam film this century that hasn’t been at least partly dull. Brothers Grimm, Tidelands (though I know some love that one), Doctor Parnassus, that one with Christoph Waltz, Don Quioxte. A couple have been good – and I’m sure I’ve even forgotten one – and I know they’ve had their problems but I’ve been disappointed by all to some degree and outright bored by some. I always, *always* root for Gilliam and any new film he makes but he is definitely capable of producing something dull.
The Columbus films aren’t my favorite of the series, but he was a very practical choice to helm it. Here’s a 150-minute movie carried by children who were very inexperienced, so hire the guy who made his whole career off kids carrying his movies.
Columbus was fine, his ability to work with children shouldn’t be overlooked — but this is the first I’d heard that both Rowling AND Gilliam wanted Gilliam to direct. He would have made an amazingly weird movie. I understand the studio’s decision not to hire him for the first movie, but when they moved on from Columbus (and Caurón), they should have pursued him.
They should have watched A Little Princess and gone with Cuaron from the beginning.
I bet if Gilliam had made Sorcerer’s Stone it would have been really interesting and the franchise would have ended there.
They needed someone more mainstream and kid-friendly to really establish the series. I think Gilliam could’ve done a later book really well, but this one was an intro to the whole franchise for a ton of kids, so it had to be slightly middle of the road.
There
is a magical moment that I love in this one: in the first dinner, when
Dumbledore or I cannot remember who does a magic trick, and all the kids
smile, surprised. All of them. Even Draco Malfoy, who is still allowed
to be a boy before being totally screwed up by his education and
influences. Colombus never loses that focus, the focus on how you see
the world when you don’t fully grasp it. It may be my favourite movie
from him.That’s interesting, because this is exactly what I most dislike about Columbus’s Potter films: the absolutely relentless sense of slack-jawed wonder. It’s an attitude that certainly makes sense coming from Harry in the early stories, but it’s so generalized that basically everyone, even characters who have lived their whole lives in the magical world, is constantly gaping or cheering or explaining how astonishing everything is. It makes the entire world feel sort of phony to me, like Hogwarts is less a boarding school than an amusement park.In fact, I think Cuaron’s single most important contribution to the series was the way he bulldozed Columbus’s theme-park aesthetic in favor of a sense of lived-in verisimilitude. I remember Potter fans complaining at the time about how the kids in Azkaban were too often wearing casual clothes instead of wizards’ robes, but tweaks like that were actually essential to reshaping the series’ fundamental vibe.
I was not focusing on the sense of discovery – which has sense on it’s context as you explained and really I cannot remember anyone complaining about Custom’s take – but on empathising with the kids, which at that moment of the narrative are kids of diverse social class and diverse levels of evil in their ancestry but have not being fucked up by the destiny, family, prophecy, you name it.
Custom= Cuarón. I. Hate. My. Mobile.
I rewatched the first couple movies recently, for the first time in YEARS, was struck by how *young* everyone was, relative to how the later movies depict them as angsty mini-adults.
The only issue with Ocean’s 11 is that watching it now, it’s obvious that half the roles could have been cast with women without losing anything at all and gaining a ton. It would matter less if the rest of the world was less sexist, but it does make me twinge a bit looking back. Having said that, it’s basically a perfect movie, looking past that important factor. Also, Fellowship of the Ring made Sorcerer’s Stone look like a 90s TV movie, and I say that as someone who likes the Harry Potter series better from a book standpoint.
I get your point about the casting, but the movie is a throwback remake of a Rat Pack (not “Brat Pack,” Jesus, Tom) movie from a sexist era, so an all-make crew makes sense.
Similar to that, I don’t know if Cheadle’s character is supposed to be a big hollywood joke about mary poppins-esque accents, but everytime I rewatch it I wish that he weren’t guvnoring it up all over the place.
Eh, he gets a lot of shit for that accent but I think Basher is fun.
Yeah, I don’t know who’s decision it was to make Basher talk all cockney.
I really cringe when people try to do a “British” accent and they default to either RP or Cockney. The latter is harder to do than people give credit for. Also, there’s not exactly an “English” accent, any more than there’s an “American” one. Region and background matter, folks!
I just always think of Natalie Portman in V for Vendetta, whose accent is all over the fucking place.
Dick Van Dyke’s. He wanted someone else to shoulder British accent anger.
I think it’s totally a joke, seeing as they stop more than once and make him explain what he said to the others.
Pretty sure that Neil Cicierega was the biggest star to come out of Harry Potter pal. (Potter Puppet Pals is about Harry, right?)
I was overjoyed recently to learn (via Emily VanderWerff) that Neil has been putting out dank albums of remixed songs. His version of Folsom Prison Blues and his mashup of All-Star with John Lennon’s Imagine are small masterpieces.
Oh yes, he also has a great Christmas EP that I’d highly recommend listening to.
Neil is like the one early internet superstar who’s still doing alright for themselves and putting out new stuff.
That was .. really well done. Thanks for that!
His album, Spirit Phone, is unironically my favorite album of all time.
Yeah, ‘Sweet Bod’, ‘I Earned My Life’, ‘Touch Tone Telephone’, ‘When He Died’, ‘Lifetime Achievement Award’, ‘Cabinet Man’, ‘Reaganomics’. Every song’s a bop.
Yeah. I hadn’t heard of him other than Potter’s Puppet Pals and the Mysterious Ticking Noise (and I didn’t know who had done that). YouTube recommended Spirit Phone to me out of the blue one day, I clicked on it out of curiosity, and the one-two punch of “Lifetime Achievement Award” and “Touch-Tone Telephone” blew me away. There’s not even a mediocre song on that entire album, the whole thing is incredibly cohesive feeling, and the bonus tracks are better than a lot of band’s best songs. “Redesign Your Logo,” “Crisis Actors,” and “You’re at the Party” in particular are all great.
“I just watched that one with my kids. It fucking sucks.”My brother, never truer words were spoken. The first one was passable, that second one was a goddamned crime against nature.
Fun-fact, around the time of the third or fourth film, my wife attended a party, which she knew would include Rickman. The kids begged her for autographs, so she took along a couple of photos of him as Snape, and shyly presented them to him.“I don’t sign photos of Snape,” he snapped. “They all end up on fucking ebay.” Then he gave a big shit-eating grin and whipped out a pen. They did not end up on ebay.
What a great story, if only for the sound of Rickman drawling “fucking eBay.”
You know he made “eBay” take 10 seconds to say, while glowering at Penis’ wife (what??).
ahem, Mrs. van Lesbian, please.
OHHHBBBB-vee-usss………leeee
Rockman was one of those actors for wich you can’t read a quote without hearing his voice in your mind…
Fucking hell do I miss Alan Rickman.
Rickman in HP and Hugo Weaving as Elrond in LOTR sound like really weird casting choices when you read about them in the books, but their presence in the films are so legendary I can’t imagine the films with anyone else.
yeah, I got this too. Because I look vaguely (but not really) like the actor who plays Potter, Japanese girls would line up for photos with me at my store. Japanese people struggle to pronounce the ‘r’ sound and so they’d say ‘Hally Pottahh’. Boku wa [redacted] desu!
I cannot like this enough. It’s crazy how his voice is embedded in my head (thank you Die Hard and the Harry Potter films). What is it about certain British/Irish/Scotch actors that their accent will never leave your mind?
“Losersh try their besht. The winner goesh home and fucksh the prom queen.”
What a story!
OMG, I miss Alan Rickman. If I come across anything he’s in I’ll still stop and watch it. AND after all these years, I’m still mad that “Truly, Madly, Deeply” was billed as “the British Ghost” and never got the love it deserved
Fuck, yeah. God, I’m a mess by the end of that film.
Man, I would be so scared if Rickman had pulled that joke on me. I can just imagine his voice dripping with disdain as he said that. But also I would love it completely. That he was actually cool about signing the pics is icing on the cake for this story.
