Harry Potter grows up.  Reviews of the latest films. June 3 2004
6:47 PM  The Plot Against Harry  Young wizard battles evil,
deals with puberty.  Potter's hotter than ever Potter's hotter
than ever  What a bummer when that genial Hollywood company-man
Chris Columbus was hired to direct the movie of Harry Potter and
the Sorcerer's Stone (2001). The adaptation was faithful to a
fault, but the picture was a bland, twinkling, Christmassy thing
that missed or muffled the book's emotional beats, and it had
none of the subversive energy out of which J.K. Rowling's Harry
had been forged. I'm not saying Rowling is some kind of Riot
Grrrrl. But despite the headmistressy civility of her prose and
her insistence on a disciplined and controlled nonconformity,
her books express a rage against a certain fascistic strain of
the blue-blood English upper crust and their clueless allies,
the vulgarly snobbish middle-class mortals known memorably as
"muggles." Every book begins with the lonely, friendless,
maltreated orphan Harr