Harry Potter

Three in a row, I’m on a role. Dan L. and I saw Harry Potter this Friday. It was quite an interesting children’s story turned movie. As someone who hasn’t read any of the Harry Potter series, I thought the movie was entertaining.I could immediately tell that this was out of a children’s book. A book that I might have read in elementry school (and I do wish I was in elementry school reading this). The characters all had that Tolkien’s Hobbit meets something else… maybe Beverly Cleary or some other children’s author I read as a child.

Surprisingly yesterday on the train in the city I heard someone saying that Harry Potter was evil and that the person she was speaking to shouldn't raise their kids like that. I strongly disagree on any grounds. Witches and Sorcerors and Wizards are all things that fundamentalist Christians since colonial times have deemed as evil. Yet, magic in this movie is not treated as a worshipped entity, or a power meant to harm or decieve others. Magic is portrayed as magic, a skill just like athletic ability is a skill. It seems that any level of fantasy cannot escape the grasp of some skewed fundamentalist denouncing it as evil. Get over it, it's called fiction.