With all due respect, I don’t think I’ve heard anyone call Emma Watson a great actress and a movie star. The latter is highly debatable given she hasn’t had a single success which she’s led that is not based on a huge IP, but the former is straight up absurd. She is consistently the weakest link in the movies she tends to do. She barely made an impression in Little Women, where literally everyone else got critical acclaim but her. Her performance as Belle was really dry and her singing left much to be desired. She was dreadful in The Circle. I think the only two post HP performances I feel she deserves credit for are The Perks of Being a Wallflower, where I think she was still outshined by Ezra Miller and Logan Learman, and The Bling Ring. Her best work overall is still probably in DH1. Radcliffe is easily the best actor post HP. He’s done plenty of varied and critically acclaimed work.
Looking back, the Harry Potter series is probably Daniel Radcliffe’s worst, most boring, least thought-provoking work.I’m glad that it provided him with a vehicle to launch his career, but in comparison with things like Swiss Army Man, Guns Akimbo, or Miracle Workers, the Potter series is just garbage.Fight me.
Counterpoint – The F Word/What If?, a movie so boring it couldn’t even decide what it’s called.
Counter-counterpoint: What If rules (and was retitled due to prudery). You should lighten up with some sex and nachos.
It’s odd that you criticise Grint for “gawping” but you go to bat for Gilliam. His films are littered with mannered, obnoxious, unfocused performances. How do you think the kids would have acted in a Gilliam film? What we got with Columbus was a solid creative framework that more nuanced filmmakers could build on and a cast of well-chosen children who were protected by the filmmakers at an early age.For that, I’m grateful.The only director who wanted the gig AND would have been an exciting and responsible choice was Peter Weir. He would have made a much more energetic and creatively inventive film while preserving the themes and intent of the source material. He would have also created a framework for other filmmakers, too.
I’m not sure this is a counterpoint, but I feel not enough people acknowledge this, so here we go: Harry Potter 1 is a kids book, and Columbus made a terrific kids movie out of it. The later books get more complex and mature and dark, and the movies try to match, but the first one is a 220 page kids book and Columbus does it justice. The dorky jokes land perfectly…as dorky jokes for kids. The tone is correct as a kids movie, and unsurprisingly, kids loved it, but it’s pleasant enough for adults who are manifestly not the target audience.
Meanwhile it’s almost a cliche for adult writers to talk about how Azkaban is the best (is it really? Or is it just because Cuaron is an Adult Filmmaker We Respect?), but that one also made the least money and the least impact on the moviegoing world at the time.
In my mind I always think of Columbus’ Philosopher’s Stone and Chamber of Secrets as being two rough movies to get through, but whenever I watch them I’m always surprised how much better Chamber of Secrets is. It’s still a kids movie, and it’s not Caurón, but it’s not bad.Part of that is definitely pilot-itis for the first one, with everyone being more comfortable in the 2nd.
Chamber also has a murder mystery plot which lends itself pretty well to film, I think. I have a harder time getting through the later ones which decided to have a gray/blue color wash on everything and no fun at all
I have a real softspot for David Yates’ potter-as-hunger-games movies.But everything he’s done since – Tarzan with Alex Skarsgård, and the awful, awful Fantastic Beasts – are completely dull and unwatchable, so you might be right.
I wonder what blackmail dirt he has that allows him to apparently direct all Harry Potter movies to eternity
Once upon a time that would have a seemed like a sweet deal, but the two Beasts movies have been so bad. And Yates is partly to blame for that, because he ditched the “grounded” look of his potter movies for the “it’s just like watching a pretty crummy videogame” aesthetic of Jackson’s Hobbit trilogy.But there’s also the story, and Rowling’s various issues.
“it’s just like watching a pretty crummy videogame” aestheticThis.
My assumption has always been that he must work very efficiently and economically. He came from British television. He probably knows how to keep a production on course. He brings the films in on time and on budget. By the time he was brought on board, the cast and crew were already firmly in place and had established a rhythm. All Yates really had to do was, again, keep the production on course. As long as the movies make money, that’s all the studio cares about. And Yates doesn’t bring with him any of the eccentricities that Cuaron or even Newell had that might have slowed production down.
That’s how I’ve always rationalized it, because his drab, bloodless films certainly don’t inspire much enthusiasm. And I say all this as a die-hard Potter fan.
Good take here
With the exception of book 7 and sort of 5, all of them are basically murder mystery plots, although there is not always a murder, per se:Book 1: who is trying to steal the philosopher’s stone?Book 2: who opened the chamber of secrets?Book 3: who is letting Sirius Black into the castle?Book 4: who put Harry’s name in the goblet of fire?Book 5: what is in the department of mysteries and why does Voldemort want it?Book 6: who is the Half-Blood Prince, and what is Draco Malfoy trying to do?I think the first movie’s main problem is that it requires a lot more exposition, character setup, and setting establishment than the others, so the plot itself kind of needs to be rushed. Chamber only has to explain a handful of things (house elves, Gilderoy Lockhart, Moaning Myrtle, mudbloods, the chamber, polyjuice potion, parseltongue, Tom Riddle, and the diary, the basilisk), so it can fit a lot more actual plot without having to have 5 minute scenes explaining the rules of Quidditch.
Those aren’t really murder mystery plots. Those are plotlines. Book 2 is a classic murder mystery – people keep dropping (paralyzed not dead) and we don’t know whodunnit
My point is that it basically has the same structure as a murder mystery. It’s written the same way even if there isn’t an actual murder. There is something happening done by an unknown perpetrator. Much of the plot is then spent trying to uncover the perpetrator’s identity. The fact that there isn’t an actual murder doesn’t change the fact that these plots are effectively structured like a murder mystery. The fact that book 2 has the mystery kind of revolve around people being murdered (even then, it technically doesn’t because the only actual death was from decades ago) doesn’t change the plot structure much from the previous books.Making the act being investigated “putting Harry’s name in the Goblet of Fire” rather than “killing X person” won’t change that much of the focus is on trying to figure out who did the act. Not the entire focus, sure, but that’s true of book 2 as well, which has plenty of interludes and slice of life scenes in it that are only tangentially or not remotely connected to the main plot or the mystery.
I’d say I 50% agree with you 🙂
You’re right, though! Rowling has been very open about the fact that she cut her teeth on Agatha Christie and that she conceived of the Potter books as a series of mystery. The fantasy elements are almost a red herring in that respect, misdirecting us away from the fact that this is a fundamentally an adventure-mystery series at heart. I love the fourth movie because it’s the only one of the movies that really seems to get this, and leans into it. My one complaint is that I wish they had filmed those moments at the end of each movie where someone explains the solution to the mystery in a flashback sequence so that it had the feel of a BBC mystery TV series.
I completely agree on Chamber of Secrets. When I rewatched all of these with my kid I was surprised at how enjoyable it was considering it gets regularly placed on the bottom of the Harry Potter rankings.
Gary Oldman’s scenery -chewing in the “it was Peter Pettigrew!” scene was so over the top that I feel second- hand embarrassment every time I watch it.
Cuaron’s film might not have set the box office on fire, but it did set the template for not only the series itself moving forward, but I’d argue for just about every 00’s YA adaptation that followed. The production design is still magical, still whimsical, but with a contemporary edge (When they’re in their school uniforms, the kids wear their neckties in a loose, “rebellious” fashion and all their hair is meticulously spiked, swept and molded. The movie’s also eager to get them outta those dowdy robes and into some friggin’ slim-cut selvage jeans and trendy casual wear. It also takes the design into George Lucas “used universe” territory, whereas the first two films gave everything about Hogwarts this nice sheen.)
I think some of 3 works and some of it doesn’t. I don’t like the jeans – part of the appeal of Harry Potter is that it ISN’T my world. I don’t want jedis in Star Wars wearing jeans either. But that’s to personal taste.
More substantively, I don’t really agree that HP3 set the template. When I think of the David Yates adaptations (5 onward) they have this horrible grey/blue color palette that wants to let you know that we’re in a DARK WORLD and I don’t think Cuaron’s is really there. I think Cuaron isn’t the template setter but the bridge between 1-2 and 4-8, especially 5-8. 4 is a bit of an oddball with Mike Newell.
Oh and what the hell is with the talking Jamaican head on the Knight Bus?
You’re right about the Yates movies and their color palette; I did not care for his films (Except the scene at the beginning of Order where we see that Dudley and his crew are full chav now, “Big D” with his head-to-toe sportswear and a big, gaudy chain.) But can you at least see where I’m coming from with Azkaban inserting a modernity to the production design? Combined with the actors themselves aging, I see it as the real demarcation between the first two as “Kid’s movies” and the “Young Adult” look the franchise grew into.
