Philosophically speaking

Since I did not read the books, my first exposure to Harry Potter was through a 2001 movie called Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. Actually, that's not entirely accurate. I'd started to read the first book before seeing the movie, but didn't finish it until, well, until I read it with my son a few months ago. But that book was also called Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone.

When I read it with my son, it was called Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. That's because we're in Australia, and Australia gets everything from England, and in England, this book and the corresponding movie were both called Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone.

I always knew this, but it was something I always objected to. Sure, J.K. Rowling is British, and whatever she originally wrote back in 1997 was obviously what it should actually be. While we're on the topic of the world's introduction to Harry Potter, it's funny to think that this is only the 20th anniversary of Rowling's first book. I contend that Harry Potter is the last great massive industry to have been introduced to pop culture. Pretty much everything else we love with this kind of name recognition has been with us far longer than 20 years and has just been continually rebooted.

Anyway, I preferred the American title for two reasons, both of which were probably considered when making the change for American distribution: 1) "Sorcerer" is better than "Philosopher" for purely linguistic reasons, as it allows alliteration with the next word, "Stone;" and 2) What the heck does a philosopher have to do with magic?

A mystical MacGuffin like the stone in question should conjure images of Merlin or Gandalf, not Immanuel Kant or G.W.F. Hegel. A philosopher sounds like a person who sits around talking your ear off with existential ideas. A sorcerer, on the other hand, is a person of action. Just try to think of the word "sorcerer" without imagining a man in a robe and pointy hat gesticulating his hands in order to whip up some kind of fireball or colored smoke. Can't, can you?

So who knows why Rowling initially called it the Philosopher's Stone, except that the British are funny sometimes and they don't always want to be held accountable to what we might consider reasoned logic. Then again, it's also a matter of perspective. Americans have a bunch of different words for things than British or Australians do, and maybe to a Brit or Aussie, a philosopher is indeed someone who waves a magic wand and makes things explode.

The point of me telling you all this is that over the past two days -- this movie is pretty long -- the four of us watched Chris Columbus' 2001 movie, which, like the book, is called Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone here in Australia. Even though I accept that this is its proper title, I will still refer to it as Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone in my Most Recently Revisited section to the right, and in the tag for this post. At least the second of those choices is partly motivated by the fact that I already have a tag for the other title, and I'm not about to go back and rewrite history on my blog.

The thing that's interesting about this is that other sites are rewriting their own history. If you type Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone in wikipedia, it will not bring up an entry for that. It will instead redirect you to Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, informing you very early on of the alternate title for its American release. IMDB does a variation on the same thing. It will produce a result in the search area if you type in the American title, but it still takes you to a single IMDB page under the name Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. Underneath that it reads "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (original title)." Which just makes things all the more perplexing.

This last kind of gets at what I think is unusual about the whole situation. There are any number of movies released with different titles in different countries, but in many if not most situations, the American title is considered the default title. That's especially so if the films are released simultaneously in the different countries, or staggered by only a small amount. If a foreign film is released in its country of origin, takes off there, then receives a title that's easier for Americans to understand or pronounce, we'd expect the original title to take precedence on the web, if only because its page on something like IMDB would have been created at the moment of its origin. But this is, for all intents and purposes, a Hollywood movie, something expecting to do the majority of its business in America, its British origins basically an afterthought in terms of marketing muscle and other logistics.

And yet I do think it's right that websites have recognized that the original text was called Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, and that the only reason it was changed for anybody was that Americans were considered too unimaginative to expand the boundaries of their understanding of magic. Who knows how well the book would have sold in the U.S. with its original title; we'll never know. But we do know it became a sensation in this incarnation, so obviously it was well worth it.

As I was watching the movie, I was interested to see what kind of shenanigans might have occurred in order to substitute one word for the other. In a printed text it's pretty simple -- you just do a find and replace command, and there would be no false positives, as I'm sure the word "philosopher" does not occur in any contexts in the original book other than in discussion of this particular stone. But in a movie, characters have to mention it in dialogue. Would they go to the trouble of filming the scenes twice just for this small change?

