Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone

Grade: B

Let’s get one thing straight – I LOVE Harry Potter. I LOVED HARRY Potter long before family, friends and colleagues joined the Potter bandwagon, and I oh so wanted to LOVE this movie. Alas, Harry Potter the film is often great fun, often charming and with a near-perfect cast, yet that indefinable spark of magic simply isn’t there. The movie is like watching a wonderful book on tape, but it is so reverentially faithful to the book that it never really takes a creative leap into a different medium. The film attempts to recreate each and every scene with such painstaking accuracy that the filmmakers resort to computer-generated special effects, which run rampant throughout. When used subtly, many of them work nicely, but much more often they are distracting at best and just plain dreadful at worst (the Quidditch match is downright embarrassing). I for one have grown to despise this new breed of special effects, for they are never quite believable and always leave one with the feeling that the filmmakers have taken a computer-shortcut -- in this case, the film suffers greatly for it. Someone should also just plain shoot the composer, for the music is a downright abomination -- bad “Jurassic Park” meets bad “Empire Strikes Back.” If ever a film screamed out for a magical score filled with whimsical flourishes – this is it. Instead, the music is heavy-handed and thumping, and I’m amazed it was allowed to remain. All of this said, the film still has it’s share of moments, and finds a weird sort of mix between something out of Charles Dickens and “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.” Alas, with a better, more imaginative Director this could have been an “ET” for a new generation, instead of the entertaining near miss that it is. And still, I simply can’t wait for “Harry Potter” book five.

More Movie Info: http://imdb.com/title/tt0241527/