The talking head is, uh…well it’s memorable, I’ll give it that (In that it’s the first thing I think of when I think of the film.) I looked it up, and that was apparently a Cuaron idea, and Rowling endorsed it. My guess is that he wanted to integrate some kind of global perspective into the world of magic, arrived at the stereotypical shrunken head/witch doctor thing, and it snowballed from there. Honestly, it’s probably to blame for Rowling starting down the path of ethnographic magic blunders she’s so keen on trading in these days. (Also in looking it up, I found that the voice was provided by a British comic actor married to Dawn French, who took over the role of The Fat Lady for Azkaban. Whole thing probably just started as a favor/“This guy’s funny, we gotta get him in the movie somehow” thing.)
Thanks for the info! Just for the record, I don’t have any issues with the talking head from a cultural imperialism or whatnot lens — Harry Potter traffics in all manner of mythological stuff and I don’t find a shrunken head any worse than a mandrake — I just think it’s REALLY jarring
Obligatory Top 10 Highest Grossing Movies Of 2001 Post: The Numbers1. Harry Potter And The Philosopher’s Stone, Warner Bros., $300,404,4342. Shrek, DreamWorks, $267,655,0113. Monsters, Inc., Disney, $244,638,4584. Rush Hour 2, New Line, $226,164,2865. The Lord Of The Rings: The Fellowship Of The Ring, New Line, $206,448,4626. The Mummy Returns, Universal, $202,007,640 7. Pearl Harbor, Disney, $198,539,855 8. Jurassic Park 3, Universal, $181,166,1159. Planet Of The Apes, 20th Century Fox, $179,841,53810. Hannibal, MGM/Universal, $165,092,266Wikipedia1. Harry Potter And The Philosopher’s Stone, Warner Bros., $978,755,3712. The Lord Of The Rings: The Fellowship Of The Ring, New Line, $871,530,3243. Monsters, Inc., Disney, $525,366,5974. Shrek, DreamWorks, $484,409,2185. Ocean’s Eleven, Warner Bros., $450,717,1506. Pearl Harbor, Disney, $449,220,9457. The Mummy Returns, Universal, $433,013,2748. Jurassic Park 3, Universal, $368,780,8099. Planet Of The Apes, 20th Century Fox, $362,211,74010. Hannibal, MGM/Universal, $351,692,268
Here’s Nathan Rabin’s “Forgotbuster” entry on Ridley Scott’s Hannibal.
I’ll always have an appreciation for Hannibal just becuase for the scene where Anthony Hopkins cuts out a chunk of Ray Liotta’s brain and then feeds it to him. I don’t actually remember anything else about the movie, but that was pretty… memorable would be the word I guess.
I still regret that we never actually got to see the scene of Pizza the Hutt eating himself to death in Spaceballs.
That and feeding a guy to pigs, it’s literally the only things people ever say about it
Besides those two, I mostly remember the detective’s hanging disembowelment. Lecter’s little hidden knife move was pretty slick.But yeah, overall it was very visually unmemorable for a Ridley Scott film. I can’t recall anything else except that maybe there was a shootout in an outdoor market and a car crashed into a vegetable stand? Wait, no, and Verger’s introduction in the bed. But I was specifically looking for that scene since I knew he was played by Gary Oldman.
Great, now I’m sad about The Dissolve again.
Wow, I did not see any of those in the theater. That year it appears I went to the movies only nine times? I was out of fulltime work then so that explains it. Waking Life
Valentine
A Knight’s Tale
Hearts in Atlantis
The Royal Tenenbaums
Mulholland Dr.
Vanilla Sky
Gosford Park
A Beautiful Mind
Man, Valentine suuuucked. Since then I have read the studio cut most of the violence due to 9/11, which seems silly and misguided for a slasher movie. A slasher flick with no nudity or gore, the closest it got to either was Denise Richards in a bikini getting poked once with a power drill before the killer just electrocutes her instead. And I remember the plot/characters being weak even for a slasher of that era, and the “reveal” at the end was stupid and obvious.
I only saw is cuz it was a slasher which was nostalgic for an ‘80s kid like me.And now that I think about it, pretty sure A Knight’s Tale was a double dip at the multiplex after it. I sure don’t recall buying a ticket.
So that means I went to the movies only eight times in 2001.
Waking Life was perfect for 18-year-old me. I’m not sure how I’d fare with it as an adult, but you were a full sophist, then, if you were aware of it and into it.
I haven’t seen it since but remember liking it enough at the time. I was all about Linklater then. And now, too – I still give anything he does a look.
I definitely respect him as a unique director. A Scanner Darkly was interesting as well, but I probably prefer the vignette style of Waking Life. Spoiler from the future, though, as both contain Alex Jones. I just rewatched his WL speech, and divorced from most of the Alex Jones that would come to be, it’s actually a damn fine speech. Grain of salt if you take in the fact that this was all made prior to 9/11, and this sort of ‘wokeness’ was still basically Fight Club/bored of 90’s malaise, but the guy had some pipes before he decided he wanted to be like Rush Limbaugh.
(113) Waking Life – Alex Jones – YouTube
Watching the clip I’m like, is that really Alex Jones? @1:36, yeah, that’s him.
Geez, the only movie I really enjoyed on either list was Fellowship. Ocean’s 11 was fun enough but I never had a desire to re-watch it. Monsters Inc was ok.Looking through all the releases that year, Ghost World is one of my favorite movies, I loved Mulholland Drive and Royal Tenenbaums, otherwise it was an incredibly “meh” year for movies for me. There were a decent number of other movies I watched and enjoyed once and then pretty much never thought about or watched again. I remember really liking Enemy at the Gates, I will have to give that a re-watch and see if it holds up.
The Harry Potter films were an important part of developing my understanding of what a director could bring to a property, because of how dramatic the difference between Columbus and Cuarón was. Though it was perhaps a sign of things to come in franchise world that Cuarón’s was the lowest-grossing entry in the series (even if a milder form of his style became the visual template for the remainder of the series).Columbus’ two films versus the rest are also interesting in that he’s bringing a very pre-2000s family-oriented aesthetic, whereas all the later ones have what we’ve come to know as the 21st century blockbuster aesthetic.Also, in comparison to Columbus’ mauling of the Percy Jackson series (which are obvious Potter derivatives but very charming and intelligent about it), it’s noteworthy that one of the big differences was that Rowling was able to insist on keeping much closer to the source material. People have not-incorrectly suggested that at times, particularly in the early films, the Harry Potter series suffered for being too bound to the text, but it’s easy to apprehend a far worse scenario along the lines of what happened with Percy Jackson — turning the kids into young adults, tossing out much of the main plot and in particular the Greek mythological detail, etc. Rick Riordan’s emails with the creatives where he’s painfully trying to nudge them away from butchering the text are both funny and sad.
In the early films at least they had no choice but to hew closely to the books. Young audiences had read them over and over, and there would have been massive disappointment if the movies diverged too much.
And I think your point about Cuaron’s being the lowest-grossing speaks to why someone safe like Columbus was hired in the first place. Someone more inventive could have produced a movie more appealing to adults, but that was a major misfire with respect to broad young audiences. I’d love to see what Gilliam’s Hogwarts looked like, but expect it would have been not a little grotesque.
