James Proclaims!

I was a little bit too old for the Harry Potter novels when they first came out, but I’m always one to jump on a bandwagon, so by the time the movies started appearing, I was well-versed in the world of wizardry and witchcraft. I quite liked the books in the main – I can certainly understand why the generation who were the target audience seemed to be so enthusiastic.

The movie adaptations were fairly well-done for the most part too. 2001’s Harry Potter and The Philosopher’s Stone (also known as Harry Potter and The Sorcerer’s Stone depending on where you reside) certainly arrived to much fanfare. It hasn’t aged as well as it might – the CGI looks very 2001 in places. And while the cast is undeniably stellar, the main trio of Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson and Rupert Grint, though impressively adept for child actors, are nonetheless weaker than some of their adult co-stars in this entry. The movie is also a little too long, which is something the series does manage to rectify in later movies by daring to be a little less faithful to the source material than the debut outing.

It’s still not a bad effort though. If I’d grown up with this instead of Star Wars I might love it as much as Star Wars.

But I didn’t.

So I don’t.

Score for Christmasishness

A blockbuster movie about magic is entirely the stuff of Christmas viewing schedules. But if we purely stick to the plot then only a bit of the film is set at Christmas. It’s relevant to the plot and there are some very Christmassy scenes. But most of the movie is not set at Christmas. So we can only consider Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone to be a bit Christmas(ish) in reality.