Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 1 *

Well, for obvious reasons this is a tough one to get too into until I've seen both halves. It quite literally cuts off without the slightest semblance of resolution or anything. In fact it felt a lot like when I was a kid and we had movies on laserdisc, and I would watch Star Wars, and Grand Moff Tarkin, fed up with the princess's lies, would bark the order, "Terminate her! Immediately!" -- and at that exact moment, the disc would cut to black and wait to be flipped over. The end of this, with Voldemort snatching the Elder Wand from Dumbledore's dead hands, just after we bury Dobby (more on that in a moment), hasn't resolved anything. I mean, that's okay, at least in theory, because the book is vast, and apparently uncompressable, and you can make a lot more money if you release two 150-minute films rather than one five hour film, and that's what's done here. I refused to go see Kill Bill in theaters for this reason; I wasn't willing to fork over money twice for a single film, and I wasn't willing to try and understand a single story with a six-month gap between parts or whatever. Here I've gone ahead and done so, but I still can't judge this story until I see how any of these things pan out. Subsequently, all I can do are discuss scenes or elements, but not the overall narrative, which is frustrating. As such, this may come off even more like a list of hopefully-not-too-petty problems even more than usual. I legitimately don't know how this story ends; all I can do is judge what they've given me here.

And so, with due apologies:

The biggest problem is the "end" of this half, then, so let's start there. Harry and HermioRon are captured by Bellatrix and the Malfoy clan. Draco is forced to identify Harry, who's had an uglification spell cast on him, and the pressure is really on because, I guess, if he mis-identifies the most famous boy in everywhere, Voldemort will kill them all for the bother -- because Voldymac isn't interested in maybes, only sure things, and he values his soldiers just that little. Anyway, they all fear him and he's crazy and evil and I'm splitting hairs, but no no, let's stay on track here: Draco has to decide if this is really Harry. It's important, suffice to say. You'd think if he was on the fence, maybe he'd be swayed the existence of Hermione and Ron, who he probably recognizes as Harry's ginger sidekick and that one kooky chick who punched him in the nose three or four years ago. But okay, maybe he wasn't on the fence until he saw H&R, and so now he's 50/50 and still unsure. But then Bellatrix (which seems to be Helena Bonham Carter's Jack Sparrow impersonation, by the way... she seems to have wandered in from another, much more spastic film) sees that the snatcher bandits who brought them the kids have the fabled sword of Godric Griffindor. So she decides it's time to mount Hermione (why Hermione? I assume the answer is racism) and cut her a little for being racially impure. While she does this, Harry and Ron are thrown in a dungeon along with Luna Lovegood and Ollivander the wand merchant. Okay, I admit it, all of this is a snarky build up to right here: Ron and Harry are trapped in a dungeon and Hermione is being low-level tortured, and they are in the stronghold of the crazy evil bad guys, and magic is right out -- so how will they ever escape?

This is the kind of brilliant corner a writer wants to get his or her characters into, because it's these kind of moments that really show us what a character is made of, and there's nothing more exciting that when the hero is backed into a corner and still finds a way out. The trouble is, the writer actually has to come up with the way out, and the goal here is that the way out of the no-win scenario comes from an active character and is sufficiently clever to impress us. If the solution is too random or arbitrary or comes from unexpected third parties, well, it's kind of a cheat, isn't it, because our hero just got lucky, and when that is literally a plot device that comes out of nowhere we call this -- you guessed it -- deus ex machina. And if you have an elf magically pop in and break existing rules ("I can use magic; I'm an elf") and save the day with little to no effort, maybe it's called elfus ex machina, but no matter what you call it, that my friends is a plot device, and in case you can't tell from my tone, using it does run the risk of irking your audience. And then they get on their blogs and piss and moan about it, and nobody wins.

But seriously, that was a cheat of the worst kind, and just in case we didn't know how literally the storytellers were taking this Dobby-as-plot-device thing, he is killed immediately after saving the day, so we don't have the excess baggage of another character, one whose super rule-breaking magic might have come in handy again later. And then we have to mourn him, because he "died to save our hero," and the whole thing is just frustrating.

Okay, you know what? I'm being much more sarcastic than usual here, and it's actually not because I have some special hatred for this movie. In fact I don't. This is tangential, but the truth is I've become a little more sarcastic because I have become acutely aware of a funny kind of solitude in writing these Harry Potter rants. I feel like I'm uniquely positioned between those who don't love the stories and therefore haven't watched them all (or at all) and those who passionately love the stories and therefore watch them all uncritically. I may have even taxed my girlfriend's patience tonight with too many questions; even though they were all sincere and open I'm afraid they were all a little leading, as I was seeking out which things were plot holes, which things were shortcomings in translating to the big screen, and which things I merely missed or misunderstood. Long story short, my excess of acid is actually the result of indulgent self-consciousness. The further along in storytelling these mega-blockbusters got, I think the easier time they had selling their fans on each next installment, because they'd established a ride where hard questions weren't rewarded, and everyone had already agreed to enjoy the ride. (And it's not like I don't succumb to this phenomenon: anything from Labyrinth to Star Wars [even the "good trilogy"] to Indiana Jones doesn't hold up if you dig too deep, to one degree or another.)

I have a feeling the long, meandering bit in the various wildernesses of England did not need its full allotment of time to get across its point of hiding and reading, or whatever they were doing when they should have been racing around looking for the horcruxes and all. I have a feeling that that is one place they could have trimmed to get this story down to a single long movie. I have a feeling I will feel exhausted with the number of artifacts and fetishes this final story is going to make us obsess over, as it's already starting to feel like a Sierra King's Quest game with swords and rings and amulets and cloaks and wands and books and potions and everything -- I mean, no good wizard story could happen without magic items but I have a feeling this may constitute magic-item overload here. I also have a feeling all my big-picture questions like what the muggles understand (or experience) as Voldemort and his Death Eaters run around doing what they do, or why it's so hard for a room full of professional adult wizards to ever catch three plucky teens with amazing luck, or how much of the future Dumbledore could predict and how much he couldn't and why he had some glaring blindspots despite other moments of miraculous accuracy -- I have a feeling these will all remain largely unanswered.

On the other hand, I suspect and hope that more of Snape's backstory and motivation will come into play as the muggle genocide gets underway, and that the pathos of his sacrifice will be realized at least partially before we're done. I suspect and hope that many questions about Harry Potter and his parents will be answered, and that we will better understand what Voldemort's master plan actually is, and that the final showdown between Voldy and Harry will be big and nasty and taxing and I'm even holding out hope that despite the Dobby Incident above, the end of the whole series will probably be less of a cheat and more about the inner strength and bravery in Harry, and that love will probably play a part -- possibly the love between Hermione and Ron, which seems a little random from a prophecy standpoint but more or less sound from a dramatic one -- and that we will see in the end that a lot of people worked in a lot of ways behind the scenes to make sure Harry is prepared for that final showdown, and to make sure that Harry wins in the end. I also suspect and hope that things will get a lot worse, a lot darker, before they get remotely better.

But I reserve final judgment on all such things until the whole story is told. And until this summer when Part 2 finally comes out, I shelve all these concerns and complaints, criticisms and witticisms (see what I did there?), and move on to other worlds and interests and passions. From the beginning I feel like I've been simultaneously shooting fish in a barrel and beating a dead horse (and raining on my friends and loved ones' parade, while we're mixing metaphors), but I also feel that for the last ten-plus years I've been goaded endlessly into the position I'm now in, answering the claim by so many people that the series can be enjoyed by intelligent adults as well as dumb old kids.

