journal features

movie review - Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-seven years and one million words

Toronto, 2011.08.07

A friend gave me his Harry Potter movies to watch. They're about a young boy who leaves his home with his normie adoptive parents (where he lives under the stairs for some reason) and enters a magical school. The movie feels like 80% world-building and 20% story and I reallllly have no idea what all the fuss is about. There's something tacked on about his being the Chosen One who will defeat an evil wizard. I've never found evil wizards to be compelling villains. They should be hanging around at the edge of the throne, or perhaps roaming the countryside raising hell. Even Oak, the Big Bad in the "Book of Swords" series -- who was done really well -- was more of an emperor than a wizard. I honestly can't think of a compelling wizard villain. E.g. Not Saruman!

The visuals are not great with this movie, and the Big Bad lurking in the back of a school teacher's skull is just weird and annoying. It may have worked in the kid's book but in the film it comes across as pretty ridiculous.

Not recommended. But I have more to watch...

rand()m quote

Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.

—Michael Crichton