I had watched Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone several years ago, shortly after it came out on DVD and found it among the least enjoyable movies I’d watched in quite a while. It wasn’t that it was bad - it was that it was, in my estimation, completely forgettable. I compared it at the time to a fast food value meal: Nothing about it would stick with me for very long. I’ll admit I went into it having not read it or any of the other Harry Potter books, but that didn’t seem to matter. I had no interest in exploring the Potter universe farther.
Then my brother-in-law, darn him, convinced me to read the books and I decided to indulge him and give them a shot. He was, after all, the one who had overcome my resistance to “Buffy, the Vampire Slayer” and so I’ve come to more or less trust his judgement on these things.
I, of course, wound up enjoying all seven books. So I decided to give the movies another shot.
While Sorcerer’s Stone still comes off as pretty flavorless - as does Chamber of Secrets, the second in the series, the movies do get progressively better from there. Prisoner of Azkaban is quite a bit darker than the first two and brings with it 150 percent more characterization effort than those two combined. If anything, Goblet of Fire is *too* fast-paced, trying to cram too much into its relatively short running time. The fifth and most recent movie, Order of the Phoenix, is probably my favorite of the bunch as it manages to contain not only some of the best action sequences of the series but also some very good continuation of the characer development Prisoner and Goblet really started in earnest.
All in all I’m glad I decided to give the movies a second shot and, much like I was when I was reading the books, I’m now anxious for the next couple movies to come out.
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Chris Thilk