I'm really not trying to pick a fight with anyone, and I can name a dozen or more popular series I like or would like a lot less than Harry Potter, and I'm openly admitting that the books do sound better than the movies with regards to at least many of my complaints. I do not hold anything (more or less than I did before) against the books. But I get the feeling most of these films only work as dim reflections of the novels, as accompaniment for those who enjoy the books and want to return. It's exactly how I feel about the recent Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy film, for example, or the Watchmen movie. The bottom line is, I'm not an enormous fan of the Harry Potter movies. They are uneven, overlong, kind of graceless, and lack a certain special something (a certain "magic" if you will). They don't feel like they were made out of passion but out of rote, like they were made because the thing simply had to exist. There was a demand, and the demand was met.

But that's just me. Quite obviously, your mileage may vary.

Seen at the Regal Broadway Metroplex.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

A pet cause I often rant about is the frustrating misperception of a writer's responsibility when adapting a work to another format -- particularly, of course, to the big screen. It isn't exactly a new thought to suggest that what works as a comic book or a novel doesn't always work as a TV show or a film. That an adaptation must stay true to its source makes inherent sense, to an extent, but to most people that seems to mean that the adaptation must be a verbatim translation across mediums, and that even the slightest beat lost or altered is a savage crime against the text. The more religious your fanboys and fangirls get about a thing, the more demanding of exactitude for the sake of exactitude the audience tends to be. But adaptation should be about finding the spirit of a thing, the thing that makes this story great, and keeping that alive at all costs -- literally, at the expense of the details. Sometimes when you are too careful to preserve every bone and sinew when creating a new creature you lose the thing's soul, and the end result is hollow, or malformed (or formless), and the impact isn't just diminished, it's lost. I haven't read the Harry Potter novels, and I'm reasonably sure I never will, but I get the feeling that this is happening here. The fan-enforced painstakingness of translation -- adaptation by committee, essentially -- may be sucking a lot of life and breath out of the work.

I can only judge the movie as-is, as a movie, which is how it is meant to be judged. And so, all considerations of "oh but if you read the book" aside, Half-Blood Prince has some pretty good stuff in there somewhere, but it doesn't seem to know how to get there. Furthermore (and this I think is intentional, but in this case it doesn't help), it's not even a complete story. This is to the Harry Potter series what Empire Strikes Back is to the original Star Wars trilogy. This is "the one where things get dark," and it's also the one where all that tension boils over into romantic entanglement -- by way of easy character development. In fact about half of the story is given over to a lot of really artificial love triangles.

I'm guessing that we were supposed to root for Ron and Hermione to finally "snog" with such passion that every step away from it was meant to be agonizing. Likewise I gather that because Ginny Weasley once came down the stairs excited to see Harry in, like, movie 2 or 3? I forget which -- anyway, because of that we are meant to secretly hope these two will get together. Maybe I'm just too much a cynical thirtysomething dude and not enough of a fourteen year old girl for this, but it all sure feels like forced shipping to me. Anyway, two years ago we had Wizard Prom and the boys and girls were just starting to notice each other. Now, love is really in the air, stinking everything right up. This is part of what feels like a novel to me, because there isn't anything directly linking the continued romantic explorations of these characters to the return of Voldemort and the machinations of his evil ragtag gang of followers. Technically, Potions Class, and potions in general, form the link, but it is a weak link at best. And for the record, not every single scene of this was bad -- in fact, most the actual scenes were well handled (the cast and crew have gotten into a natural groove with each other, and the photography is always very pretty; in general the whole thing's gotten more palatable even when it's a wreck at times) -- it's just that the dynamics at play here feel arbitrary and unearned, and as such I don't actually care much about them. I like Hermione just fine, and Ron is mostly okay, and if they get together I think that's cute, but I don't really care one way or another because it's just as believable that they'd be happy with others as with each other, so it's hard to imagine an hour needed to be spent on who is kissing who and who they'd really rather be kissing. At least when that's not remotely what the story's really about. Anyway, like the film itself, I digress.

In theory, this is the story of Dumbledore and Harry's attempts to stay out ahead of Voldemort and his cartoonish acolytes (led by a cartoonish Helena Bonham Carter... the snob in me wonders whatever happened to that amazing actress I used to admire, but the pragmatist in me realizes that she's getting paid buku bucks to play a horde of fun roles and what's so great about straight-drama?). We "reveal" Snape to be a villain in a scene so direct and unambiguous that, after five films of is-he-or-isn't-he I immediately disbelieve it, which is a shame. They pushed the scene too hard on us, which had the reverse effect of making me read the "second reading" subtext of the scene on my first viewing of it. Even before the final scenes between him and Dumbledore (and despite them leading to [SPOILER?] Dumbly's death), I was ready to bet real money that Snape was an agent of the good guys all along, and that he was going to make the ultimate sacrifice in order to bring down Voldemort once and for all. It would have been nice to feel betrayed, but Snape was never a character capable of that, because we've gone to that well too many times. We are told so often to mistrust him, but oh wait he's good after all and we were wrong to mistrust him!, that it's pretty clear what endgame we're going for. He's got one note as a character, and so we're playing out the misunderstood-ally role to the very end.

(Oh, wait, I just remembered, I have one other complaint about Snape here. It's revealed at practically the last second that the "Half-Blood Prince," which was apparently important enough to name this story after is none other than Our Pal Severus -- but that's it? It's not a clue to anything, or useful to understanding Snape's role in this or Harry's, or a connection to the past or anything -- it's just a random detail. Harry has a note-covered Potions textbook that belonged to a seeming genius at potions, and it turns out to be the gloomy former Potions professor's. Okay, I guess I can see that making sense, but what the fuck does "half-blood prince" mean?? And what does it mean that Harry found and used his book? Surely it's not just a funny coincidence! Come on guys. Is this something the book explains but the film drops the ball, or what? Somebody explain to me the title here.)

Back to the point of how they've used a character in previous installments undermining how they're trying to use him now: I've got a similar beef with our other so-called would-be betrayer: little Draco Malfoy. Seriously, from the first time we met him on he's been one evil dojo away from sweeping Harry's leg, although before this film every single scene of him being a bully or a prick ends with him cowering or humiliated. He is never given a chance to be anything other than an embarrassing petulant brat with the most stubbornly puffed up sense of self-importance ever. He's never shown as capable or deserving of attention or respect long enough to feel worthy of the scene they thrust upon him here. Neither his intent to murder our story's Gandalf nor his pussing out about doing so are meaningful scenes because this is never a character we took any interest in, seriously, as either protagonist or antagonist. At best he's a comical thorn in Harry's side, at worst he's a heckler from the sidelines. He's always been too small in scale for the kinds of trouble that Harry has per story for him to even register as a villain, and suddenly now Voldemort has picked him? I'm assuming Voldy's recruiting pool is pretty small here, if he thought Draco Malfoy was the man for any job. Then again, maybe the plan all along was to find someone pathetic enough that Snape (of all people! or something) would pity him and get pressured into a binding magical promise to do the job for him. Actually, all kidding aside, maybe that really was the plan all along. Anyway, you can't argue with results.

On a side note, I wonder if I'd have found Dumbledore's death more moving if it hadn't been famously spoiled for me. The truth is, I suspect not, because at least in the movie, it felt telegraphed for the majority of the story. It felt more like a game of when and how than if. But I think I can see how this would be a good hard shock in the books.

