Has the mere thought of final exams and papers and projects, soon to arrive in the future, aggravated that embarrassing facial twitch? Do you find yourself snapping at the dining hall staff when they run out of grilled cheese sandwiches? Do you find yourself yearning for a simpler, more carefree time when you had recess after lunch and Mom packed your lunch for you? Back when a final project required only posterboard and crayons, and you still got a weekly allowance?

Well, luckily for you this holiday season, this blissful state can be yours for a mere eight dollars and two hours of your time! That’s right kids, the Harry Potter movie is out, just in time to save your sanity in this time of crisis.

This movie is not a date movie, that is, unless you’re dating an 11 year old, in which case, stop reading this immediately and run, not walk, to Monsour (you sick bastard). Although this movie is being tou-ted as the latest in family entertainment, it still holds potential for the more mature and worldly college audience. Granted I saw this movie in the company of my two younger sisters and my parents, all in the name of "family time" (because nothing says family better than over two hours spent sitting silently in the dark and staring blankly at the screen), but my family dysfunction is a topic best left for another article.

So, why did I like Harry Potter? It is a general principle among movies that any movie based on a book generally, well, sucks. Why? Mostly because your imagination is better any day than your average over-paid young Hollywood starlet. But in large part, movies simply fail to convey the complexity and subtlties of most works of literature.

However, the charm of the Harry Potter books is that they are not complex stories; there really aren’t any redeeming social or political qualities to stories about wizards and trolls and ghosts. They’re well-written, with a likeable main character and enough fantasy and adventure to satisfy any red-blooded American kid. The books are fun–there aren’t any themes or symbols to figure out, and certainly no professer is going to assign a paper on J.K. Rawlings’s use of dramatic tension in the plot.

One of the main reasons though that Harry Potter works as a movie is because it largely remains true to the novel. Its characters, such as Harry and his friends, Hermione Granger and Ron Weasely, look like the characters in the book. Hermione, played by Emma Watson is the school’s over-achiever, complete with frizzy hair, and Harry’s other friend, played by Rupert Grint, is an adorable little red-head. Together, these first year students at Hogwarts, a boarding school for young wizards, fight the forces of evil

It would have been easy for the adult British actors in the movie, who include Alan Rickman as Professor Snape and Maggie Smith as Professor Minerva MacDonagall, to overly exaggerate their characters. Yet their acting is controlled, so even when Rickman is at his most threatening, he eludes being a ludicrous and over the top evil villain.

The setting also captures this effect of blending just enough realism with its more fantastical elements. The set is not too realistic to take all the fun out of the movie, while its more fanciful elements are controlled just enough to make it clear that this is, indeed, a mythical world in which children can fly on broomsticks and turn pincushions into hedgehogs.

The school of Hogwarts is a foreboding stone Gothic building. Yet its staircases move and the paintings on the walls move around and talk to the students. At dinner, ghosts flit about while students eat, and mail is delivered by owls. Other elements of fantasy are woven throughout the movie; when Harry goes back to school shopping, his list includes a cauldron and a magic wand–definitely not part of a typical child’s education.

The scarier parts of the film are also just gory enough to deliciously frighten young children, but not enough to scar them for life. There are three-headed dogs, a room filled with dangerous flying keys, and the threatening specter of an evil wizard, the chief villian of the movie. Yet no matter what situation Harry and his friends find themselves in, they are still able to finally extricate themselves, whether it’s through Hermione’s brainpower, or Ron’s chess-playings skills.

So in case you were yearning for an alternative world in which going to class involved levitation, or really just an excuse to finally get off campus this weekend, go to the movies and see Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. At the very least, you can procrastinate for at least another two and a half hours.