‘Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince’: An Alternate View

by Andrew Leigh

So, John Nolte didn’t much care for the new “Harry Potter” movie. If memory serves, he didn’t care for movies 1-5, either. He admits, however, to never reading the books. This is a fatal error in appreciating the “Harry Potter” films, in my opinion.

John is like Charlie Brown and the football — forever doomed to dislike these movies, but he keeps coming back for more. Because the “Harry Potter” films are made for the books’ readers, period. In fact, you might say it’s a unique genre unto itself.

Let me attempt to head off the expected response to this: a movie should stand on its own, without requiring familiarity with the source material. Ordinarily, I agree with this. And I agree that the “Harry Potter” movies would probably be better off if they tried harder to satisfy this rule.

But it seems as though the filmmakers made a conscious or semi-conscious decision at some point early on to make these movies for the readership, not for the general public. They’re really cult films. And with such lavish budgets, if they were based on any other source material, they’d be a financial debacle. (more…)

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Posted Jul 17th 2009 at 4:47 pm in Featured Story, Reviews | 113 Comments