So things end here appropriately darkly, that Empire Strikes Back ending. It's more of a cliffhanger than an ending of its own, and since this is an ongoing series after all, I try not to fault it for that. We're six films and something like fifteen hours into the epic story here, so you'll get no complaints from me if you bypass the reset-button at the end of every movie and the start of each next. A lot of stuff happened, which is all fine and good. (I managed to rant about so many things I didn't even talk about how odd it was that Harry's preferred choice of action throughout the story is to lurk... that in fact eight or nine different times he is a peeping tom, an eavesdropper, or an out-and-out spy on a situation he's not supposed to see. It seemed like all he knew how to do was hide and watch people, and that was weird.) But there didn't seem to be a lot of strong themes tying together everything we saw, perhaps because the storytellers were much more excited by what was actually happening. Without unifying themes it's sometimes hard to pull together a single story out of disparate elements, or to compare scenes or relationships to each other and see any bigger picture here.

Instead, this is like the second-to-last episode in a serial television show (and I realize how apt that analogy is), where all the pieces are moved around the board to where they need to be for the climax. Dumbledore is dead; Snape is with the baddies; someone named RAB has a horcrux (I'm unclear if this is the last piece of Voldemort's soul or just one they know is out of their reach); Hermione and Ron have pledged their loyalty to Harry as he plans to forsake the school to continue Dumbledore's quest, and they've also pledged themselves to each other (more or less); and somewhere out there is Voldemort, though I'm not sure exactly what he is up to while Bellatrix runs around doing his dirty work. All these things happened to put people where they need to be to begin The Final Race To The Showdown. Unfortunately, because they were all just a bunch of events, it's hard to say if any of them meant anything or not outside the logistical confines of the story.

People are always reminding me: lighten up, Travis, this is just a story. I don't know how to respond to that because nothing is ever "just" a story, and something this many people feel this strongly about is clearly, clearly more than a mere story. I don't feel the slightest bit out of line hoping it means something. And since this episode was all mechanics, that puts a lot of pressure on the two-part finale.

And for the record, I'm not sure it'll all add up to deserving of the passion it's received, but I remain cautiously optimistic that despite its terribly rocky start, the Harry Potter series just might go out on a good note. Here's hoping!

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

Well, I'm going to be straight with you here. This is hardly a flawless film, but this was the first Harry Potter film that elicited more enjoyment than disdain from me. It's got character development, a single crisis that (convoluted though it may be) ties all of the many threads of action together, and it's even got themes throughout.

In fact, we moved through the Goddamn Dursleys so quickly they didn't even really annoy me very much, and even though the evolution of the Dudley character (into "Big D") was a little embarrassing, they managed to work it into a scene with actual ramifications with the story -- and keep his parents to such a minimum that it felt like a bitter-but-swallowable pill. As to the ramifications, I actually enjoyed how insanely quickly things went from the face-off with Dementors in the tunnel into Brazil into Kafka's The Trial and for about twenty minutes or so I was kind of hoping the entire story would just continue spiraling downward into surreal bureaucratic madness. I didn't quite get my wish, but The Trial did give way to 1984 for a while there, as Umbridge eventually took over the school and began to scrub it clean in a very peculiar and pointed attack on the contemporary education system and its emphasis on impractical rote memorization versus practical applied knowledge or creative thought. And while the whole thing with the Minister's increasing paranoia while Umbridge guts the wizard-education program from the inside-out makes pretty much no sense when you look too closely, it's all in aid of something here -- in fact, it's in aid of both character conflict/obstacles and exploration of the roles and purpose of education and government in our lives -- and in the end, being true to the drama is much more satisfying than being true to logic. (Best to be both, no question, but I prefer to err on the side of emotional truth over logical fact.) And damned if this isn't the first time in about ten hours of story that I've been able to say that.

And although Voldemort plays a pretty crucial role here, obviously, this one works like Prisoner of Azkaban, in that we have concrete antagonists for our heroes as well as abstract ideologies they are pitted against; Voldy seems almost like an additional bonus round when all the rest is said and done. Order of the Phoenix also feels like the first time the storytellers have willingly turned their world on its head and challenged the basic tenets of their society: What is Hogwarts if we remove Dumbledore? What is Hogwarts if we remove magic? What do Harry and the Scooby Gang do if we take away their freedom to cast spells and so on? The answer here is extremely satisfying: they take matters into their own hands, they fight for their own forms of education and applied knowledge, and they form an underground -- a parallel to the Order of the Phoenix itself -- to stand in resistance to the forces of tyranny. All without betraying their characters and, much more excitingly, in ways which greatly develop them as people. Harry becomes a teacher. Hermione learns to paint outside the lines. Ron gains some self-confidence. Even lesser characters grow, as Longbottom learns some spells and Cho deals with the conflicted emotions of liking Harry and mourning Cedric (this last mostly through Hermione's exposition, and it remained unresolved, but it was gratifying to have them address the point, not breeze over it). Harry himself, especially, has clearly grown as a character in a number of ways from beginning to end of this one installment. In the past, most of his development would either come in a miraculous last-minute bout of bravery or off-camera, between years as it were, such that like Luke Skywalker in the original series, he'd simply show up in the next movie a better man. Here, we see Harry grow. I've got to admit, that's nice. Hell, we even get an unusual flashback that shows us how Snape got to be such a dickwad and sheds some less flattering, ambiguous light on the youthful hijinks of James Potter, knocking him down a notch toward mere humanity.

The story is far from without holes or confusing bits. The centaurs, the (ass-lousy CG) giant, Hagrid's role in general, the same stock scenes with Draco Malfoy for the fifth year in a row, and the oversimplistic motivation I touched on above for Minister Fudge and Miss Umbridge, among other things. I could probably go on about those things in as much detail here as I had in previous posts, but it was nice to switch it up, spend a little time talking about something I liked for a change. Lest everybody think my heart is made of coal.

One thing I meant to mention that came up while watching The Goblet of Fire and comes up again here is, all this talk about what kind of an education is needed by these proto-wizards really begs the question, what exactly is the end goal of teaching wizardry? We've seen what the academic life of an adult wizard is like, and some service industry jobs like shopkeeps and busdrivers of course, but this I think was our first actual hint at the world of wizards in a more metropolitan setting (albeit within the various Ministries of Magic). You get your first feel that their world may be just as insular and rat-racey as our own, and so it makes a little more sense -- all things being equal -- to question the nature and necessity of so much emphasis on the Defense Against The Dark Arts. Of course, we've got the return of The Dark Lord and all that, so, you know, all things are hardly equal. Still, all this attack- and defense-related magic... makes you wonder. (On that note: we got to see our first full-on magic combat in Order of the Phoenix, and while it was pretty chaotic and generic, it had the feel of using magic and using it so fast we didn't have time to question which spell was used how... it didn't blow me away but it didn't give me much specific to complain about, either. Nice work, guys.)

Yeah, so anyway, I'm pleased and a little surprised to report that here we have a Harry Potter movie that gives credit to its characters, explores and creatively undermines its world to good effect, and advances the overarching narrative without sacrificing the single story contained herein. Curious what the sixth installment holds for me, but it'll have to wait of course. I ought to get at least a little sleep.

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

Well, I have to say, you have no idea how nice it is to skip the whole muggle/Dursley thing and just get into the story. If for nothing else than that this one felt a little more palatable. Actually, this one almost seemed to launch too quickly into the action and exposition, but considering we've got over two hours of wizarding teenagers to sit through, it's hard to complain too much about that.

