Blu-ray Movie Reviews

Once upon a time witches were acutely schizophrenic old hags who lived alone in the woods, fiddled around with poisoned apples and magic mirrors, and spooked lost little girls from Kansas. Wizards wore pointed hats, looked like a mouse, conjured up armies of brooms, and had major plumbing problems.

They needed better training. So author J.K Rowling conjured up Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry and populated it with a colorful collection of professors and students, including one Harry Potter—he of the google-eyed glasses and Zorro scar.

I saw the first four Harry Potter movies during their theatrical run and later on DVD. They were all fun, but never stayed with me very far from the theater exits. Maybe that’s because I never read the wildly popular books, written for both mature children and child-at-heart adults. I like to think I fall into the latter category (why else the passion for all these electronic toys!), but Harry Potter just never found his way onto my reading list.

Nevertheless, the movies have become deeper, darker, and more serious as the series has progressed. The third and fourth films, in particular, promised a lot more than the first two lightweight installments, and for the most part they delivered.

Still, I wasn’t inspired enough by the maturing of the films to check out the most recent release, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, when it came to a theater near me. But on high definition disc it has grabbed me in a way that the earlier films did not. Perhaps it was the fact that the child stars have grown beyond their “cute” years. In particular, Daniel Radcliffe, as Potter, has become a good young actor and not just a wunderkind.

Or perhaps it was because the parade of Britain’s best actors that populate these films now seems more inspired than gimmicky. Imelda Staunton’s turn as the new Professor of the Dark Arts, Dolores Umbridge, should earn her a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nod but probably won’t because this sort of film is often overlooked during awards season. The Lord of the Rings is the only significant exception that comes to mind.

The plot isn’t difficult to follow. Harry Potter gets dragged before a tribunal for violating the Wizard code of ethics by performing wizardry at the wrong place and time. The Ministry of Magic, it seems, refuses to believe that Voldemort—the Dark Lord whose name shall not be spoken—is back in town and spoiling for a fight. Since Harry is an outspoken witness to that return, the Ministry is out to discredit him. With no apparent help coming from higher up, Potter organizes the resistance that the Ministry refuses to provide by secretly training fellow Hogwarts students. This deepens an ongoing conflict between him and Professor Umbridge, the Ministry’s agent who has been assigned to Hogwarts. Umbridge is busy remaking the place in her own cheerfully totalitarian image.

I won’t tell you how this plays out. But enough remains undone that additional flms will be needed to put everything right—two more, to be precise, judging from the books.

Perhaps one of the reasons I enjoyed this movie so much is that this Blu-ray release (and the similar Combo Format HD, thanks to Warner’s continued support of both HD formats) is a real winner. The picture quality could hardly be better (credit the missing half star in the rating to nothing more serious than critic’s reserve). The detail is all there, from the skin textures and hair on the actors to the remarkably real-looking sets (probably a mixture of real paint and wood and CGI—it’s getting harder to tell these days where one starts and the other ends—a welcome development). The deepest blacks are rich and true and there is excellent shadow detail—a good thing given the many dark scenes in the movie. And the colors always look right.

The audio (TrueHD on the HD DVD; uncompressed PCM on then Blu-ray) is perhaps even more impressive. The bass is deep, the surrounds fully fleshed-out when they need to be, and the effects super. That’s all expected in modern movies of this sort (though not always delivered). But the recording of Nicolas Hooper’s superb score is also impressive.

Nicolas Who? I wondered the same thing. A search of the Internet Movie Database revealed that he has been around for some time, mainly composing scores for British television. This is his first truly high profile film, and I hope more will follow. While themes originally written by John Williams for the first three Harry Potter films are woven through this score (Patrick Doyle wrote the score for the fourth film), there’s a lot of original work here, and it’s outstanding (good enough, in fact, to drive me to buy the soundtrack CD).

The special features include an “In-Movie Experience” which inserts a button in the form of a spinning disc onto the image whenever a short clip describing the creation of the scene is available for viewing. An interactive feature on editing, which allows the viewer to combine three shots from a specific scene in any order, with different options for sound and music, is also fun. Both formats also include deleted scenes. But while the HD DVD version does have several web-enabled features that the Blu-ray lacks, the Blu-ray has two other featurettes that the HD DVD does not. I wasn’t able to try the web features, but the extra material on the Blu-ray disc is very good, and I wouldn’t want to be without it. The Hidden Secrets of Harry Potter, in particular, runs for 43 minutes. It probably wouldn't fit on the HD DVD with that format's smaller data capacity.

Several of the extra features on the Blu-ray version are promoted as high definition on the disc jacket. That’s only partially true. Most are a combination of crisp high definition, soft-looking high definition, and standard def.

Altogether, however, this is a great release of a very fine film.

Picture: 9.5 (out of 10)….Sound: 9.5…Film: 8.5

Reviewed on a Sony VPL-VW200 1080p projector and Stewart Studiotek 130, 78" wide, 16:9 screen, with the Panasonic DMP-BD30 Blu-ray player, an Onkyo TX-SR875 Surround Sound Receiver (used as a pre-pro), an Anthem Statement P5 power amplifier, and an APC S15 power conditioner/UPS. Also B&W 683 (L/R front) and 685 (surround), Revel C12 (center) speakers and a Revel B15 subwoofer.