We Are Wizards.

"Considering that it focuses on a group of extreme Harry Potter fans, We Are Wizards ostensibly treads Trekkies territory, though mercifully, this slight documentary is less a look-at-the-nerds freakshow than a portrait of the means by which JK Rowling's popular fantasy series has inspired others' creativity," writes Nick Schager in Slant.

"The bulk of the movie is given over to the musicians, an engagingly geeky cross-section ranging from seven-year-old hellions to aging Gen-X-ers with kids of their own, who expound on the glories of the boy wizard or pound out Potter-obsessed power-pop (loosely modeled after the sweetly naive anthems of Jonathan Richman)," writes Lance Goldenberg. "Ignore the scattershot approach... and there's considerable pleasure to be had in spending time with these bizarre enthusiasts."

Updated through 11/14.

"Harry Potter is an audience-participation friendly commodity," writes Dana Keith in the L Magazine, "and when Warner Brothers, the production company behind the film adaptations, tried to put the kibosh on the fan sites, threatening lawsuits, the fan community fought back with an embargo against all things Harry Potter except the books (they had no quarrel with author JK Rowling). Though the film is vague in the actual outcome of the consumer strike ('we didn't get everything we wanted, but we got enough'), Harry Potter sites are still up and running and the importance of the fan recognized."

For Filmmaker, Nick Dawson talks with director Josh Koury "about the cult of Harry, his dual role as both filmmaker and film programmer, and getting into fights as a pizza boy."

Updates, 11/13: "No matter how distorted the franchise may become with merchandising or legal battles or a fan's reinterpretation, the books have become a part of the cultural landscape, something that's never really examined in We Are Wizards," writes Mark Peikert in the New York Press. "A better approach would have been one that focused less on a child's home movies and performances and more on why he's on stage singing about an imaginary wizard."

"I know plenty of smart people who enjoy the Harry Potter stories, and there could be, at extremely generous moments, a certain side of me that would consider giving them a shot," writes Michael Joshua Rowin at indieWIRE. "But not as long as there are movies like We Are Wizards, and not as long as there exist the Harry Potter-crazed subjects who comprise this painful documentary's meretricious survey of kitschy fandom."

Updates, 11/14: Koury "has actually latched onto so many subjects in this 79-minute movie - fandom as an act of creation, intellectual property rights in the Internet age, conglomerate bullying - that he can't get a real grasp on any of them," writes Manohla Dargis.

For IFC, Matt Singer lists "Five Documentaries About Nerd Culture."

Posted by dwhudson at November 12, 2008 2:07 PM