A lot of heated debate has cropped up in the wake of me watching these films so critically, which is maybe not so surprising. A lot of this tends to just be about telling me to lighten up and enjoy a simple kid's story without tearing everything apart and raining on the fun -- which, to put it bluntly, I respectfully reject, because you can learn a lot by applying criticism to pieces that don't immediately demand or warrant it, and frankly if it can't hold up to a little scrutiny then it's not for me anyway. Scrutiny and looking into the layers of a thing is how I enjoy a work. It's not like I'm complaining that the world of Harry Potter isn't believable or is too childish; I believe I've done my best to take the work as it stands and look at what it aims to be versus what it is, and I've tried only to judge it accordingly -- or at least I try to own up to moments of personal taste.

Anyway, the specific thing that keeps sparking debate is my claim that Rowling wasn't overly imaginative when constructing the architecture and rules of her world. Magic here is too literal, too direct and plain, too banal. I have quipped that Quidditch could only have been invented by a muggle. I have also quipped that the lady who wrote these stories about wizards has never even seen the inside of a Player's Handbook, let alone partook in a little role-playing in her day (or any other pastime that might give her insight into what being a spellcaster in a historied world of spellcasters might be like). Glib as they may be, I stand by these claims. In fact, especially considering how very Anglocentric the whole Harry Potter universe is, and how much magic and magick exists in the vast pagan-filled history of England, and considering works of fantasy by Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, and Chia Miéville, it becomes all the more egregious how much wasted potential there is here. Imagine for a moment the Harry Potter series as written by Neil Gaiman or Alan Moore and maybe you'll see what I'm saying here. The same basic, simple hero's-quest storytelling but with a stronger sense of history, a more applied and inventive use of magic, and a more consistent use of character and archetype. It's not that Rowling and the filmmakers owe us this, exactly, but to not try for these things shows a lack of ambition, imagination, and initiative, and does not speak of a "great writer." But I'm beating a dead horse here, and so let's move on.

This comes up tonight because my one off-the-cuff idea from the last writeup about magically compressing large structures into smaller ones actually comes up here -- for all of a single shot, in the first ten minutes, showing the inside of a tent as something like a massive and comfortable blanket-strewn Turkish palace. Only here, instead of applying this concept to any storytelling, it appears as a sight-gag, there long enough for (a now awkwardly teenage-looking) Harry to remark, "I love magic!" before we move on with a story that looks like it has more to do with the world's various passions for football (combining the American pigskin-football arenas and budgets with the world's round-ball "soccer" passion and fandom) than it has to do with the concept of wizards or school or character growth. Okay, okay, I digress a second time... yeah, I hate Quidditch, but I'm talking about magic and its application: and here, with this Tardis-like tent, we see another overly literal, unapplied usage of magic.

As to the story itself: well, it's a bit frustrating, since most of the story is about something called the Triwizard Tournament. I have no idea how often it runs, but every once in a while three and only three (or four if your name rhymes with Barry Botter) kids get to compete in what we are told is a brutally dangerous literally life-or-death triathlon of dragon besting, merfolk wrestling, and hedge-maze completing. We are assured that people die doing this, though nobody does (the one casualty is unrelated). We are told it's highly competitive, though in two out of three competitions Harry ignores these rules and plays cooperatively -- and is mysteriously rewarded for such behavior. (But okay, so sports in the wizard realms are far more utopian than in the muggle world; can't fault them for that.) We are told the only prize is "eternal glory," which everyone seems to be taking literally without expecting it to mean literally anything. And we are told that the "contract is magically binding," so there is nothing to be done when Harry's name is slipped in despite it breaking very nearly every rule of the contest (there's an age limit, for one, and it's called the TRIwizard Tournament, for another). Anyway, almost no time is spent at the school learning spells and potions and such, unlike in previous installments (though there is time to introduce a new DOTDA prof, make him incalculably crucial to the plot, tie him into the overarching Voldemort narrative, and then eliminate him from the position by the end, so the apple hasn't fallen too far here). Instead 90% of the story is devoted to the Tournament, and to Harry falling out with Ron (over what it's never clear, but considering they're now 14 year old boys I wasn't too concerned), and to Ron and Hermione wanting each other in what must be the least-demanded most-squick-inducing case of ongoing series shipping since Jabba licked Leia. Oh, and to wizard prom.

One complaint I have that isn't limited to Rowling's world or teen wizards or anything of the sort is, I have a really hard time watching the cheap and artificial attempts of film and TV to depict the hormone-infused chaos and confusion of being a teenager without getting their hands messy. The self-doubt and relationship changes that occur in movies and TV are embarrassingly easy to cope with and clean up after, there's very little anger that can't be soothed out with a couple of words and a hug or two, and sex never even enters into it. It's ghastly the way they depict by-rote scenes of what they call "teens being teens," and -- well, I hate to harp on it, and I know I just said this isn't limited to Harry Potter, and it isn't, but -- the truth is, this looks to me like one more case of the artists being lazy with their material. They have to show "teens being teens," and here they did the bare minimum. Harry and Ron fight, but the reasons are too light (Harry's name being picked by the Goblet) and the solution far too simple (Ron decides Harry didn't put his own name in the Goblet, apparently?). Harry is a little more prickish, but only a little, and it only comes out when he's not busy being pawn or hero. Hermione and Ron have a falling out, but everybody (especially Hermione) is suspiciously honest and expository with their deepest, most vulnerable inner feelings, and so by the end of the movie that's taken care of, too. The one thing being a puberty-stricken teenager isn't is clean and tidy, but here just like all lazily crafted stories about cardboard teenagers, everything wraps up with a neat bow.

And then there's that other 10%, which is Harry's dreams and Harry being lured (suffice it to say through a scheme so convoluted as to make a Bond villain blanche) into a magical cemetery for a ritual to bring Voldemort back and finally give us a chance to cast Ralph Fiennes as the grand villain. (A side note: Goblet of Fire stars Fiennes, Brendan Gleeson, and Clémence Poésy, which makes three of the four main actors from a favorite recent film of mine, In Bruges, which was surprising and kind of cool.) Fiennes here is good and creepy, but it's basically just a teaser "first battle" with an appropriately video gamey "miracle" escape, setting us up for future terrors. That's okay, it's a decent introduction of the archvillain, though I'm a bit confused about how Peter Pettigrew went from supplicant captive at the end of Prisoner to the sycophantic Igor with the suspiciously familiar sounding name of Wormtail, but it doesn't seem worth splitting hairs over. In retrospect, I assume he was just lying to Black and Lupine, and he really was the eager betrayer all along, not just a victim of persuasion. Anyway, it all happens very fast, which is probably good, and plays out as creepy, but since you're never worried if something is going to happen to Harry it's not too scary. Plus, the other kid present, Cedric, dies so quickly there's nothing left to do but deliver the information packets (Voldemort returns, noseless and bald; Wormtail steals Harry's blood; Lucius Malfoy and the seniors Crabbe and Goyle are all "Death Eaters"), put up a bit of a fight, drop some ghostiness on us, and get Harry back in time to deliver the bad news to the guys who, really, should have known all along.

