The Harry Potter movies

Hillary and I were in agreement that the Harry Potter books were to be read to the kids as soon as they could handle chapter books and understood the vague concept of 'school'. We also agreed that they could only see a specific movie in that series if they had read the book. Finally, we had agreed that book four would not be read by us and we would attempt to wait until they had hit double digits before encouraging it.

I loved the books and liked the movies. Hillary liked the books and loved the movies. Literally the first HD film purchase I made (officially ending the Age of Piracy in our household) was the Harry Potter collection on iTunes. We watched the entire series together twice and probably watched each of the first three movies a half dozen times.

I am currently nearing the end of book 2 with Isaac in our nightly readings. Yesterday, after a dentist appointment, we had a couple of hours to kill so I suggested we watch the first movie together.

The following will be somewhat incoherent.

It was wonderful to watch a movie like that with a seven year old with such a sense of wonder. Isaac gets spooked by movies pretty easily and has watched very few live action movies with any sort of special effects. There were audible, "Wow" and "Oh my god" in a number of places, starting with the brick wall unfolding onto Diagon Alley.

The movie does a great job of just being joyful and wondrous whenever a new, exciting piece of magic is shown to Harry, especially in the first act. Hillary loved this about the series. It was so lighthearted and almost pure in a lot of ways, which balanced some of the darker themes.

She would have loved to have heard Isaac's gushes and words as we watched the movie. Several times in the movie it almost felt like Isaac's words were of a kind with the unspoken thoughts that I knew would have been going through Hillary's mind during that scene.

The story doesn't shy away from Harry's dead parents. The Mirror of Erised scenes in particular I found really hard to watch. Perhaps that's not a real surprise there.

I don't know. It was good, we enjoyed watching it and I took a while to recover from it.