Well either they did, which would not be so hard because it doesn't actually get discussed all that much, or they only filmed it the one way. I can tell you for certain that Emma Watson is making the word "philosopher" with her mouth in one clear instance of discussing it. It does get spoken off camera once or twice, but I think there was another instance where the actor was clearing speaking it.

What I don't know is whether Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone has any instances of the word "sorcerer" being clearly spoken, since I don't have access to that version. Though the internet tells me they did film some scenes twice, and worked around it in other ways when they couldn't (having the actor's mouth not appearing in the shot when the word is spoken, for example).

The kids seemed to like it. The first book was as much a hit with my son as I'd hoped it would be, as we got it in this beautiful hardcover book with pictures:

We finished that in mid-September, and it was difficult to wait until the next gift-buying occasion after his birthday, Christmas, to get Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. If you want your kids' interests to take root at this age, you really have to stoke the fire so it doesn't go out. But his fire remained lit, and he was so eager to get through the next book that he nearly threw a tantrum last night when I wouldn't read him the third chapter, having read the first that afternoon and the second as his bedtime story.

The movie was pretty much perfect for him and his younger brother, containing some scary moments but nothing too crazy, as the characters themselves are just a few years older than the older one. And he seemed to really enjoy seeing the things he'd learned about in the book coming to life.

Me? I always defend this movie, my standard argument being that the movie has a special place for me because it was the first time we had seen Hogwarts, or quidditch. Of course, if the person on the other end of that argument is smart they can and often will say "No it isn't. We first saw those things in the books, in our minds." Damn. Great point.

And on this, my second viewing -- I had previously seen every Harry Potter movie exactly once -- I was a bit struck by its flatness, in general but also compared to certain movies that come later in the series. There are only a few I think are really distinctive, most notably Alfonso Cuaron's Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, and indeed this one is only really distinctive for being the first.

Still, it definitely works as a kids movie ... whether its MacGuffin was forged by a sorcerer or a philosopher.

The questionable necessity of reading

"Okay, Vance. In your last post you questioned the value of music, and now you're taking on literature??"

Eh, not quite. Read on.

On Thursday, I finished a 215-page book I had been reading since November. In fact, I made a special point of finishing it before the end of January, just so it wouldn't carry on into a fourth month. I am a slow reader, but this was slow even for me.

The book was Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five. It's not that I didn't like it -- I'm quite fond of Vonnegut's twisted world view, and this one was pretty twisted. I think part of the problem was that the book jumps around in time almost constantly -- which is the point -- and that makes it hard to get one's bearings, especially with his short, staccato sentence bursts. Plus, between Thanksgiving and New Year's is a famously bad time to accomplish much reading in the first place.

Why am I telling you about reading Slaughterhouse-Five? Because this was actually my second attempt. A year ago or longer, I read the first 15 pages and decided I wasn't in the mood for it right then. And so why am I telling you about that? Because my failure to read Slaughterhouse-Five has meant a failure to review Slaughterhouse-Five, the movie, directed by George Roy Hill and released in 1972.

Let me take you back a bit. In July of 2002, I watched Hill's Slaughterhouse-Five. It had no review on the website I write for, but for some reason, I forgot to put in for it right away. In fact, I didn't officially request it until a couple years later, at which point, the details were seriously fuzzy. Yeah, I can review (and have reviewed) a movie I haven't seen for many years, but it's not ideal, especially when the details did not really stick with me. So Slaughterhouse-Five essentially fell into the other category of movies I review -- the ones I get approved on before watching them, and then can write the review the moment I finish.

But then I got another idea. I had a copy of the book Slaughterhouse-Five. Why not read that first, and then have my review be yet that much better informed? When I finished reading, I'd closely follow that with my second viewing, and then I'd be able to write the definitive Slaughterhouse-Five review. (Never mind that this is a lot of work for a mere $20).

We're finally at that phase, and the movie should be coming to me sometime next week.

