Harry Potter & The Amazing Box Office
by Paul McGoldrick
My family had to see the first Harry Potter movie the first weekend; it was a necessity which carried along with it the fervent hope that the movie rights had not been abused by the denizens of Hollywood. When it was announced that Warner Brothers had acquired those rights my first inclination was absolute dread that the egos of Southern California would presume, incorrectly, to know better than Jo Rowling what the story "should" be.
There was nothing to complain about. The casting was superb, the locations exactly right, the costumes and sets absolutely fitting. And the story was not destroyed. Sure, there were things missing, but even with a two-and-a-half-hour running time it would have been impossible to accurately cover the entire book's content.
The perfectionists among us have continuity problems that most moviegoers did not see. <As I'm told they say on the Net, "Spoilers Ahead!"> Access to Platform 9¾ in the book was certainly from the main concourse in King's Cross Station and not, as depicted, through a column between Platforms 9 and 10. Also, the locomotive used for the Hogwarts Express was a LMS engine, not a LNER one, and the shed location (10A) was Willesden -- so that locomotive (and a few years ago I would even have been able to remember its name) would have been more at home in Euston station than King's Cross.
But those are trivial to the fact that the movie was 99% the way that I saw the book in my mind; and certainly things like the Quidditch game were a great deal better than the book, where it would have been impossible to describe so much detail. That game reinforced for me, however, how inadequate 24 fps movies are. The fact that the movie industry has embraced DTV and HDTV in a specious 24 fps format continues to confirm that the industry does not understand its own medium properly, and is committed to mediocrity far into the future.
We live with the mediocrity of compression in too many arenas already. The manner in which the compression ratio has been turned up even on satellite services is driving this engineer nuts, with freeze frames just on simple scene changes, for heavens sake!
Whatever Hollywood's future productions look like, the first Harry Potter movie was absolutely right. I personally hope that the magic of reading that it has sparked in so many children is not affected by the movie's availability and, rather, that those kids who saw movie number one and have not read the books now decide that they need to read the second, third, and fourth book just to see what happens next.
We only had to buy tickets two hours in advance last week and managed
to get stadium seats about as close to the middle as you might hope. The
190 mile roundtrip was very worthwhile and I am happy that Warner Brothers
can count our $13.50 in its magical first weekend total. "You're a
wizard, Harry!"