saw it Sunday

[dpitzel at mindspring.com]

spoiler space


















I was lucky to see the movie today.  My 6-year old son and his 7-year 
old friend loved it.  Not too scary they said.  I also went with my 
husband who's read all but the first book and my friend who's read 
none of the books.  They were both able to follow the storyline/ 
characters for the most part.  Bottom line: we all enjoyed the movie 
and would go again.  

I am glad I had read some other posters' reviews because I did not go 
to the movie expecting the book verbatum.  This change in 
expectations helped me to enjoy the movie even though many of the 
lines were changed or left out.  Considering the way many book to 
movie projects turn out, this one fared very well.  I think the 
makers took care to maintain the heart of the characters and 
storyline for the most part.

There were only a handful of things which bothered me.  The first was 
the pacing of the movie.  I really felt like the first part of the 
movie was too slow and disjointed.  There was a lot of expostion 
material.  We meet Harry as a baby, we meet Harry and the Dursley's 
at age 11, We meet Hagrid, Harry buys school supplies, Harry meets 
students, Harry at Hogwats and Harry meets his teachers.  I enjoyed 
these scenes because I wanted to see Harry's world come to life, but 
something was off. It was like in their effort to introduce all the 
background in the alloted time, they only did a little of each 
without much flow to the story. We really don't even get to the stone 
part of the story until well into the second half of the movie and 
then it really gets moving.  

A few highlights and lowlights:
My son's favorite part: Fluffy
My favortie part: the chess game
My husband and my least favorite part: the centaur
Norbert's storyline seemd to be left hanging.
Harry's protection from Voldemort's touch and Lily's sacrifice were 
not explained as well as they could have been. 
There was no explaination of why Snape was protecting Harry.
Alan Rickman was very good as Snape.  The kids were all very good, 
especially Rupert Grint as Ron.  
I thought Richard Harris was fine as Dumbledore.

One final thing.  The flashback scene with Voldemort and Lily was 
very brief and didn't really seem to contradict anything mentioned in 
the books. We see a figure (Voldemort) enter the house, there is a 
bright flash of light.  We see a a couple shots of a worried Lily 
holding Harry in the nursery.  We see another flash of light.  Then 
we see Harry alone with an unseen figure advancing.  There is no 
sound in this flashback, and the full scene isn't shown.  There just 
isn't a lot of information here to figure out what happened. 

All in all, a good movie which I would see again.  I'm looking 
forward to COS.