Oh, right, and "Mad Eye" Moody wasn't really himself at all, but was in fact Dr. Who (I'm kidding, but it was David Tennant, playing a villain with a name embarrassing even by Harry Potter standards: Barty Crouch, Jr.). There were plenty of clues throughout about the polyjuice potion (which, if you paid attention to Chamber of Secrets, or you have a girlfriend willing to drop hints for you, you'll remember is the shapeshifting serum), but there was never any call to suspect Moody was anything other than who he said to be because we've never met him before, and that struck me as a little weak. It makes the reveal of him a touch more non sequitur than it should be, which as I've said before is the difference between a really good late-game twist and plain old deus ex machina. You don't want it telegraphed, but if there's no reason to suspect (other than the story's unending pattern of using DOTDA professors as plot devices) then it's a suckerpunch, and unsatisfying. Or maybe I missed clues. Always possible.

Anyway, I suppose I'd rank this one about equal to Prisoner of Azkaban, in that it had less misery than Prisoner (almost no Quidditch, zero Dursleys) but also less interesting characters or advances in plot than Prisoner. Nice dark stormclouds brewing, though.

Ready for number five, about which I know pleasantly nothing.

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

The Harry Potter movies seem hellbent on punishing you for the first half-hour of each sitting, don't they? My fuck, each movie in the series gets some momentum once it gets into act two and the mystery is moving but it has the hardest time depicting what is ostensibly the real world. Every second -- every frame of film -- I have to spend in the company of Harry's hate circus of a family is like torture, and it's such a strange decision to make the opening act of your film so gleefully sadistic. It smacks of poor judgment but more than that, it smacks of lazy writing. There is a story here, and again it's an improvement on the previous one -- in style and tone, in pacing and performance, in aesthetics and plot -- but like every Harry Potter movie, it takes almost an hour to get there, almost an hour before I care in the slightest. For that first hour, I am so close to turning it off that the truth is, my dedication to finish the series and blog about them as I go is the only reason I didn't switch it off and find something less punishing to watch, like maybe Irreversible or Martyrs.

I have to admit it's pretty frustrating that each film follows such a predictable model -- muggle foster family, misery, hijinks, unauthorized magic, escape, diversion, train (or car) ride, up the stairs into school, a couple of pointless classes whose lessons will be shoehorned in later but feel far more interested in showing off pointless new teachers and pointless new magic spells that are all variations on the same idea (wave wand, incant some really ridiculous sounding faux-latin crap, and pow! magic), and during all this every single person seems to be talking like a 1980s video game NPC, doling out morsels of exposition that add up very quickly to whatever this year's big mystery is that Harry's not supposed to know anything about even though it directly involves him and he'll inevitably step in and save the day, and in the end Dumbledore will wander through with his benevolent smile and say that was very good Harry, like that's how he'd had it planned all along. Along the way we'll meet the new Defense of the Dark Arts instructor who will be incontrovertibly linked to the primary mystery of the story in one way or another, and Snape will show up and act sinister (but if you wait long enough, it will turn out he's acting as the good guy, so don't worry about mean old Snape), and by the end the DOTDA teacher will leave. Harry will clash with Draco in some of the most time-wasting, exhaustingly overwrought scenes that don't involve the Dursleys, presumably because the author assumes audiences wouldn't enjoy a story about high school without some half-assed obligatory bullying scenes, and then -- sigh -- there will be a Quidditch match, and eventually Harry'll start acting out, he (or he and his buddies) will sneak out or do something they're not supposed to, get caught, get away with it, talk with Hagrid, uncover some piece of the big mystery, and away they go on their adventures. Ron and Hermione will each have their chances to save Harry's neck before Harry steps up to the plate and hits the grand slam to win the -- oh wait, wrong lame sports metaphor, let's try that again -- before Harry catches the Golden Snitch and invalidates the score to that point. (Honestly, though, the puzzle of "It would take a great wizard to do what we saw happen, Harry" was solved by "I realized I'd already done it, so I just did it again, it was that easy." That's precisely resolution by grandfather-paradox, and that's precisely a crap end to what should have been a tense and moving scene.)

Don't get me wrong. I actually liked Prisoner of Azkaban pretty well -- a lot compared to the low bar set by Sorcerer's Stone and the slightly-less low bar set by Chamber of Secrets. But that enjoyment comes at a price, which is a heftier dose of suspended disbelief than I'm usually comfortable giving. The world is just so illogical, poorly thought out, and weakly motivated, with so many winking nods to the audience and so many moments of shoehorned exposition and rushed growth, it's a task to let go and say, okay, all right, show me what you've got, I'll overlook what I can. For instance, the characters of Lupin and Black are interesting, and Pettigrew too for that matter, but we went from "Sirius Black is the scariest murderer in the history of scary murderers, and he wants to kill Harry Potter" to "Sirius Black is my father's best friend and a wrongfully imprisoned man who's very gentle and kind and not the worse for wear or bitter at all despite twelve years in a scary prison" all in the space of a single David Thewlis-shaped hug, and I couldn't keep up. I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop, for the truth behind this second, all-too-easy lie to be revealed, but nope. The all-too-easy was the end of the matter. Likewise, the mystery of Lupin was telegraphed so much -- I mean, assuming the name alone wasn't a giveaway -- that I was sure there was more to it than that, that another layer was going to be revealed to the mystery of the Teacher Who Disappears Every Full Moon And Makes Other Teachers Paranoid About Werewolves, but nope -- thats it. He's just a werewolf. And he's "used to" the shitty treatment he receives, end of story, so even if it's a tiny bit sad we shouldn't dwell on it -- that's the way the world works.

Part of the thing with the story here is it's rather guileless, and I think this plays into my previous comments that the world is surprisingly unimaginative and blandly conceived. Quidditch isn't the only example of a system that could only be conceived by a muggle. A good writer comes up with a neat idea and writes it out completely and is pleased with that; a great writer comes up with a neat idea and then finds a way outside that idea, looks at it from every angle, and has neat ideas about that neat idea. Think of The Minority Report or Asimov's Laws of Robotics (examples that came up earlier today in a conversation with my friend Rex) -- both show us concrete systems, rules of governing the fictional world (precog crime units; laws of robotics) built on conceits of the story (precognitive mutants; sentient robots), but neither story just shows you this world and calls it done. Both then challenge their own systems from a variety of angles and come up with pleasing stories that show imagination and cunning. In the world of Harry Potter, it is sufficient that magic wands and funny words make things happen; the author felt no need to explore these concepts any deeper than that. When Harry goes to a boarding house -- or whatever the hell he goes to, after running away from home and before getting on the train -- it occured to me that, following the triple-decker bus doing it's "squeeze" routine, it would have been really cool to see the hostel/hotel as a series of essentially plywood walls with doors, almost like a maze and less like a corridor, but every door opened into a large, comfortable room -- compression of space within each wall, via magic. That would have been cool. What they had instead were kids pouring tea from a floating teapot (yawn) or waving their hand to make the spoon twirl in their cups on their own (double yawn). There's no imagination applied to the potential of the world Rowling has created, and the world she's created has pretty boundless potential. In a world so amazing, why are things so literal at all? If you can manipulate reality and defy physics, why are you content to show us the "wonder" of a floating teapot?

