Mischief Managed: Epilogue to "Potter"

Well, I guess this is quite effectively, and permanently, it for the Harry Potter phenomenon that has been going on for more than a decade now. If I haven't made it clear already, I'd like to say how severely sorry I am that I didn't love Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2. However, the feeling I have, more than anything at this very moment, is utter disbelief. I start to wonder exactly what it was that people saw in this film that 97% of critics, according to Rotten Tomatoes, gave it the go ahead. I know Rotten Tomatoes isn't a very reliable source for how good a film is, and I learned to disregard them a while back.

Still, the movie that I saw was rather sloppy, stiff, silly, and unrefined in most aspects. Yes, it tied up the story, but it didn't take time and effort to make it the best it could be. And it seems like they're completely fine with what they made, as the final shot of the film features our main characters grinning so self-righteously. The film is, as we speak, demolishing box office records left and right, so what I have to say doesn't really matter. I'm not pretending that it does. It gets to the point where I can't be held accountable for what you are likely to like or dislike. The best and worst decision I ever made was to review films honestly from my own point of view. That does polarize you from quite a few of your readers.

Potter-Watch (29 of 77) Review: Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone

Nearly ten years has gone by since this journey began, and when people think back based on merely memory, this may be one of the worst films of the series. I'd definitely contest that the worst of this series is still better by far than most films out there. As the series has expanded, the world of the first film seems so much more interesting and fun. Early on in the film, just after Hagrid and Harry leave the Dursleys, there is a shot that encompasses London, and in the distance, we can see the millennium bridge, just five years before it is demolished by death eaters. It's something that Christopher Columbus could've never predicted at the time, and it appears by pure happenstance. In a way, it's a small miracle tucked inside a larger one.

Now, what made this first film such a success wasn't the quality of the work the cast and crew did. After all, the film was made by Christopher Columbus, who has gone on to make such films as I Love You Beth Cooper and Percy Jackson and the etc.. More than anything, what made this film a hit was the source material. The book itself is such an amazing thing adored by so many children, myself included. As Rowling herself said, "If it gets published, it will sell", and she was 100% correct in that account. When the film came out, there was such a huge following that people just ate it up. These days it's hard to forget how many people are in love with this series, and we can attribute that to the absurdity of the Twilight phenomenon. Whenever I hear about some annoying teenage girl who dislikes Harry Potter but loves The Twilight Saga, I feel the impulse to smack them in the face. Not with my hand, but with a hammer.

Sorcerer's Stone may not be the ultimate introduction to the series, but it isn't all that bad. There are definitely things I dislike about the film, first of all being the young actors. Nobody's a credible actor at that point in their life (except maybe Chloe Moretz), and the three that show that point off in your face are Tom Felton (Draco Malfoy) and Rupert Grint (Ron). Just look at how far they've come. They've all come from humble beginnings to becoming more mature as the films go on. To their credit, the ten years in between then and now have made them a incredibly more tolerable. I mean, what kid isn't that annoying at that age. They're eleven. Cut them some slack.

As for the story, which you should know already by now, young Harry Potter finds out he's a wizard and escapes his abusive A.U.C. (Aunt, Uncle, and Cousin) to go learn magic at the greatest wizarding school there is: Hogwarts. Daniel Radcliffe does a pretty credible job of portraying Harry's wonder, not only at this fantastic new world, but at the fact that he's famous. It's a fame that came at a terrible price, that being the loss of his parents when he was just an infant. When you really get to thinking about it, this is already one of the saddest stories ever told. If he could turn back time, and choose from the two lives before him, he would definitely have chosen to grow up with his parents, and never become famous. That's just not the path that was given to him.

It helps the story along to have the cream of British talent filling up the supporting cast. Such actors as Robbie Coltrane, Richard Harris, Maggie Smith, and the delightful Alan Rickman bring something special to the table. As for the technical aspects, they are pretty unimpressive. The cinematography lacks the smooth texture of the rest of the franchise, opting for something that makes the film feel ripped out of the late 1980s. There's no doubt that John Williams is a magnificent composer, but this is still one of his worst scores to date. We all know and love the main theme, but it's used way too much in this film, and everything else lacks the same sort of charm. Voldemort's theme works the first time around, but after that, it fails to reach the same impact. As a matter of fact, it hasn't really been used much since.