I honestly don’t blame Columbus for what happened with the Lightning Thief. He competently filmed the script that he was given. It wasn’t his fault that the script was awful.And if anyone hasn’t read Riordan’s emails to the film’s producers, it is utterly fascinating. Like a trainwreck in slow motion, or one of those comedy sketches where one character is trying to not lose their temper but slowly failing. It’s also scary how close Riordan’s complaints are to the fan’s of the franchise after they saw the final film.https://rickriordan.com/2018/11/memories-from-my-tv-movie-experience/
Obligatory Every Movie Featured In These Articles Ranked From Best To Worst Post:The Godfather (1972)2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)The Exorcist (1973)Jaws (1975)Saving Private Ryan (1998)Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)Raiders Of The Lost Ark (1981)Blazing Saddles (1974)Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (1980)Star Wars: A New Hope (1977)E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial (1982)Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid (1969)Rocky (1976)Jurassic Park (1993)The Graduate (1967)West Side Story (1961)Beverly Hills Cop (1984)Back To The Future (1985)Batman (1989)Toy Story (1995)Star Wars: Return Of The Jedi (1983)Spartacus (1960)Titanic (1997)Rain Man (1988)Kramer VS Kramer (1979)Harry Potter And The Sorcerer’s Stone (2001)Top Gun (1986)The Longest Day (1962)Aladdin (1992)Independence Day (1996)Three Men And A Baby (1987)Billy Jack (1971)My Fair Lady (1964)Cleopatra (1963)The Sound Of Music (1965)Star Wars: The Phantom Menace (1999)Forrest Gump (1994)Home Alone (1990)Grease (1978)The Bible: In The Beginning… (1966)Love Story (1970)How The Grinch Stole Christmas (2000)
I still put the Grinch well above Love Story. But under Grease, which was kind of awful besides the music
I had to put Grinch at the bottom. It annoys the ever living fuck out of me more than the other movies.
I had them in the exact opposite order.
I disagree about a lot of this. I think the first Harry Potter was pretty good and I would contend it’s far more responsible for the franchises popularity then the books were.
The books were already a world-dominating cultural phenomenon by the time this came out.
Not really. It was popular among YA readers but I think the movies pushed it to mainstream
No. Pottermania was already a global phenomenon when Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire came out the previous year. The books were so huge that the filmmakers frequently just assumed the audience had read them and could supplement the onscreen plotting. Now, obviously some more people saw the movies who never read the books, but Harry Potter was already mainstream.
Yeah. Adults were reading the books before any of the movies came out.
In July 2000, a year and a half before the first movie came, the New York Times created a children’s category for its Best Sellers list because they were tired of the Harry Potter series dominating the overall fiction list.
nah, you’re misremembering. the books were everywhere already. the movie certainly led to more merchandise and literal visibility, you maybe didn’t see a t-shirt before, but everyone knew what harry potter was. the books were for sale at gas stations.
I’m genuinely curious how old you were, and how well you’re remembering that time. The only reason we’re discussing this movie here at this moment is because the books were absolutely and increasingly everywhere at that point.
Pretty damn old. Which may be why I didn’t think it was a huge deal. I was 20 when the first book came out. I suspect that people responding here were about ten years younger, so this YA story about a young wizard may have been far more in their world then mine
Sounds like we’re about the same age, then, and my recollection is that by the time this movie came out, the books were absolutely everywhere across media and culture. One of the things that really drove that was that it wasn’t just kids reading them, not by a long shot.
The film was huge *because* of how big the books were. You don’t make $900m on your kids book film unless it’s already mainstream.
Yeah, like LOTR it had enough of a following that it would’ve done well, but it just introduced that many more people to the series so it went beyond a hit and became a phenomenon. I’m sure a ton of people read it after seeing the film too.
Yeah, name another book release that had people camped out to buy copies at midnight. I don’t think that’s ever happened otherwise in my lifetime.
Yeah, Goblet of Fire was published in 2000 and was HUGE. I didn’t read the series until 2009 but even I remember hearing about this series that adults loved as much as children.
For the first two films, the movies were just an ancillary source of revenue. I worked at a movie theater over that winter break and witnessed hundreds of kids showing up, dragging their parents in, then quoting scenes and lines from a movie they had never seen before. The books were that huge.
Not a chance – they were already on book four when the first movie came out and I had friends that worked in bookstores. It was insane way, way before the movies.
Chris Columbus is such a fucking hack who has no concept of cinematic language.
There’s a scene in this movie where Harry is trying to get around Snape and the twist villian while wearing his invisibility cloak. We see the whole scene from his perspective because there’s invisibility cloak filter all over it. Except, we don’t see it from his perspective, because the camera is at eye level with Alan Rickman, so the invisibility cloak must make you grow two feet as well.
Just look at this shit. At least Spielberg would have know where to put the camera for a child’s POV.
Meh. Not that uncommon. The POV of Myers in Halloween is also all screwed up when he’s a kid at the beginning, and we’re eye-level with his parents.
I like the visual style of the first two HP movies better than the rest. It’s a lot more whimsical and “merlin-esque” than the rest of the movies. I do appreciate how they kind of grow up along with the three main kids, but they definitely lost a little charm by going darker with each following movie.
It’s weird to look back on the early Harry Potter movies and realize that, for all their big, fancy visuals, the performances are probably what made them actually work. But at the same time, I think Columbus’ sort of uninspired directing and visual design is perhaps the only place they could’ve done their jobs.While a lot of its bigger, fancier visuals don’t work,Columbus set up a very familiar sort of lived-in style, which surprisingly worked. The wizarding world is full of magical crazy shit, but it’s also… a world where people live, and work. There’s a newness to all of it, but eventually you just realize that Diagon Alley is a kind of old-fashioned shopping district. Ollivander’s, for all its mystique, is essentially the magical equivalent of the shop that sells the ‘smart’ shoes you need for school. Sure, Hogwarts is a castle with shifting staircases and talking paintings, but beyond all that it’s just a school, and going to potions class is no different to going to chemistry with the weird, kinda curt teacher.That gives all of these amazing performances a bit of a different air to breathe. They’re not selling some deep, fantastical legend and world; sure, they probably could’ve pulled that off, but it probably would’ve been a bit too ‘explosive’ for what they were aiming for. They wanted ‘like our world, but weirder’, and that cast really pulls that off. They make it feel like a world with history, but believable history; customs that have become commonplace, cultural wounds that haven’t and probably won’t heal, rivalries that you only sort of get. It needs the grounded sort of backdrop that Columbus paints, but it also needs some stellar performances to make you believe that backdrop.
The lived-in element is what makes Hogwarts work. There are all kinds of weird things going on in the background at all times that most people just ignore. The first years might stare for a moment but even they move along quickly so they don’t look like rubes, and in general portraying all of these things are business as usual went a long way towards normalizing the setting.I do have to admit that there were far too many ways for a student to be killed while attending, though. Maybe a fence between the school and the world’s most deadly forest would be a good idea?
Wizards are too busy making puke-flavored jellybeans to erect simple things like a fence.
You’d think some people would have puled their kids out of school what with the annual school crisis that resulted in total lockdowns and the not-occasional murder.
Where else are they going to send their kids? To some complete dump like Oxford?
Wizards are apparently not fond of lawsuits.
This is true, but the way it’s done also makes the movie irritating, since it’s a constant series of moments where Thing From Book is introduced to a swell of music and a lingering camera shot, making pacing and flow practically non-existent. More subtlety could have kept the lived-in feel, satisfied book readers, and made for a better movie.
I love the Harry Potter series with a fiery passion unbecoming a grown-ass adult, but this movie is dull as dirt. It’s full of line readings that reveal a lack of familiarity with the material (yes, I have watched it way too closely), and every directing choice is as obvious as possible. Columbus is pedestrian director, competent in the worst possible way. As in, “there wasn’t a boom mic hanging in the shot, great job.”
My favorite displeased fanboys are the ones upset that the casting people dared to be unable to tell that Emma Watson would grow up to be such a bombshell, unlike Hermione.I was actually most excited at the time for Robbie Coltrane, who I’d loved so much in his two James Bond films.
What 007 movies were Coltrane in?I’ve been a fan of his work since Nuns on the Run.
Goldeneye and The World is Not Enough. He plays Bond’s Russian frenemy.
Okay, now I remember him.
“I gave him the limp.”
Columbus gets a lot of credit for the casting and setting up the world, but his visual direction is so dull and uninspiring. Even resorting to a standard straight shot of the kids screaming like something out of Home Alone. I think the script of Azkaban was too lean but visually it really was a huge jump in quality. No longer did Hogwarts just seem like a few distant model shots, you actually got down on the ground with the students to make it feel like a real environment.
Casting a better Dumbledore didn’t hurt either.
Michael Gambon is the superior Dumbledore. FIGHT ME.
Given that he wasn’t half-dead while filming, I think he had it a little easier than Richard Harris.
I think Richard Harris would have been better had he lived long enough to do more than two films.
