A Harry Potter Virgin Speaks

Rating: 7/10 (1 February 2013)

By January 2013 I had never read a Harry Potter book or seen any of the movies. I decided to start with the movies.
I've always avoided Harry Potter as what little I had heard about the books and movies did not appeal to me. The one thing that I had seen was a sequence from this first film of the Quidditch game and this was enough to put me off for all the intervening years. There are plenty of interesting theories on the origin of witches and broomsticks but kids using broomsticks to play a ball game is not one of them. This sequence was still the one I really, really disliked in the film and I groaned every time Quidditch sequences appeared in subsequent films.
Two things surprised me about this film (and was borne out by the subsequent ones). Firstly they aren't about magic and witchcraft at all. In fact the nearest anyone ever gets to magic is waving a wand a speaking a couple of cod Latin words. Secondly they are primarily about life in a boarding school and perhaps should have been called "Harry of the Second Remove and his Magic Wand" or perhaps "Hermione of the Sixth and her  " (On second thoughts let's not go there).
None of these comments mean that I did not like the film nor that I thought it was bad. On the contrary, once I got past my preconceptions, I thoroughly enjoyed this excellent family film. It worked brilliantly on the level of Harry's ill treatment at the hands of his adoptive parents, his integration into the school and the beginning of the introduction of the external threats to his world. It was well directed, funny and always engaging.
The young cast did well although they clearly had a long way to go. Daniel Radcliffe sometimes looked as though he had been well tutored in the art of pulling particular faces to express different emotions though his eyes didn't always show he had internalised them. Rupert Grint was probably the best of the young actors. The adult actors were uniformly good and the decision to work only with British thesps was clearly the right one.