But I am caught in a critical digression it's hard to escape. Despite everything, this movie worked a good deal better than the others. It's just a kid's movie after all, and if the motivations are more obvious or the twists more predictable, well, remember that no matter how many adults love it it was written for thirteen-year-olds. The guilelessness is appropriate, the directness of the characters, even to an extent the moral black-and-whiteness of it, it does all work for the demographic age we're writing for here. In fact, by that standard, the unorthodox storytelling and grandfather-paradoxic overlap (though done too bluntly and too blasé for my tastes, not to mention just rewarming stale Back to the Future II plot devices) could be considered kind of bold and daring. That the monstrous villain is so readily a friend and that the rat (which, by the way: the rat? okay, whatever... I'll admit: that twist wasn't predictable, but this time I don't mean that as a good thing -- non sequitur storytelling is just another form of deus ex machina, after all) was the real villain in disguise, and that even he was "kind of" innocent because Voldemort is a hard guy to say no to, and the truth is this movie actually has no villain -- all that's different from your average adventure tale for tweens. The villain is of course the looming shadow of the omnipresent never-there Voldemort, but the only real antagonist in Azkaban is rumor, hearsay, and committee. The Hippogriff and Sirius Black and Peter Pettigrew/Scabbers and Professor Lupin are all under fire from the same nameless, faceless foe -- the rules or laws that do not always have the facts right but force men to come to a judgment anyway. (Hey, an actual theme that ties together all the action throughout and actually affects the primary and secondary storylines impactfully? My, we have come a long way!)

In a way I wish the Harry Potter movies hadn't been made when and how they were. If the first one was being made today, with the same cast and art design and all that, it might have been made into an HBO or AMC style television series, one where separate episodes could explore the worlds and rules and systems, and characters could be given their proper due, and the overarching mysteries could be given enough time and attention to really have impact. The plotholes or inconsistencies could be ironed out, much like when we adapt Lord of the Rings or Narnia, or Philip K. Dick, or Roald Dahl, or anything ever from one format to another. As is, though, it feels weirdly disjointed, its episodic structure feels more stilted and unsatisfying. In each film we meet a couple of new teachers -- usually exactly one ringer (always obvious; also maybe always a woman? in 2 and 3 it was) and exactly one who ties into the main story. Our "regulars" like McGonnagal and Snape sometimes feel like walk-ons. (I've been watching a lot of 90s Star Trek lately, and occasionally Geordi La Forge will be in a scene for no reason, and he'll have one line that could have been said by anybody, and you realize that this is probably a contractual thing, to make sure everybody has at least one line and picks up a paycheck that week, even if the story doesn't need them; anyway, McGonnagal here and Snape in the last one kind of felt like that to me.) It'd be nice to give the world some breathing space, but it would require someone with stronger skills than Rowling, if I may dare say, to whip the world into a better kind of shape.

Anyway I daydream because I think it'd be a worthwhile endeavor. I see what people like about these, and each one is a significant step up from the last (though I'm warned not to get my hopes up for the 4th? seems like every film in the series needs the apologies and caveats of someone or other -- not a great sign), but I just can't as easily overlook a lot of the silliness and laziness of both plotting and world-building as my friends can, it seems.

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

Well, the story at least has a lot more plot cohesion here, and in fact for the most part I wasn't bored or irritated in general, though there were an awful lot of suspiciously plot-hole shaped questions I had about the story as we went along. It's also making aims at themes, though I'm not sure to what end, to be honest. So much talk of racial purity and class warfare, but I can't tell you how either of those things factor into the story in a meaningful way. The Malfoys scoff openly at Ron for being poor and Hermione for being common muggle trash, but it's odd because Harry is equal to or superior to them in both categories (I keep wondering why that mountain of gold he inherited in Sorcerer's Stone never comes back up, or why he doesn't help out his struggling friends the Weasleys), and while we are led to believe that perhaps Harry is the direct descendent of Salazar Slytherin (I think I got that right) he turns out to be, apparently, the heir of Godric Gryffindor instead, though Tom Riddle calls his mother a Mudblood (mixed breed). Still, if what Hagrid says is right and nobody's got pure blood, then Harry's as well off racially as any, or better.

Additionally, Tom Riddle has apparently hypnotized Ron's sister Ginny and made her write hateful things on the walls about the Mudbloods and seems intent on killing them, until he admits to dropping the ruse as soon as he sees he can lure Potter in instead. He also mentions that he, too, is born of muggle parents, and so I'm just confounded as to what bloodlines have to do with anything here. As Hagrid says himself, it's all "codswallop," but why include it in the story? As a way of building tension around Harry's revealed bloodline? To call into question the whole Slytherin-versus-Griffindor thing and allow us to learn from Dumbledore that Harry pulled a Rogue on some of Voldemort's powers (like confidence and resourcefulness, apparently? or so says Dumbles) during that scar-making attack on him as a baby? The whole repeated theme of who is pure wizard and who is part or all muggle seems bizarre, especially since (as Hermione, Harry, and Voldemort all prove, at least) magical skill seems to have nothing to do with it. Maybe there's some commentary for kids here that racism is a bunch of malarkey, because I'm not seeing the value otherwise. Likewise the moneyed-versus-unmoneyed thing, but that one doesn't come up quite as directly (though it sits one layer behind an awful lot of the story, in things like Dobby, the Yoda-fucked-Jar-Jar-and-look-what-you've-got-now abomination that is apparently the Malfoy's indentured elf servant). So yeah, in short: there does seem to be a smattering of themes here, but I don't know why because they feel arbitrary and poorly integrated into the central story.

As to the plot, it's an awful lot like the first film, though a fair bit tighter. If you accept the Inspector Gadget conceit that the adults are bumblers or somehow "busy" all the time and that the Pennys and Brains of the world have to maintain order and solve the mysteries for them and just generally save the day, then the story works reasonably well. How and why our characters keep being in the right place at the right time seems to work a lot better, even if the number of times they happen to be in the right place at the right time still seems a touch high. Dumbledore and Hagrid fell into and out of peril so rapidly and so arbitrarily I got a little bit of vertigo, but at least the storytellers gave us a reason they weren't around at the story's climax -- though I find it tough to buy that Snape, who seems intent on quietly keeping Potter alive and doing good from the dark side, would risk so much to show up Lockhart by sending the blowhard in alone to fight the monster and save the school. I guess you could argue Snape never expected Lockhart to know where the Chamber was, or that he'd be brave enough to go in if he did (and of course Lockhart wasn't), but it still leaves Snape backing out of active duty and allowing the school to be closed down without even trying to save the day. That hardly sounds like the Snape who chased Quirrell all around the place and thwarted his every scheme against Potter in the background of last year's story. But whatever; the bottom line remains, if you don't stop to wonder what the adults are doing or why, the story moves along a lot better than in The Sorcerer's Stone. Any improvement is good, right?

The only other thing I have to say -- which is true of both films but I had a lot to say about the first one and didn't get around to mentioning this -- is how awful, how terribly fucking awful, the opening scenes of each movie are. Harry's muggle aunt and uncle and their Augustus-Gloot-meets-Veruca-Salt son are so unbearably loathsome that it takes me another ten or fifteen minutes after their departure from the film to start caring about anything. They are drawn so broadly, and are so bland, so unrealistic and unfunny, that in both films (which start depressingly similarly, by the way) I basically don't care anything about the lame adventures on the ride to Hogwarts, and only check back in once things settle down. In Sorcerer's Stone that meant I didn't get into the movie until somewhere around the stairwell confrontation with Malfoy and the Sorting Hat sequence. Here it meant I barely registered the ridiculous and thoroughly unnecessary flying-car ride or pounding they take inside that tree monster thing. I didn't get into the story until Snape catches Ron and Harry and threatens to have them expelled. In each case, the despicable opening scenes keep me at a disdainful distance from the story until about forty minutes in, and make act one a bitter pill indeed. I cannot express to you how much I hate those two, and I know I've seen both Fiona Shaw and Richard Griffiths in other, more respectable roles, but I honestly hope I never have to look at their faces ever again. I'm already recoiling in horror at the mere thought that I have at least five more films that no doubt each open with those two and their stupid, poorly written and poorly conceived comedy-of-hate routines.

