August 10th, 2009, No Comments »
Continuing my reviews of every movie I see in 2009:
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince - 8/10 - I wrote about it elsewhere, but I think this is the best of the Harry Potter movies. It moves at a different rhythm than the other movies, and the cast has really come into its own.
The Hurt Locker - 9/10 - A terrific war movie, brilliantly directed by Kathryn Bigelow. The cast is also excellent. They’re mostly unknowns, with a couple big names in small roles. American critics are falling all over themselves to praise this film, and that’s mostly deserved. I think critics have been a little desperate for a really good movie about the Iraq War. This film has a lot in common with the excellent mini-series Generation Kill.
G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra - 4.5/10 - Not as dreadful as the Transformers movies, but pretty poor. It’s overly long, and suffers from the comic booky hollowness common to a lot of superhero movies. The accents, also, were often astonishingly bad. Despite watching the TV show and owning a few toys when I was a kid, I felt zero nostalgia while watching this movie.
A Perfect Getaway - 4/10 - A predictable, run-of-the-mill thriller in Magnum P.I.’s old stomping grounds. Even Milla Jovovich’s presence couldn’t elevate to average.
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July 21st, 2009, 12 Comments »
District 9 is a star-free, rather original looking science fiction movie being released (ominously) in August, 2009. While watching Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince yesterday, I visited the washroom. Here’s what I saw on the door:
I haven’t gotten around to calling the number listed at the bottom of the sign, but I’ll do so and report back on what I hear.
What’s ingenious is the poster’s location. It’s the rare bit of unused real estate at the cinema. The only downside is that if you’re like me, and going to the bathroom during a film, you’re unlikely to stop and read the poster.
Wikipedia shows a similar billboard version of this poster in Toronto. The associated article has a write-up on other aspects of the film’s marketing campaign.
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July 20th, 2009, 5 Comments »
Yesterday I saw the sixth film in the Harry Potter franchise, Harry Potter and the The Half-Blood Prince. It’s the first of the movies that I’d call “quite good”. We’re watching the cast mature on-screen, and the audience is getting older too. As a result, movies seem to be getting more interesting.
The young leads are much better actors than they were eight years ago. They’ve earned some confidence and chemistry onscreen that makes them much more watchable. Given the series’ success, the producers took a huge casting gamble. Any three actors would be a gamble, it just happened that these turned out without:
- Looking hideous
- Engaging in a crippling public scandal (drug addiction, sex change operation and so forth)
- Quitting acting for a quieter life
As a producer, the only casting decision I’d regret is Bonnie Wright as Ginny Weasley. She’s pretty plain, in both performance and appearance. In light of the international cadre of Hogwarts honeys giving him the doe eyes, one finds oneself asking what Harry sees in Ginny. The producers might be forgiven, as they probably cast her in 1999 or 2000. According to Wikipedia, only three or four books had been published, so they may not have had much insight into Ginny’s importance to the later films.
The addition of the superb Jim Broadbent is also a treat. I was recently remarking on how difficult it is to convincingly act drunk, and he does an exquisite job in one scene.
Which reminds me of the underlying drugs-and-alcohol motif of this movie. Everybody seems to be constantly high on this potion or drunk on that brew–it’s like Dazed and Confused with wands and robes. Harry Pothead, indeed.
The Half-Blood Prince manages to avoid a lot of the irksome ruts of the earlier movies. They were often a combination of Choose Your Own Adventure and a Cast of Wand-Wielding Thousands, neither of which made for natural pacing or easy watching for those who haven’t read the books. The film’s opening moments really grab you in a very unexpected way. Plus, this movie is less married to the standard year-at-Hogwarts structure–the action goes off the reservation in a satisfying way. For a change, the special effects feel streamlined and underplayed. I even found the Quidditch scene to be happily brief and kind percussive.
I even enjoyed the teen romance. It’s refreshing, in light of how chaste the previous movies were. After all, these are a bunch of teenagers living away from home.
The movie isn’t without its flaws. No director has worked out how to really sell the wand-to-wand combat scenes, which always come off as goofy Latin shouting matches. Plus, at 153 minutes, it’s pretty long and drags here and there.
Director David Yates is apparently signed on for the remaining two films, and the franchise feels like it’s in sound hands. I was listening to the Slate Spoiler Special podcast (I tried finding a home page for that badboy, but no joy) for his film, and guest Dan Kois aptly refers to the next film as “Harry, Hermione and Ron Go Camping Forever”, so Yates will have those hands full.