As for the visual effects, they're mostly just brought down by the quality of the cinematography. When ranking the films, this one is undoubtedly in the bottom half of the list, just because they have gotten so much better since then. However, like I said before, it's not a bad movie. There are plenty of enjoyable bits in this movie, and I forgot how funny and geeky Hermione was in her first year. For me one of the funniest moments in the entire series remains when Harry first takes off on his broomstick, despite Hermione protesting that he doesn't know how to fly, and then her remarking in that pitch-perfect know-it-all manner, "What an idiot!" It was somewhat juvenile back then, but looking back now, I just can't help bursting into laughter. Just seeing the origins of these characters is enough to garner a smile. If this is among the worst of the series, then what does that tell you about where we're headed?

B

Potter-Watch (23 of 77): Momentum and Jeopardy

We're nearly six weeks away from the release of the beginning of the end of one of the greatest motion picture phenomenons of all time, so things are going to be more fully loaded from here until then. Don't expect many posts on single topics, because we're surely about to get a great flood of promotional material for these films. However, before we go on any further, I'd like to offer a teaser from my upcoming review of Harry Potter and the Sorceror's Stone:

What made this first film such a success wasn't the quality of the work. After all, the film was made by Christopher Columbus. More than anything, what made this film a hit was the source material. The book itself is such an amazing thing, and when the film came out, there was such a huge following that people just ate it up. These days it's hard to forget how many people are in love with this series, and we can attribute that to the absurdity of the Twilight phenomenon. Whenever I hear about some annoying teenage girl who dislikes Harry Potter but loves The Twilight Saga, I feel the impulse to smack them in the face.

Yesterday the set visit reports for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows were released, and we got a great deal of insight into the making of the final installment. Of course, a great deal of what we've heard was abbreviated, as the second part of the film doesn't come out until next summer. So most of what you're about to see is from the first part.

~Steve Weintraub (Collider): The first thing you notice about the [Great] Hall is the stone floor. Unlike most movie sets that cheat with the way they build practical locations, the Great Hall was built to last and that meant stone floors and thick walls. While the walls weren’t stone, it was not the typical paper thin walls that you find on most movie sets. As we arrived, all around us were tons of people working. The Hall was filled with camera people, kids in uniform for the scene, hair and make-up people, Daniel Radcliffe, stand-in’s – the room felt like it was alive and I couldn’t believe how large the set was.

~Director David Yates (Collider):

Q: The final book is so dense and has so much pay off, talk about the challenges of adapting that for the cinema but keeping in everything that fans love about the final book?

DY: We had things, of course, the book is pretty rich but you have to try and sometimes create a little bit more momentum or jeopardy. There are sections in the book that while are every fun to read, like the big tent section in the middle, going chapter after chapter wouldn’t easily translate on screen. Then we’ve added moments. We’ve added a couple of sequences, which aren’t and the book that I think raise the emotional stakes and the jeopardy stakes. So the process is always fraught with challenges, you want to try and keep the best of what Jo came up with but you have to refine it and shape it. So we’ve lost things, I’m sure, that some of the fans will be frustrated by but fortunately we’ve kept more than we’ve ever been able to keep in some of the other adaptations I’ve worked on. Simply because we can spread the whole story of the two movies and as you say there are some loose ends we can tie up as well as we go... We’ve added a scene where after Ron is gone, Harry comes back to the Tent and finds Hermione listening to some Muggle music and they have this dance with each other, which is a very tender, awkward and emotional moment for the two of them because they’ve lost their friend but also there is always that question. They have a very special friendship as characters and there is always that moment where you think could this trip beyond friendship to something else? It’s a very naturalistic, charming moment and quite intriguing. So we added that and a big chase towards the end of the first part. Jo gave us these brilliant characters called Snatchers so I wanted to have some more fun with them so we added an extra beat where they chase the trio.

