The Documentary That Makes Harry Potter Exciting Again - I Loved It

[Brendon Connelly]

I don't believe in that ol' Harry Potter magic, of course, but I do love illusions, particularly when I've fallen for them hook, line and sinker. I love feeling like I've just seen something magical.

I don't mean, necessarily, a woman being cut in two, or a man teleporting from one box to another, but anything where I think, if only for a moment, that I'm looking at something that I'm not actually looking at all.

There can be magic in being fooled or, often more powerfully, in the moment you tip over from being fooled to no longer being fooled. And that's just how Morgan Matthews starts his short documentary film, When Harry Left Hogwarts - fooling us, then tipping us over.

It was a real surprise that a film I expected to tell me the truth, to pull back the curtain on Hollywood trickery, starts with a concerted effort to capture an illusion and put it on the screen.

But it was the perfect way to begin.

Documentarian Matthews was given some incredible and far reaching access behind the scenes of the last two Harry Potter films to make a documentary for the Deathly Hallows Part 2 DVD and Blu-ray.*

The strange world he stepped into is full of the odd, the unexpected and the surreal.

Compare JK Rowling's world of magic and the world of making movies. Both are exclusive enough that most folk are outsiders looking in.

Both are peopled with larger than life characters, many of them preceded by even larger reputations.

Both are built from surprising, odd juxtapositions - the technological alongside the mythical, the huge against the tiny, the banal against the beautiful.

There's more than a few exact parallels too, and I wonder how accidental they are.

• As with the characters, every actor playing a Wizard on the film has their own wand, and it is just for them, and is special to them, unique and distinct, and intricate in proportion to their stature - but as in the stories, these precious magical artefacts might sometimes go missing, causing a panic...
• The mundanity of lessons and learning has to punctuate the more exciting indulgences in magic.
• One boy above all others is exalted.
• People have their forms transformed, or have their unexpected true forms revealed.
• And there are even invisibility cloaks, to all intents and purposes. Invisibility cloaks that work far better than you think they might...

I fell in loved with Alfonso Cuaron's The Prisoner of Azkaban, but no other Potter has never quite brought forth the same wonder again, not for me.

I had no idea I'd find that glamour and allure in a documentary on the special features disc in a DVD set.

Matthews' documentary is too short at around 45 minutes, and there are things hinted at that I want to see more of, but he has judged the tone so perfectly, and found so much magic that, while the film lasted, I was transported.

Morgan stays out of the picture, and for the most part, off of the soundtrack, leading us around the backstage world without drawing much attention to himself at all. He does better by just framing these things for us, finding the moments and the camera angles and the juxtapositions that illuminate the magic hiding everywhere.

There's no doubt that any number of other filmmakers would have walked right past the strange, glimmering things, or dried them out and drained their colour in putting them on screen. Matthews seems to be on a mission to serve the magic.

It ends up seeming almost like he had fixed Mad Eye Moody's eye onto the camera in place of a normal lens, the better to see through dull, Muggle fug to the quirk behind.

I learned almost nothing about what it is like to make a film like Harry Potter, but so what? There's not a lot I won't have seen or studied and been part of already. No, this wasn't one of those mundane lessons I was telling you about. Instead, it was that indulgence in magic.

Is it worth buying a copy of Deathly Hallows Part 2 to get this film? You'll have to tell me if 45 minutes sounds like enough. I wanted more myself, for sure, but I was still happy with what I got.

And I think it's definitely worth putting on your Christmas list.

So, now, Harry Potter is finally really exciting again. When's the new film coming out?

Oh...

Previously: the trailer for When Harry Left Hogwarts.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows is available on Blu-ray and DVD right now, including a Triple Play set with Blu-ray, DVD and digital copy.

*Note: in the US, this documentary is so far only included on the Target-exclusive release.

[Justin]

I'm waiting for the Laserdisk or Betamax.