“In 2001, the oldest millennials were 20, and the youngest were 5. There were a lot more kids out there in the world, and kids like stories about castles and monsters.”A lot of trends in movie making make a lot more sense when you think about generational aging. Like, we think of the 70s as a golden age of adult filmmaking, and that probably had a lot to do with the fact that the boomers were in their 20s and 30s during that decade and most of them hadn’t had children yet. There were just fewer kids to make movies for so Hollywood was uniquely positioned to make money by making movies for the “cool” age groups.
I think this one nailed the tone of the books, as did Chamber of Secrets. As the films go on, they “feel” less and less like the books. Which isn’t a problem per se, unless that’s what you’re looking for (like me) — I normally think adaptations should try to do something different. But the subsequent movies were just so lifeless. This one at least feels simple and light and enjoyable…damning it with faint praise I guess 🙂
I didn’t care for the increasingly dark palettes. I like the Hallows movies, but they looked like Private Ryan.
Sorcerer’s Stone is fine. Chamber of Secrets is a fucking slog. And I know I already mentioned it in a reply to another comment, but the original Ocean’s 11 was a RAT Pack film, Tom, not a BRAT Pack film. Although now I want to see a heist movie with mid-to-late 1980s Anthony Michael Hall, Molly Ringwald, Emilio Estevez, Robert Downey Jr., Judd Nelson, Andrew McCarthy, James Spader, Rob Lowe, Ally Sheedy, Charlie Sheen, and… shit, I need two more Brat Packers. Do Christian Slater and Kiefer Sutherland count?
You could throw in John Cusack and Jon Cryer?
Replace Cusack with Patrick Dempsey.
YES! Okay, someone get me a time machine…
Ahem. Cusack has a hot tub for you.
Is this column going to be all Harry Potter and comic book movies from now on? Basically, everything I have zero interest in watching.
I’m afraid this category is “the Popcorn Champs,” rather than “the Best Movies”. I’ve stopped expecting the Oscar Best Picture to be a good movie.
Looking at the list for upcoming movies in this series, I will go to bat for a bunch of them as maybe being the “best” (or at least my personal favorite) of the year, particularly The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (also Best Picture winner) (2003). Others I would say are my favorites are Dark Knight (2008), The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (2013), and Rogue One (2016).
I haven’t even made it through a Lord of the Rings trailer without being bored. It’s really not my cup of tea. If I’m going to watch an unrealistic movie, I’d prefer it involve people bursting into song instead of characters being hobbits or superheroes.
Fair enough. The genre isn’t for everyone. I was certainly a Lord of the Rings skeptic when the first one came out and didn’t really care for the first two movies until I saw the 3rd which totally blew me away and retroactively made the first two so much better because of what they were leading up to.
My main beef with LOTR is way too much super-dramatic slo-mo. Oh, and Bloom surfing a shield down the stairs.
But that was in the book!!!I think.
That’s why the second and third ones are slightly worse in my opinion to the first, I know they made it all at once, but it felt like they tacked on superhero Legolas once they knew Bloom was gonna be a star. Then it gets so much worse in the Hobbit films, long after his star had faded and Pirates weren’t a thing anymore.
LOTR, Game of Thrones…. people never seem to tire of costume narratives full of kings and dragons.
Then in 2003 Pirates. I still consider the porn film more iconic than the slightly overrated Disney film.
Rogue One is great. An original trilogy-quality Star Wars film through and through.
There’s a fair amount overlap between “good to great movie”, box office leader, and best picture winner, and as you noted Return of the King managed to be all three at once. But what I find interesting is that half the comments in this series end up being about one of the runner up movies; somehow there’s a really good, interesting movie that always seems to end up 2nd or 3rd at the box office. They ought to make that the next series, the most interesting movie from each year that either lost the best picture Oscar or finished 2nd through 5th at the box officer. Or possibly both, I think there may be a good movie that fits both criteria in almost every year.
Even the first Spider-Man has an excellent comic book feel to it that was refreshing, WAS. But it really was a breath of fresh air, especially after 9/11 and before Iraq made us all gritty and glum (LOTR and Zoolander also provided some much needed post-9/11 escapism).
I think from 2001 on, almost every single box office champ is a film in a franchise or sequel—I think there’s maybe one film that is a standalone film that isn’t a superhero or sci-fi or animated film as the highest grossing film of the year in the last 20 years and that depends on if we go by calendar gross or in-year release gross.
I completely disagree. Chris Columbus directed the best Harry Potter films with Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone & Harry Potter and The Chamber of Secrets. I could say that John Williams’ composed his best score ever for Sorcerer’s Stone as every note feels memorable.They’re all magically atmospheric and every actor is captivating. The dark forest sequence with the unicorn is still dark and scary, John Hurt’s wand choosing scene is beautifully tender and engrossing. Columbus’ direction is so earnest unlike Alfonso Cuaron and every other Harry Potter director’s dark, cynicism. You are enjoying the ride alongside these kids.This writer is clearly a jaded adult looking back on Harry Potter. I was 7 when Sorcerer’s Stone came out and it’s still the most fun to revisit. Columbus was the perfect choice to build up the lore and wizarding world without Terry Gilliam’s weirdness or Spielberg changing the book, which is certainly what would have happened.
I will disagree and say I think in terms of Harry Potter, POA is the best Williams Harry Potter score.
I was just about to reply with something similar – that, to me, is the last all-great Williams score. He’s does some great stuff since (Rey’s theme) and he was on a roll before (Philosopher’s Stone, A.I., Catch Me if You Can) but PoA is just fantastic from beginning to end. Special shout outs to Aunt Marge’s Waltz and Buckbeak’s Flight.
For me it was Revenge of the Sith, despite the film being meh Williams pulled out all the stops for this one musically. There was some ok motifs in the sequels, but it felt like he also was starting to show his age.
I’m personally a big fan of War Horse/Lincoln/Adventures of Tintin triple whammy.
I love that John Williams score too.
I HONESTLY do not get the hate for this movie. I watched it once it was released on DVD, without ever having read the book and absolutely fell in love with it, as a 30 yr old woman. Seeing the movie made me desperate to read the book and I became a Harry Potter fan as a result, catching up on all of the books and getting the subsequent books as soon as they were available. I HATE when movies based on other material change key elements of the source material, which could explain why I have no issues with this movie and why I cannot stand the third movie. To my way of thinking, a movie based on a book should bring the book to life, it shouldn’t turn it into something else entirely, what is the point of that? Is this movie perfect? Of course not, but to suggest it is lacking in magic or is boring is ridiculous, even if you don’t like the choices made by the studio and the director.
“ I just watched that one with my kids. It fucking sucks.”The lament of the embattled parent-I recognize it well.Having kids is the best thing that ever happened to me, period. I adore my sons so freaking much. But one thing I did not anticipate, one of the few real downsides, is the horrible movies that are almost a requirement of parenthood. I have taken a nap along with rows of other anguished parents during the Emoji movie (seriously, I was in a theater with recliners, and every parent was asleep). I have sat stoically through MULTIPLE annoying chipmunk “adventures”. Don’t get me started on Angry Birds. And on, and on, and on.There are some amazing films for kids too. But one of the few awful things about parenthood is the hours you waste on some really bad things the kids insist they need to see.
It really is impressive how many of the children cast at the very beginning turned out to be at least reasonable actors and look the part by the time the last film came out ten whole years later. The one exception being Ginny Weasley. While she looks the part, I just found the interactions between her Harry to be stiff and awkward (and not in the “teenagers are awkward with the object of their affections” sort of way).That, and Draco’s lacker (Crabb? Goyle?) who had to be dropped because of misconduct of some sort.
I think the first movie was okay. It suffers from being slavish to the book. That’s all. Emma Watson is a good actress. I think she’s very intelligent. She became the breakout because she grew into being a stone cold fox, while the other two grew into being taller versions of the kids they started as. She gets more print work and so remains in the zeitgeist. I think Radcliffe has had, far and away, the more interesting resumé. Ocean’s Eleven wont age badly. The mechanics of it will always be fun to watch. I remain 9be odmf seven people who liked Twelve marginally better.
“Print work”? Is she a writer?
She’s a face for several cosmetic and clothing brands. And of course looks like this:
Yeah seriously if you’re an actress and ingratiate yourself with magazines and cosmetics companies, you’re minted for life. Sheesh, Jessica Alba started her own and she never has to act again if she doesn’t want to.
