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Happy Thanksgiving. Chew your movies carefully.

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Despite the controversy Film Forum mentioned last week, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone enchanted audiences and soared at the box office again this week. The film has earned $187 million as of Tuesday, but will not fulfill projections that it will outdo The Phantom Menace's record-time leap to the $200 million mark. Critics continued to offer ho-hum summations. Salon's Andrew O'Hehir, for example, calls it "a big and often sloppy Hollywood production with some bad computer graphics, a syrupy score from John Williams, and a focus on storybook adventure rather than Rowling's oddball characters."

Incidentally, there's an interesting feature in this week's Los Angeles Times regarding how some critics in the religious press, including Christianity Today's Douglas LeBlanc, were introduced to the film.

That other blockbuster fantasy, Harry Potter, ruled the box office once again, largely due to lack of competition. Over the weekend, its total take rose to $220.1 million, which is actually a lot lower than the studio anticipated.

Regardless, Harry Potter just doesn't measure up as a movie, according to The New Republic's Stanley Kauffman. "In one way the story is a great surprise—it doesn't exist," he writes. "The screenplay … is a series of episodes with not a shred of growth or purposeful drama. Almost all the children's perennials that I can remember, such as Treasure Island and Robinson Crusoe and The Swiss Family Robinson, had stories that gripped, that made me eager to learn the fate of the people I cared about. [Potter's] episodes are entertaining, and virtually all of them are immediately forgettable. Nothing persists except the yawning absence of continuity in a film that runs two and a half hours." He admits, "Certainly I am not attempting to predict a child's reaction … I speak as someone hopelessly adult."

Andrew Thompson and others agree that some Christians have a false understanding of what Harry Potter is about.

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