I normally rely on my own opinion to rate movies, but occasionally I like a good argument. So before I sat down to write this review, I put on the Sorting Hat and asked it how many stars I should give Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.
“FOUR,” the Hat boomed authoritatively.
“Are you daft?” I scoffed. “It was good, but not that good. Besides, you’re biased. Reviewers shouldn’t appear in the films they review.”
“If you want a second opinion, why don’t you ask another talking hat?” the Sorting Hat retorted, knowing full well the likelihood of my finding another talking hat.
“C’mon, be honest,” I said. “Yes, they did a great job of it, effects-wise. Especially the small touches, like people in the paintings moving in the background of some scenes. Not that the set pieces aren’t jaw-dropping—the Quidditch match, the interior and exterior shots of Hogwarts. And the nasties are a careful blend of cartoonish and scary. Kids will love it, that’s for sure. But effects aren’t everything, even in a movie about magic.”
“True,” said the Sorting Hat, “but it’s not as though they’re there for no reason. The film is extremely faithful to Ms. Rowling’s splendid book, and you gave The Green Mile four stars for being faithful to the book. If you’re going to go on about ‘cinematic literature’ and all that rot, you ought to be consistent.”
“Of course it was faithful!” I blurted. “What did you expect? You don’t tinker with something that’s sold a quadrillion copies. Warners would get a blizzard of hate mail, most of it written in crayon. The place would look like the Dursleys’ house when Harry gets all those letters from Hogwarts.”
The Sorting Hat folded in on itself in a gesture I interpreted as a shrug.
“Nevertheless,” it said.
“They left out Peeves, the poltergeist,” I said peevishly. “I liked Peeves in the book.”
“I suppose two and a half hours wasn’t long enough for you,” the Sorting Hat replied. “And surely you don’t object to the rest of the cast.”
“You have a point there,” I conceded. “Choosing three unknown British kids for the major roles of Harry Potter, Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger was a risky move in Hollywood terms, but it shows how much the filmmakers respected their source material, the distinctively English flavour of Rowling’s books.”
“Don’t forget Richard Harris’s Dumbledore, or Robbie Coltrane’s Hagrid, or Maggie Smith’s Professor McGonagall,” the Sorting Hat said.
“Or Alan Rickman’s Professor Snape,” I added, nodding. “Hell, I think I imagined Snape as looking like Alan Rickman when I first read the book. That’s definitely an example of the obvious choice being the best. The cameos by other well-known Brit actors don’t hurt, either. But is that worth four stars?”
“FOUR,” the Sorting Hat said, just as authoritatively as before.
“Are you mad?” I cried. “J.K. Rowling did all the work. The brilliant storytelling, the universally appealing characters, the richly imagined non-Muggle world of witches and wizards—all hers. The only thing the filmmakers did was make sure everything was as close to her conception as they possibly could.”
“What else would you have had them do?” the Sorting Hat asked calmly.
I hate it when the Sorting Hat wins.
(4/4)