Wow, not one freckle!
Perhaps I use the phrase wrong. She gets a lot of pictures in magazines. Though it’s possible she is a writer.
I did a quick search and it appears that Emma Watson is a fantastically prolific cookbook writer.
I’m sure this will be an unpopular opinion, but I don’t think Prisoner of Azkaban is “easily the best entry in the series.” Personally, I prefer both Goblet of Fire and Deathly Hallows 2.Also: the people who did the casting for this movie were either spectacularly good at their jobs, incredibly lucky, or both. The three leads could have gone badly very quickly, yet they absolutely nailed all three, miraculously.
Hallows 2 is such a departure from the others because it’s basically an action movie. Though the King’s Cross scene is probably my favorite.
Y’know why that is? It’s thanks to Macaulay Culkin’s dad.
Kit Culkin made a ton of unreasonable demands when Home Alone 2 got green-lit, and almost threatened to pull Macaulay from filming a couple times. When they were doing casting for Harry Potter, Chris Columbus made sure to interview not just the kids, but also their parents. If any of them came off like stage parents, he’d immediately eliminate them from consideration.
Considering all three turned out to be well-adjusted adults, this was definitely a good move.
I have not seen this movie, but I have seen several excerpts from Brad Neely’s delightful commentary track Wizard People, Dear Reader.
Lol.
I got to see this in a rented movie theater for a friend’s birthday. What a fucking hoot that was.
This is the only good thing to come out of Harry Potter.“I AM A BEAUTIFUL ANIMAL. I AM A DESTROYER OF WORLDS. I AM HARRY FUCKING POTTER!”
Ron loves Twizzlers!
This is the one Harry Potter movie I’ve seen. The last book I read was Goblet of Fire. I think that’s enough to know the basics without being one of those people who needs to “read another book”.I was not aware that Emma Watson became a great actor, although it’s not like I’ve seen all that many things she’s done. I did recently watch “The Bling Ring”, and I’d describe her performance in that as adequate. I forgot she was in Little Women until I just looked up her filmography, and the same description applies there.
I watched The Circle recently. She still speaks as if she’s about to cry (like she does from GoF on). Can she stop doing that?
If Gilliam would have been chosen we would still be waiting for the film and it would be a strange as Brazil. I do love his work and am a fan saying this.
Yes. I love some of his work but he was barely able to finish 12 Monkeys without losing what remained of his sanity. I can’t believe that Gilliam could have kept up with the scheduling, working with kids, etc. He really shouldn’t have been so awful about it either
Oh, I can totally imagine him traumatizing those kids forever
You can kind of tell that Rowling was influenced by Gilliam. Any scene in the Ministry of Magic feels like it came straight out of Brazil.
On the morning Harry Potter was released my whole family showed up at my house and forced me to go see it with them. I was ridiculously hungover. The theater was packed with screaming kids all dressed up. There was an awful Scooby-Doo trailer, then Harry Potter. It was nightmare. The projectionist (I used to be one) played the soundtrack full-blast (a no-no, but I would do it during the end credits of Dazed and Confused, so I’m a hypocrite), which had the kids screaming louder and louder over it, whenever Harry succeeds at something, which is all the fucking time. He’s supposed to be an underdog, and the other characters in the movie always say “Harry hasn’t got a chance” which of course means he’ll succeed. This happens a lot, and every time lil’ old Harry musters up some whatever, he wins, the kids go fucking nuts, and I feel like my forehead is giving birth to an anvil. This went on for 2 1/2 fucking hours. I found myself debating whether or not just running out of the theater and catching a bus home was a good idea, but I realized being that hungover on a bus might actually be worse. Then the movie has some side-joke where a kid doesn’t know how to use his wand yet and keeps randomly blowing shit up. Every time this little prick blew something up it was shocking and loud as fuck and then the kids in the audience would scream their shrill little faces off. It was like the firecracker scene in Boogie Nights x 245 (and I know, Putney Swope). At the end there’s a giant chess match where every time a piece gets taken it explodes or some shit. Every time this needlessly loud shit went down my head felt like it was falling off my neck. It was one of the worst days of my life (after the movie my mom literally almost killed us driving home. Worst Day a la fucking Mode).I haven’t seen another Harry Potter movie since (even though Cuaron made one) and never will. I suppose I’m ‘triggered’ but fuck that shit. Harry Potter sucks, man.
Hahaa! Really loving this take.
So you’re saying…Harry grew up to be:Johnnnnnnnn CENNNAAAAAAAA
That question will be answered this Sunday night at WWE SUUUUUUUUUUUPER SLAAAAAAAMMMMMMMMM
You reminded me of how awful the soundtrack is because it telegraphs everything that happens so badly
Sometimes John Williams can be TOO John Williams for his own good
Didn’t the Scooby Doo trailer start off with a “this is going to be a new Barman movie PSYCHE it’s Scooby!” fake out?
Oh, yeah. Yep. I’m amazed my crumpled brain remembers it. I also remember being mildly comforted by Matthew Lillard and Linda Cardellini (big Freaks and Geeks fan). And for reason the director’s name was a big deal? Raja Gosnell? Shrug. There was also a Lord of the Rings trailer and a bunch of the kids booed. Was that a thing?
Raja Gosnell was coming off of Big Momma’s House, which I guess all the kids were into in 2001.I can believe there was some kind of Rings vs Potter rivalry in 2001, which has been lost to the winds (and internet archives) of time.
Have a star for the D&C love.
I quite enjoyed the first couple of Harry Potter films, and I think the franchise just got worse from there.
I found The Sorcerer’s Stone to be a very good film that captured the passage of time over the school year far better than any of the others. I feel the criticisms in this article apply better to the second film, which really felt by the numbers for me. The third one, in my opinion, did turn the series around, and by that time I was well and truly invested in the characters. But the first one, I felt, did have a sense of magic and did a great job of selling the whole concept and setting of the franchise. 2001 was when my College room mate moved out of our apartment, and I was living by myself for the first time, so when Harry was all alone over the Holiday break, I felt him. Fellowship was miles better, of course.
Prisoner of Azkaban is still firmly my favorite of the series, with Order of the Phoenix as a close second. This isn’t a fresh take I know, but the reason I like both of those films isn’t because they’re darker than Sorcerer’s Stone. It’s because they’re actually about something.
Sorcerer’s does solid world-building, but that’s all it does. There’s no emotional through-line. Harry doesn’t have an arc. He doesn’t discover something new in himself to save the day. Chamber of Secrets is a little better in that regard (Harry realizes how similar he and Voldemort, but still chooses good), but it’s still rather flimsy.
Azkaban really starts to explore Harry not having his parents, and Sirius represents that loss to him. By the end, the memory of Harry’s parents have given him skills he didn’t have before, and he regains something of his family when he discovers Sirius is his godfather. Bam. Solid arc.
Phoenix explores loss too, but in a different way. The Wizarding World gave Harry comfort, and now all those comforts are being taken away either by Voldemort or the Ministry; his friends, Hogwarts, freedoms he used to enjoy. He realizes at the end of a fight with Voldemort is inevitable, but he also learns he’s not alone in the fight.
And the funny thing is my favorite scenes in both films aren’t the dark ones. They’re things like Harry talking about a memory of his parents he isn’t sure is real, or laughing in the common room with Hermione and Ron after kissing Cho. By then, the series feels “lived in” so little scenes like that feel extra personal.
Emma Watson is neither a great actor nor a movie star, discuss.Seriously though, really weird comment! I’d argue she’s still by a decent margin the weakest actor of the three of the them, and has yet to carry a movie as a star – Beauty and the Beast is her only big budget film post-potter and she hardly carried it and was pretty bland. I haven’t seen the movie in years but I remember liking it as a kid – I wasn’t much of a Potterhead though and had no expectations. Recently watched the Home Alone movies again and actually think Columbus isn’t a bad director – those movies had no right to be even close to good and Columbus directs them with aplomb and clearly has skill at getting good performances from young actors (no easy feat!).Ocean’s Eleven is arguably the most rewatchable movie of all time, and the Clair de Lune/Fountain sequence is one of the most unexpectedly moving movie moments. Also one of the most quotable movies ever.