~Daniel Radcliffe (Coming Soon):

Q: Could you talk a bit about the moment where there are seven Harry Potters on screen?

DR: Yeah, absolutely. That was one of the most sort of daunting scenes to do because it was a highly technical visual effects scene. A lot of it's more just painstakingly slow than it is complex, but in terms of basically how we did it, I mean, there was one shot which was 95 takes. Yes, you may well recoil (Laughs) because basically if I'm here in the scene and that's the real Harry, then we filmed say seven or eight takes of me playing the scene as me and then keep the camera, so it's a motion controlled camera, so it's controlled by computers so it can recreate exactly the same move, exactly the same time every time. And so, I stand there, we do the take with just me standing there and then the camera continues it's move which was panning around. And at this point it's panning around just an empty space. And then we do the next take and the camera goes through the same move, but instead I'm standing here and pretending to be Fleur or whoever mid-starting to take the drink and then to transform. And the camera pans around us all. And so, basically we filmed it each time sort of in seven different places. That's how it's done, but at the end of the day we were then shown a very primitive version of what it was going to look like eventually. And after 95 takes you're kind of crawling up the walls anyway. And it was the most gratifying thing to see how good it looked because it really does look great because you know how normally in films if there's a scene with one person playing two people you're sort of aware that the screen's been split and that they're always like, this far apart, you know? But, in this scene, it's great because everyone's overlapping and it's all arms and hands and it should be really effective and it did take a long time to get right because if I stood one inch too far to my left, then I was in fact standing on the feet of the me that was then going to be visual effects in later. So, yeah, it was a tricky scene to do, but ultimately very, very gratifying, and fun to be able to do the kind of impersonations, some of them are very sort of – there was no middle ground. They either were almost so subtle that you will have no idea which character it's supposed to be, or so caricatured and exaggerated that you can be in absolutely no doubt which character I'm playing. I didn't manage to find particularly a middle ground on that day, but it'll be very obvious which one's Mundungus.

~Edward (The Leaky Cauldron): For Deathly Hallows, [Yates] says, “these kids are on the road, they feel very small in this very big world. They’re away from Hogwarts, this very, big and familiar comfort blanket that they’ve grown up with. They feel quite surprisingly vulnerable and fragile in this big Muggle world. And I’ve shot it in a very vérité way so it feels not as measured and it's not as conventional... with Half-Blood Prince I wanted it to be quite elegant, so [Hallows] feels a bit raw…"

~Andrew Sims (Mugglenet): "Towards the end of Part 1, Bellatrix and Hermione have a moment that was shot differently than most. David Yates revealed this when he was talking about being able to pull an audience into a theatrical experience: “There’s this torturing with Bellatrix. Emma was really keen to do this torturing scene. I said ‘it will be really great, and we have to be really careful of how we do it. And [Emma] completely gave herself to the process. What we did was we set up a couple of cameras and Helena got on top of Emma... She was scoring [a word] into her skin.We just let the whole thing roll for about three or four minutes. In that three or four minutes there were some good bits, and some not so good minutes. And there were one or two really powerful bits where Emma was able to just let go a little bit and forget that she was acting. She’s still acting, but she lost herself in this process for a moment. And the screams were quite horrible to listen to. On the stage, everyone felt uncomfortable. Everyone just sort of stepped back a bit. It was a very odd energy in the room because she was kind of exploring... exercising demons really. And serving the scene in doing that. It was really interesting.”

It certainly sounds like they were doing some pretty fantastic work back then, and I sure hope we get to see some of that on screen come November. Just a few more things worthy of note, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 got a PG-13 rating from the MPAA for some sequences of intense action violence and frightening images. Capping things off, J.K. Rowling appeared on Oprah last friday for a somewhat interesting interview. It's definitely worth taking a look, so have at it.