Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone

December 11, 2004

Rated: PG Runtime: 142 min Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

DVD QuickTake

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone makes a much better DVD than it did a theatrical release for one simple reason, you can control the crowds. If it weren’t for the lame-ass extras disc I’d be tempted to award this movie an additional star. As it is, Warner Bros. is lucky I’m not knocking 2 stars off!

To see the deleted scenes insert disc 2 and do the following:

From the main menu select Diagon Alley. You can just click any brick, once you fail 4 times it will let you in anyway.
Select the key on the Gringots sign.
Select the main part of the Gringots sign to enter. Select the coins to fill up your pockets, then return to the alley.
Go to Olivanders and start picking wands until you find one that works. This is random, just keep picking.
Leave the alley and return to the main menu. Select Classrooms.
On the classrooms page select the owls on the statue and hit Enter twice.
In the next room, select the flute.
You make it to another room, this time select the key in the very back towards the center, the one with the slightly broken wing.
You are presented with a group of potions and given 60 seconds to make a choice. Choose the round one on the top row just to the right of center.
Wow. A big mirror with a stone in the middle of it. Select the stone and hit enter.

And there you go, you can now watch the 7 deleted scenes. Can someone please explain to me why the DVD designers thought this was a good idea?!

Movies for Guys Original Theatrical Review

I should start off by saying that I am a Harry Potter fan, have read all the books and have been looking forward to this movie since it was announced. In other words, this isn’t an unbiased review.

One of the hardest things about doing a movie based on a popular book is that the fans already have an idea in their heads about what the locations and characters should look like. When you’re dealing with a mega-popular book like the Harry Potter series (and the upcoming Lord of the Rings) it makes it that much harder. I was truly amazed at how this movie looked. Almost everything was as I had pictured it when reading, from the Hogwarts Express to the castle itself, things were right on the mark.

The only real flaw with the movie is that it seemed to get caught up with its own grandeur a few times, stretching scenes out a bit longer than they needed to be, showing off the scenery just to let us know how hard they worked to get it all right. This is fine when we first see the school itself as the sweeping views of Hogwarts are quite spectacular, but after the Quidditch match between Slytherin and Gryffindor it seemed a bit excessive to be doing panning shots of Harry.

For those of you who have been living in the jungle for the last several years, Harry Potter is a boy wizard. He’s not just any wizard either, he’s quite famous in among magical folk due to his having survived an encounter with the evil Lord Voldemort when he was just a baby. After the encounter he is left with his non-magical relatives (non magical people are referred to as “muggles” if you want to know the lingo) so that he will be raised in an environment where he won’t be fawned over all the time. It’s safe to say that particular plan worked like a charm.

The story centers around Harry’s first year at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry where he is to learn the art of magic. There is of course an evil plot to do harm to Harry, and he and his friends Ron and Hermione have to save the day. This first movie really serves as a setup for the next movies in the series, one of which is officially on the schedule for release next November. That’s not to say this isn’t a fully contained story, it is, but they spend a lot of time explaining things in this one that they (hopefully) won’t have to do in the next one.

This is a very solid 4 star movie, and could have gotten a fifth star if it hadn’t dragged a little in a few places. Well worth seeing, and worth seeing on the big screen if you can deal with the crowds.

Posted by John | Filed Under 4 Stars, Action, DVD, Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson, John Cleese, PG, Richard Harris, Rupert Grint