So why am I telling you about any of this? Because it brings up one of the great questions I struggle with as a film critic. Namely:

If you are reviewing an adaptation of a popular novel, how important is it to have read that novel?

This question interests me terribly. It's been a long time since I asked another critic this question, mostly because I don't run into many other film critics on the street. I think I asked a couple of the guys at my website, but it was so long ago that I forget what their responses were.

If a fellow critic is being honest, he/she will probably say, "It depends on what book it is." If they're being dishonest, they will probably say that they do read the book in question. But really, how can they? With their busy viewing schedules, and the other unglamarous things that fill out their 40-hour work week that don't involve writing actual reviews, do they really have the time?

When I read other critics' reviews of films adapted from novels, I usually catch at least some reference to how the film differed from the book. It's as though they -- we -- think it's obligatory. But I'm willing to bet that they've borrowed the Cliff's Notes, pow-wowed with someone who actually did read the book, or even just leafed through a couple pages to determine the author's style of presentation. Either that or they are much, much faster readers than I am.

But then there's another question. Does it even matter how a film differs from its source material?

I am a big proponent of the idea that a film is its own entity. When watching a film, you shouldn't need to have seen or read anything else in order to enjoy it, with the exception of sequels, where it is usually useful to see the other films in the series first. When I saw (and hated) Joss Whedon's Serenity a couple years ago, people told me that I would have gotten it if I had watched Whedon's short-lived TV show, Firefly. I call bullshit on that. A movie needs to start when it starts and finish when it finishes, and even a bushman from Africa should be able to sit down and enjoy it, assuming he's seen a movie or two and derives enjoyment from such an experience, and it's been given bushman subtitles.

The same logic sort of holds for adaptations. The movie has to live and die on its own strengths. It shouldn't matter if Character B is left out from the book. All that should matter is whether the characters they do concentrate on make us care about them, and whether it works within the context of the story they choose to present.

Of course, like any argument I offer you, there are shades of gray, and few absolutes. It's very possible that a book was good only or primarily because of certain decisions the author made, and that if a film were adapted from that book, they'd have to keep those decisions intact, or else it's not worthwhile source material. As critics, we have to maintain some periphery awareness of when conditions like this are in place ... don't we? And how do we know when, other than the general cues we get from the zeitgeist?

Even though there are plenty of real-world examples of this, let's take an extreme example from fiction, mostly because I'm living in this fictitious world right now. I am currently watching the first season of Californication on DVD, and in it, Hank Moody (David Duchovny) has just had his book God Hates Us All made into a romantic comedy called A Crazy Little Thing Called Love. If I were a film critic in Hank's californicating world, and were reviewing A Crazy Little Thing Called Love, wouldn't it be my duty to read God Hates Us All? Or could I just use the titles to get the gist of the fact that the producers betrayed the spirit of the book? Or would it even matter? Even in this extreme case, should the film still be taken only on its own terms?

Clearly the source material does matter in this whole thing. They do give out an Oscar for best adapted screenplay. Why would they give this out at all, if not to honor the skill -- and presumably, the accuracy -- with which a screenwriter has translated an author's vision?

I don't have the answers to these questions. I will say that I already have reviewed hundreds of films where I did not read the book, and my work has been accepted with a smile. It's not a make-or-break thing, it's more of a philosophical debate. I've only reviewed one film where the guys at my website chose me for it because they knew I'd read the book: Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. And yes, because I'd read it, and because I knew they probably wanted to see some proof that I'd read it, I mentioned some of the changes from the book to the screen. But they were perfunctory references. Did they really make my review any stronger, any better informed?

Slaughterhouse-Five notwithstanding, it would seem I'll have to stick to my personal status quo, until someone either starts paying me a heckuva lot more for my work, or I'm able to multiply my reading speed. Until then, I'll keep making oblique references to source material, hoping I've gotten the gist of it, and made the correct judgment about the relevance of the potential differences.

Oh, and in case you're still wondering what I think about reading ... I've just embarked on David Foster Wallace's 1,079-page Infinite Jest. Wish me luck, and I'll see you sometime in November.