Ha. But overall, yes, Chamber of Secrets is a big step up from Sorcerer's Stone. I've made it through the two crummy movies that everyone seems to need to apologize for, and varying reports say the next one, Cuarón's Prisoner of Azkaban is either the last shitty one or the first good one. I tried to watch it once and just couldn't get engaged -- I wonder if I made it past that forty-minute mark, when the foul taste of the Dursleys has been cleansed off the palate, or not. Soon I'll watch it and let you know.

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone

Now that the series is wrapping up, I promised I'd actually watch the movies through, seriously, critically, with sober adult eyes, and so here I am. I quipped that everyone tells me if I sit through five or six hours of mediocrity I can finally start watching some neat kids films, and that about sums it up the opening movement here, to be honest.

It's a tough thing to start a franchise, especially one so overly developed as Harry Potter. I have talked a lot about the joy of feeling like the world exists beyond the edges of the frame in a film, but I do believe this is an example of taking that concept a little too far. Like the post-Episode I Star Wars series, too much time is given to frivolous explorations of the world around the story. Efforts are made to incorporate it into the plot, such as the extended sequence with the bank... goblins?, wherein Hagrid seeks out a You-Know-What from You-Know-Where for You-Know-Who, but a lot of it feels like a contrivance to show off some fancy wonderful idea for magic locks or goblins that work at banks. Plus, it keeps resulting in our titular hero happening to be in the right place at the right time to see or hear or witness some thing that just happens to be crucial to the overarching mystery of the series, or the backgrounded mystery of this particular film (the film's central plot feels relegated to subplot status, which is trouble). I think Sorcerer's Stone comes off as 40% backstory, 40% world-building, and only 20% actual plot. The plot -- the mystery of the (also titular) whatsit being guarded by the cerberus and what it's for and who is plotting against everyone -- reads like an Encyclopedia Brown or Hardy Boys story to me, with a core mystery that the adults are involved with but conveniently keep allowing the children to get in the way of, only the children keep miraculously solving riddles and eliminating obstacles. At the end it's played off as the hero's-quest Chosen One thing, because Harry is So Special and all that, but along the way Harry's specialness takes a backseat to ordinary pluck (Ron beating the magic chess game; Ron defeating the troll in the ladies' room) and cleverness (Hermione learning who Flamel is; Hermione knowing how to get past the ivy monster thing). It is really, really difficult for me to look at this story and piece together what the adults are up to during all this. What are Dumbledore and McGonagall up to while all this is happening? Why is it important to pull the Stone out of storage and hide it on school grounds? Why did the magic mirror need moving when it did, and why did putting it in the room with the Stone seem like a good idea? Did Dumbledore know Harry and his Scooby Gang would show up, time and again, and if not -- what was he expecting to happen?

Further, it's odd to watch this because Harry looks and acts like such a geek, but he's a rich, popular athlete who isn't very good at his studies (he gets by, but he doesn't excel) and gets out of trouble more than once on account of his ability to play sports so well. He's the jock. Since this story is so clearly and deliberately a going-to-school analog I don't feel this line of thought is inappropriate; it's not just a lark to point it out. It's the point of the story, when you get down to it. It's a story for children about going to school and feeling out of place and finding out you are special, so the nature of that specialness is absolutely tantamount to understanding the story here, seems like -- at least for the first one (we'll see, but it feels like that theme pretty much permeates the whole thing). The point is, Harry looks and acts like the outcast nerd of the school, but almost immediately he is given a massive fortune and a star position on the school sports team. In fact, he seems all poised to befriend the school's other first-year rich, entitled jock, Draco Malfoy, and even the Sorting Hat wants to put him in Malfoy's house, Slytherin -- and house leader Snape is obsessed with protecting him, after all. It certainly seems that, if Harry hadn't bumped into the Weasleys on the terminal platform or hadn't shared a train car with Ron and Hermione along the way, it would have been Harry and Draco as best buds, and who knows how things would have gone. Anyway, Harry doesn't have to work for much apart from bearing the burden of being the wizard Luke Skywalker, and it's a funny message to kids. I guess when you're little and reading adventure stories the message of "be patient, and be yourself, and everything will come up Millhouse" isn't so bad. We'll have to see how the message evolves as the story continues, and Harry (and the audience that he is surrogate for) gets older and more mature.

As to the film itself, well... it's got hokey acting, an aggressively spot-on score, dated CG, and a script that emphasizes expository vignettes over active protagonists or cohesive backstory -- more in love with the whimsy and the mystery than the nuts and bolts of a good story. Every line feels so winking that you never forget you're watching a children's movie. It's forty-two minutes in before Harry makes a decision for himself that affects the story (stand up to Malfoy; defend Ron), and it's just a series of right-place/right-time sequences that channel everything toward a surprisingly easy climax. (The Stone just shows up in Harry's pocket because, as Dumbledore explains, it will only appear to someone who wants it but doesn't want to use it; doesn't that mean that if Harry hadn't shown up at all then Quirrell/Voldemort would have been unable to get near it? Didn't Harry's appearance endanger everything?) Harry's touch kills Quirrell because of love. It's all very easy for him.

And don't get me started on Quidditch. Actually, do, because Quidditch is an apt microcosm of the problem with the fantasy world being shown here. First, the rules are needlessly complicated; you are basically playing three separate games simultaneously on the same field, and because of the enormous amount of points for winning the third separate game, only one game matters: the Golden Snitch one, which ends the game and almost necessarily determines the winner (you'd have to have a 15-goal/150-point spread for the game not to be decided by whoever catches the Golden Snitch). Secondly, in a world of wizards and magic this game is decidedly unimaginative and literal -- in fact, it could only have been designed by a muggle, whose best idea for a game is to combine existing sports together, put them in the air, and call it good. Third, and worst of all, because first-year players (not named Harry Potter) aren't allowed to play, everything going on for the ten minutes of the Quidditch match is relegated to a bunch of extras as all the characters we've been learning about sit in the stands and gape, at best helping out by interfering when they spot cheaters; plus Potter can only hover above and make shocked and frustrated faces for most of the action, until it's time for him to have one little chase with the buzzing Snitch ball, and when he catches it, despite all the drama we just watched (involving nameless characters we do not know, extras essentially), the game is over and he wins. The rest of it doesn't matter. Like this first story, where a lot of stuff seems to be happening all at once (new school, learning spells, mysterious Stone, Snape's a jerk, Harry's mysterious fame and lineage) but we stay with characters who are ostensibly on (or meant to be on) the sidelines, and then Harry Potter, having done not much more than stand around gaping for the entire story, steps up and does one presumably impossible but surprisingly easy-to-accomplish task, and the rest of it doesn't matter. His one moment outshines everything else, the ups and downs, and the story wraps itself up. In fact, this same theme/structure is repeated one more time, in an even tinier microcosm, as Dumbledore announces the "points" earned by each house, and then proceeds to dole out new points for a last-minute task -- like the score from catching a Snitch -- that nullifies the efforts of the other players (in this case, would-be winners Slytherin) and creates a new winner.