I’d never even heard of Harry Potter when this movie came out, so I wasn’t that interested. The demo skewed too young, and I’m not much of a ‘fantasy’ guy anyway. But the hype was big enough that I finally decided to watch it when it came to DVD, and I was absolutely enchanted by it! Animation had basically dominated children’s movies at this point, and the good live-action kids movies were getting harder and harder to find. This film, full of wonder, was like a warm cozy blanket. Chris Columbus was not only the smart choice to direct, but aside from Spielberg, he’s as good as I could ask for. Especially for honoring the source material, which feels more important these days than in did back then. By comparison, I can’t help thinking about the decade of franchise non-starters in Harry Potter and LotR’s wake (Eragon, The Golden Compass, etc) and how even DC suffered from a bad starting point thanks to Zack Snyder. The foundation Chris Columbus established for this franchise is underappreciated. The first film may be a lot of exposition, but I’ll take that over cutting more and more material to the point where the later films just focus on moving through plot beats as quick as possible, with barely a moment to react. It all became too action/special effects heavy. In fact, as the movies got darker or more FX-focused, I got nostalgic for the innocence of the younger films. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone is a little long, for sure, but the spell classes, the Quiddich, and my God, the likeability of the kids (Emma Watson was the best one from the jump- GTF outta here with that ‘weakest link’ noise) was hard for me to deny. I fell in love with this world, and got into the books not long after. Needless to say, I 1000% disagree with the premise that the first film didn’t capture the magic.
What you’re saying is accurate but the shift in tone you’re describing was unavoidable and accurate reflection of the books. It’s a series that starts as innocent kids stuff about a magic school and gradually shifts to a full on world war like scenario as the kids age into young adults. In the final book the school setting is dropped entirely and the whole thing takes place in this dangerous, dark world
Oh, for sure. It was unavoidable because that’s were Rowling was always headed, but I still missed the early days. As for the movies, I feel they peak with Goblet of Fire, and once David Yates took over and started chopping away anything that didn’t keep the plot moving, a lot of good characterization was lost. I get it, but I think he underestimated how vital some of that stuff was. Draco’s conflict barely registers. The Ron/Hermoine ship (as well as Harry and Ginny’s) doesn’t have the chemistry it needs, imo. I got frustrated. I think the only ones who are served well during Yates’ run are Dumbledore and Snape.
My memory of the books is that there was very little on the page that didn’t simply advance the plot (with the possible exception of the last book) but I seem to be in the minority in thinking that
The Harry Potter movies were my Ewoks moment. There was a generational divide when it comes to Star Wars, the closest comparison to the Potter movies from its day. You were either young enough to like Return of the Jedi, or you were someone who hated those Ewoks. If you hated the Ewoks, it’s because you had aged out of that kind of material. It was time to move on, cherish your memories of New Hope and Empire, and find something new. For a lot of us, that something new was the Expanded Universe, Die Hard, and WCW Monday Nitro, but I digress.Harry Potter was my first realization that: oh right, I’m *not* a child anymore. In fact, I find all this wizard school stuff ridiculous. On the other hand, I did like ROTJ and didn’t mind the Ewoks. To this day, the Ewoks don’t bother me. That’s because of who I was when I saw ROTJ, versus who I had grown into by the time Sorcerer’s Stone reached theaters.Having said that, Harry Potter is a generational division within my own group though. There are many millennials who LOVE Harry Potter, even still today, and loved this movie, even as I and many others didn’t care for it. Because it was our Ewoks moment.
I don’t agree with every detail but I think your analogy basically holds up
I am a Millenial and don’t like Harry Potter. I find Rowling’s worldbuilding inconsistent and lazy, but more importantly I think it’s just not very imaginative. Setting a series with dragons and wizards at a boarding school is so damn boring, at least when half of the drama revolves around who is going out with whom. Compared to stuff like Ursula le Guin’s Earthsea series or Susan Cooper’s Dark is Rising books, it’s sorely lacking in thought-provoking ideas as well. But yes, so many of my generation adore the series. I’m not sure if I have strong feelings either way about the Ewoks.
I was born in 1985, and found Harry Potter to be a phenomenon at the time similar to Pokemon, in that I was exactly a grade older than the kids who were into both. As I got older, I found there was a lot of merit to Harry Potter, but I missed the boat of enthusiasm by exactly one year.
Wizard People, Dear Reader improves this film immensely.
On the one hand, I am deeply bitter that Gilliam wasn’t allowed to direct this movie.On the other, who am I kidding? He would have gotten booted off the movie in pre-production when he insisted on making too many changes from the source material that would have made the sequels impossible. (But if they could have gotten through that stuff, I think the movie would have been incredible.)And you’re damn right that Azkaban is by far the best film in the series. I had been a fan of Cuarón’s originally based on his adaptation of A Little Princess. (If you haven’t seen this, look it up. It is magical. It is beautiful. It takes what could easily have been done as treacly family melodrama makes it a moving experience for all ages.) I ache to see how the HP film franchise might have turned out with someone like Cuarón at the helm from the start.
I never read the books, but only made it halfway through this movie.It really did feel like it was just checking boxes off a list that I wasn’t privy to.
Funny, my reaction to it at the time was very much that the faithfulness to the book was the biggest part of the movie’s charm. I know he’s generally well-thought of now, but I don’t think Radcliffe gets nearly enough credit for his work in the early movies. He does better than just make it work.
“a remake of an old Brat Pack heist romp”I’m pretty sure you meant “Rat Pack” not “Brat Pack”. Molly Ringwald and Emilio Estevez never made a heist movie.
But they should have.
Rat Pack, not Brat Pack
Counterpoint: I saw it when I was a kid, the target audience of the book and the movie, and I loved it! Loved the second one, too. I felt the magic, alright.
Prisoner of Azkaban I didn’t like. It was less magical and more strange.
The movie didn’t suggest any of Harry’s interior life, his doubts and fears and the unease about being thrust into this new world, which was in the books. The story then just became a series of emotionally flat, undramatic victories for Harry where we never feel much is at stake, and nothing is earned.
they really failed to grasp the transgender narrative at the heart of the story
> turning into weird-looking adults.Harsh, especially shortly after bringing up Osment and Culkin.
Dammit, highest grossing should’ve been Lord of the Rings, which didn’t assume Americans were too stupid to know what Lord was and call it Sorcerer of the Rings. Fellowship is always in my top 3 all time. That being said, PHILOSOPHERS’S!!!!1one Stone had a nice whimsy to it, it was an intro for a bunch of kids to the series and it did that well. It also took a huge risk using little-known kid actors the whole time, that can make or break a film, let alone a 7/8 film series. Columbus can direct kids well, that’s for sure, like in Home Alone. Forgot he also did Bicentennial Man, I….didn’t hate that movie. Saw it in theaters, I think I was the only one.
Will be interesting to see how next month’s article differs from Tom’s Age Of Heroes take.
This movie allowed Wizard People, Dear Reader to be born.
So, in spite of its many, many flaws, I’m thankful it exists.
I went and saw this at midnight on Thursday with my school class. It was fun.
Rowling supposedly really wanted Terry GilliamAh, so she’s always been a total dipshit after all.
The first Ocean’s Eleven was a vehicle for the Rat Pack, not the Brat Pack.
I couldn’t disagree more. Sorcerer’s Stone isn’t the best movie of the 8, or the best book, but it is damn enjoyable and magical. The cast is great from the start. If anything, the movies that trimmed too much from the books (Order of the Phoenix and Half-Blood Prince, hello) were the weakest entries.