Ranking The Latest Movie
I have a poor memory of the Harry Potter movies, but I feel like this is the best of them. I thought I’d hit up a couple of review aggregation sites, Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes, to see how they thought this movie stood up. In both cases, the films are rated out of 100.
| Movie |
MC |
RT |
| Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (2001) |
64 |
78 |
| Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (2002) |
63 |
82 |
| Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004) |
81 |
89 |
| Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2005) |
81 |
88 |
| Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (2007) |
71 |
77 |
| Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (2009) |
78 |
84 |
Like I said, I can’t remember them well enough to assign more than a vague order. I’d say the first movie was definitely the worst, but after that I’m a bit lost.
Speaking of teen romance, I saw the trailer for the second Twilight movie. I don’t know about the movie, but the trailer is an incomprehensible hack job. I’ve seen the first movie, and I was still kind of lost. And, surprise, surprise, there’s a werewolf.
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July 14th, 2008, 1 Comment »
Monique is a keynote speaker down at Portus 2008, a Harry Potter convention down in Dallas. I’ve been enjoying her photos, which provide yet another view into the dorky but lovable world of intense fandom. Here are two favourites. I love that He Who Must Not Ever, Ever Be Named is on a call:
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March 13th, 2008, 3 Comments »
I just read that the final Harry Potter movie, Harry Potter and the Hollow Medley, will actually be split into two films, making a total of eight:
“Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part I” will hit theaters in November 2010, followed by “Part II” in May 2011, a decision that is being met around the world with fans’ cheers but also plenty of cynical smirks. The publishing industry is learning to live without new “Potter” releases, but Hollywood just pulled off a trick that will keep its profitable hero on his broom into the next decade.
Can I get a kerching? Sure, that last book is pretty thick, but book five is actually longer, so I’m confident in chalking this one up to the studio’s desire for an extra $300 million.
The films have gotten better (the childrens’ acting is no longer atrocious). The movies have become entertaining if unremarkable fantasy romps. I do, however, object to the tedious structure that each films follow. It goes something like:
- Harry is miserable in London.
- Harry has madcap adventures on the way to school.
- Harry cheats death, battles nefarious forces and struggles to maintain a B average over the course of the school year.
- Harry bids everybody farewell for another summer of misery.
Revise the Story Arc
After seeing the third movie, I decided that the studios should have reached higher.
The movies didn’t have to map exactly to the books. The producers could have taken Harry’s entire story arc and divided it up in a different, more exciting way. There could have been five movies, or nine or twelve. This would have freed screenplay writers from the bonds of the novels’ formal structure. The result probably would have been a far more diverse set of movies.
The natural comparison here is how The Empire Strikes Back is a considerably darker film (thanks largely to its plot) than the other two (well, five) Star Wars movies. The same goes for Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.
Of course, such a move would have come with considerable risk, and might have alienated the films’ core audience. And studios are famous for being risk-averse.
Here’s an idea for a massive fan project. Re-edit the eight movies so that they start and end in different spots. Move some scenes around so that you end with a richer, more diverse set of movies.
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July 23rd, 2007, 11 Comments »
I haven’t read any of the books, but I’m interested to see how long it takes before the ending is ’spoiled’ for me (I use quotes because, well, I feel fairly ambiguous about learning the outcome). How long before I get, uh, Crying Gamed? A week? A month? Never?
I suspect it’ll be a week or too before I accidentally read something online, or see it satirized in a Saturday Night Live sketch and more or less guess at the book’s denouement. It’ll help, I suppose, that I’m living on a rural Maltese island.
I’ve seen the movies, and will continue to watch them (assuming the fourth one ever comes to Malta). So I’ll eventually learn of the outcome.
And, of course, I’m kind of Heisenberging this test by blogging about it.
If you’re panicked about reading spoilers, here’s an example of filtering your RSS feeds for the dodgy keywords.
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July 19th, 2007, 1 Comment »
My friend Monique is kicking around an interesting project for Harry Potter fans out there. She’s exploring how people’s lives have changed in (not, I think, because of) a decade of discovering and reading the Harry Potter books:
The friendships that I’ve gained because of the books have been deeper than I expected. This is the book series that I feel most passionate about. I hide that passion because when I worked at Raincoast I didn’t want my “outside” friends to badger me about the stories or inside-scoops they thought I might have. Now as the series comes to a close I want to celebrate the fun times that have been the last 10 years.
If you’re a fan, she has a survey she wants you to take. She’s going to post the results on the nascent SinceHarry.com.
I’ll give them another try some day, but on the first two attempts, the books failed to hold my attention.
UPDATE: Doc links to a review of the entire Potter series in The New York Times. I haven’t read it yet, but have tagged it ‘readable’.
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