But god, it’s boring. Harry Potter And The Sorcerer’s Stone is a strange contradiction: a work of magic and imagination, rendered with no magic or imagination whatsoever. Columbus’ visual style is a clumsy simulacrum of Spielberg’s grace and wonder. His comic-relief characters mug and preen and gloat. His child-actor leads are forced to spend way too long laying out twisty mystery-plot mechanics. The whimsy is forced. The jokes mostly land with thuds.Well, kind of. I mean, I still enjoy the film and there’s charms and some great world-building. All of actors pretty much nailed their characters, which definitely helped sell the film as THE official Harry Potter.You can blame these short-fallings to script, which isn’t as tight as the book it adapted. Comparing this film to the sequels, you can definitely see that it was product of its time and definitely showed its age. Even so, its a really good start for the franchise and that’s all this film needed to be.Alfonso Cuarón took over on 2004’s The Prisoner Of Azkaban, easily the best entry in the series
Despite the film being my second-favorite in series, I agree that Prisoner of Azkaban is the BEST Harry Potter film. Its established the visual template of entire franchise that’s still being used to this day. The story and characters all grew up and started to tap into darker nature of magic. The actors really starting to nail their roles and their characters starting to feel like real people. And the trio of Radcliff, Rupert, and Watson really showing their great chemistry and pathos that lasted through the rest of series.The only knock against Prisoner of Azkaban is that it is the shortest of series and that it was quite a breezy (yet personally important) story to get through. I thought there should have been more story about Harry’s father and his gang that made the Marauder’s Map. That was a big development in the book and it was glossed over in the film.My favorite of series? Order of Phoenix. There’s just the right kind of movie magic with the film, anchored by great villainous turn with Dolores Umbridge and that all-time best magic battle between Dumbledore and Voldemort. Harry’s development in the film is the best in series, you can really see his depression and frustration just bubbling within him and that even good people around can fail badly. All the more for him to grow up and remember that he doesn’t have to fight by himself.Yeah, I love me some Harry Potter stuffs, even though JK Rowlings had shown herself to be a transphobic prick…
Finally somebody else thinks Phoenix is the best one. It trims the worst parts of the book and does the best parts well.One correction, though: Azkaban isn’t the shortest film in the series, although it’s close. The shortest one is Phoenix (Azkaban is 142 minutes, Phoenix is 138)
Weirdly, the only real weak spot is Emma Watson, the one of the three who became both a great actor and a movie star.
[citation needed]
here is my shameful confession:i pretty much cannot tell the difference in quality between HP filmsbecause i only ever watch them as one block
I worked at a bookshop when the first Harry Potter film was released. Customers went in to Harry Potter crazy mania, banging on the doors and demanding to be let in. A busy few days.
I’m a fan of the books, but kinda felt that Harry was mostly a cipher for the reader. The real character was Hogwarts and its secrets. Book 5 was the last I read.
Now that I read about the “search for a director” part of it, I’m wondering if Guillermo Del Toro wouldn’t have been a good choice…
“Super dull movie, long and boring, no magic. My kids want to watch it all the time.”Hmmm…Also: “Weirdly, the only real weak spot is Emma Watson, the one of the three who became both a great actor and a movie star.”Uhhh…. what?! I do like Watson, and I’ll give you ‘movie star,’ (though that status is mostly based on the Potter series, and is fading as she appears more interested in pursuing other interests) but none of her post-Potter work indicates greatness. Radcliffe has taken on mostly lower-profile work than Watson has, but it’s far more interesting work and he’s been far better in it than anything Watson has done. He’s clearly the only real actor of the three.
Would have loved to see Rob Reiner so Harry Potter, with Christopher Guest as Snape
I agree with a lot of your specific criticisms, although I don’t think I agree with the overall premise that this film is lacking the magic of the books. I was nine years old when the first Potter film came out, and I remember feeling completely transported by it. It was actually the teaser trailer that did it. I remember watching the trailer on Windows Media Player, hearing Hedwig’s Theme, seeing the cascade of Hogwarts acceptance letters falling on Harry and being totally entranced.
It launched a decade long obsession for me where every time I read one of the books or watched one of the movies, I really felt transported to Hogwarts. And that was really the genius of it. With Hogwarts, JK Rowling really created a magical destination that I and millions of other kids desperately wished were real. It didn’t matter to us that Chris Columbus’s execution left a lot to be desired. It didn’t matter that the dialogue was exposition heavy. On the contrary, we were soaking up every word of that, because we were completely invested in the world.
I also think you’re not giving the production design enough credit. Stuart Craig and his team did an absolutely phenomenal job bringing the book to life and creating Hogwarts from the ground up. He and his team are really the unsung heroes of the franchise. I was thrilled when he finally got much deserved recognition in the form of a BAFTA for Fantastic Beasts. Colleen Atwood and her team also deserve a ton of credit for their costume design.
And I mentioned him earlier, but John Williams really knocked it out of the park with Hedwig’s Theme, a leitmotif that has become as instantly recognizable as The Imperial March. He deserves a lot of credit for his contribution the magic of the Harry Potter world as well.
You pretty much covered this in your review – the magic of Hogwarts and the Wizarding World that Rowling created is so detailed and rich and cooked into the DNA of all things Harry Potter that even an admittedly by-the-numbers adaptation is going to succeed in instilling in any child watching it that sense of magic and wonder. There’s a reason your kids want to watch it so much.
The original Ocean’s Eleven was a “Rat Pack” movie – Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis, Jr., Dean Martin, Peter Lawford. The “Brat Pack” came along later, in the ‘80s – Molly Ringwald, Judd Nelson, etc.
I’d be down for Gilliam Potter, but I’m not sure it’d be a film kids would love. Then again, I’m not sure Sorcerer’s Stone is either exactly, it’s just the first entry to a world kids like. I think I liked it well enough, but I agree, Radcliffe’s hair was too neat.
I don’t know, Gilliam did Time Bandits, a film I sure as hell loved as a kid.
The original Ocean’s Eleven with Sinatra and Davis, Jr. was the Rat Pack.
Brat Pack was the Breakfast Club and St. Elmo’s Fire.
As someone who never really loved Harry Potter, and was a teen when this came out – I think this article diminishes how well they balanced the enormous expectation at the time while still hooking in the multi-generational crowd, particularly those who had never read the books. I remember my grandparents and parents being fucking thrilled after seeing it, and our tabloids in the UK heralding a masterpiece.It wasn’t a masterpiece, especially when seen now, but it worked for the people it set out to work for, and was quite deft in meeting the challenge of the world-building it needed to over the runtime.
You can argue that broad appeal just means dumbing down everything and making it packagable, but that diminishes a complex job, a requirement to nail all these mixed tones and messages to people in the audience who are sometimes 50 years apart in age. The child acting is bad, though, no getting away from that.
I mean, on paper you’d think Columbus would have been a perfectly fine pick – demonstrably adept at coaxing good performances out of kids, good at capturing things from a kid’s perspective – but yeah. It just never could have been good because it HAD TO BE THE BOOK or else.
I actually think Chamber of Secrets is worse; though I’m not going to be revisiting any of them at this point so I suppose I can’t validate it. I remember for a really long time when I was a Harry Potter fan I and others more or less just wanted the movie adaptations done so eventually we could inch closer to a series. Now, of course, I have absolutely no interest in seeing Rowling propped up in any way so while I can see someone eventually wanting to do a series, it sure won’t be for a long, long time.
Also this post just reminded me yet again that a nice holiday tradition is no more for my family; even if a lot of the movies are not great, you still watched them every December because of course you did!
A friend once described the first two Potter films as ‘artless.’ Always thought of that as a pretty accurate one-word review.It’s especially true when compared with what Alfonso Cuarón did with the third.
Philosopher? Sorcerer?
just rewatched HP and TPOA and am wondering how it was not nominated for a best picture and best director Oscars. Such a great movie. And at least as good as any of the five that were nominated and on a direct comparison is a better movie than ROTK. Really wish Cuaron had directed at least one more HP movie. He got it right.
My father-in-law has this very hilarious tendency of telegraphing when he’s getting bored with something and wants to leave by saying, “my feet are hurting.” When my wife was a kid, she begged her dad to take her to this, and he did, but about 20 minutes in, his feet started “hurting like hell.” He eventually passed out during the forest scene.
I agree that Potter would have been better suited as a TV series, and I wish Hollywood would wait until the damn book series are done before they start adapting shit (Game of Thrones, Game of Thrones, Game of Thrones). But I also agree that it was kind of the perfect time for the movie to come out. Had it come out any other time, I don’t think the movies would have become the massive successes they came to be.
That being said, the look of the first two films is spectacular. I honestly thought at the time they quite literally just snapped their fingers and the book just leaped on the screen. Everything, and I mean EVERYTHING was like how I imagined it while reading. I don’t think I’ve seen an adaptation get so many minor details so right. But it was definitely missing that “magic,” as you put it.