So that's the plot for you. A bunch of stuff, some kids interfering from the sidelines, and then a hero who goes from passive info-dump recipient to one-time derring-doer and eradicates the balance of the game played beforehand. To quote a humorous webpage, Harry Potter could be summed up as "Celebrity Jock thinks rules don’t apply to him, is right."

Despite this though, the world is intriguing, and the end feels uplifting enough (it's probably that cheating music) that once it's over, it feels at first like a positive experience. I do like the idea of a wizarding school in modern England, and I'm a sucker for a good Joseph Campbell Hero's Quest, for hidden adversaries and epic adventures of good vs. evil, for prophecies and long arcs and growing up with characters. Plus, I'm promised that after the first two (or, depending on who you ask, the first three), the series picks up and gets interesting. I mean, I'll be the judge for myself on that, but the idea of the world, even in its thoughtlessly baroque, questionably paced form, is just intriguing enough that I would like to see what all the fuss is about. I'm actually looking forward to the next one, and the one after that, and seeing where the whole thing goes. So, they certainly didn't excel at winning me over, but they left me wanting more, and there's something to be said for that. It's clearly not a total failure.

I still hate Quidditch, though.

Toy Story 3

I don't have a lot to add to what I said last time I watched this. I'm impressed again by the economy of the script and how it pays its due to the themes and relationships of the first two films. There isn't a single beat that happens just because it "has to"; everything comes first and foremost out of character.

To rehash: The first Toy Story movie sets up a world of sentient toys and their relationships to their kids, and challenges its two heroes by having them compete for position of alpha, all while teaching them the nature and value of being a toy (and not a real space ranger, or cowboy, etc.). It's clearly a story about new toys and favorite toys -- that is, it's about a toy's novelty. The second movie considers the nature of toys as collector's items and mass-produced consumer goods, and it challenges and threatens the characters' idea of what they think a toy should be. It's clearly about the middle-stage of a toy's life and about lost toys -- that is, it's about a toy's legacy. And here, in part 3, we explore what happens when toys aren't wanted anymore, we challenge the faith and loyalty toys put in their kids, and we deal with some hard truths about the finite nature of love, youth, fantasy, and devotion. It's clearly about the final stage of a toy's life, retiring, moving on, and being forgotten; it's about the finite lifespan of things, even if those things are cyclical -- and so, if Toy Story is about novelty, and Toy Story 2 is about legacy, then Toy Story 3 is about a toy's mortality.

I put this on after a discussion of how dry the year has been. There's been a good number of good films, but a dearth of great ones. Not many have risen above in that way where I can pretentiously say, "Wow, now this is cinema." What I mean is, not a lot of films feel like they'll be discussed ten years from now. The Social Network maybe, and on a smaller scale films like Winter's Bone and The Ghost Writer. And then there's Scott Pilgrim and, of course, this film -- which led me to say, only half kidding, "Hell, maybe Toy Story 3 really does have a shot at the Best Film Oscar this year." (In truth, I'd put my money on The Social Network, but nothing feels remotely like a lock.) So I watched it again. It's certainly worthy of a nomination, though it feels weird to reward a part-three of anything, even one so goddamn strong. (Though it wouldn't be the first time.) Anyway, it holds up to a second viewing, without question, and actually moves a lot faster than I remembered. In fact, it kept my attention long after when I should have gone to bed.

The Matrix Revolutions

So we have a trilogy. Dramatically, part one makes a hero (really, a demi-god) out of an ordinary man and sets him up as the chosen one, ready to save humanity from the insidious Matrix and its nigh-undefeatable dark knights (agents). Betrayal from inside almost ruins everything, but thanks to the stalwart faith of our hero's allies, he is able to rise to the challenge and prove himself powerful indeed. Part two lets our hero return "home" to a hero's welcome, and sends our band of crusaders on a series of mini-quests, each putting them one step closer to goals they only partly understand. It also introduces us to a new (version of a familiar) adversary and while Neo and Morpheus and Trinity are busy fighting level bosses like the Merovingian and his twin albino wraiths, Smith's powers expand and the threat he poses looms larger and larger. Part two ends with our hero Neo meeting the archetypal oracle (who is not the Oracle actually, but the Architect) and learning more about his nature, the nature of the universe, and the dark destiny that lays before him -- after all, the ultimate hero's challenge is to deny one's destiny.

And so we come to Revolutions, part three, in which all the final confrontations occur. The war for Zion is fought, and it's well told, but it's also as close as I need to ever get to a Warhammer 40K movie; Neo confronts his Mentor (in the first film this was Morpheus, but here the role's been usurped by the now misnamed Oracle) and gives the "Ben, why didn't you tell me?" speech; and Smith comes into his own, having grown from evil soldier to evil god in a way that perfectly counterpoints Neo.

The Smith/Neo thing is a nice segue into what I think Revolutions is doing thematically. Seems to me that The Matrix, thematically, is about questioning the given world and exploring the boundaries of what we think of as humanity/society. The Matrix Reloaded passes itself off as exploring the dynamic between causality and freewill and it expands into a more diverse (and possibly muddied) view of agency and sentience. The Matrix Revolutions continues the overarching theme of choice and destiny, and also concerns itself heavily with the idea of balance and dichotomies: an equation has to balance itself out at all times, so the more powerful Neo becomes, the more powerful Smith must become necessarily. (Tangentially, this reminds me of the Star Trek: the Next Generation episode where the computer imbibes Moriarty with superior intelligence, will, and self-awareness because that's the only way he can be a match for Data.)

And here is where Smith would be an interesting study. As with the general tone of the whole trilogy there's nothing subtle about the philosophical musings in the story, nor anything terribly deep behind it all, but that doesn't make it uninteresting to discuss. There are too many ways in which Smith is truly the anti-Neo ("your negative," the Oracle calls him) for me to get into here. One way I find interesting is that Neo is The One (a message pounded into him and us throughout the series) and Smith becomes The Many, drawing his strength from his multiplicity and multipicability in just the way Neo draws his from standing out, being singular. As Neo's powers expand impossibly to exist outside the Matrix, so too does he draw Smith's influence into the "real world." (While this still strikes me as hard to stomach, and makes me wonder if there's not a sneaky "Matrix-within-a-Matrix" thing going on here, I think it's probably easier to accept the magical realism as the point at which prophecy and spirituality rule over one portion of the story, even while science and logic purportedly rule another -- all things in balance, after all.) As Neo's personality evolves from excitable, angry, and nervous to the serenity of a zen master, Smith follows an inverse trajectory from eerie, unsettling coolness to fury, frustration, and childlike (albeit evil) glee. Like I said, too many ways the two are counterpoints for me to go through them all here.

I have to admit that the big action sequences here, including the war for Zion and both encounters with Smith (on the Logos and in the Matrix) are really thrilling, gorgeous, never-boring sequences that justify the big-dumb-fun of the story for me. For my money, despite a couple of nice sequences the second Matrix movie is hands-down the weakest, and while the first is the only one that really works start-to-finish as an elegant and never-unsatisfying story, the third one is admirable and gives reasonably satisfying closure to the series -- I'm even able, after a few viewings, to overlook the weird Freudian/Christian climax and resolution. It may be a manufactured trilogy, but I still like it well enough.

The Matrix Reloaded

The problem with sequels and manufacturing trilogies out of successful films is that in most cases (see: Star Wars, Pirates of the Caribbean, Planet of the Apes, Back to the Future, and definitely The Matrix) the original stood alone so well that it needed no story to continue it. In each case the original bore hints of a deeper, larger world around its edges but it worked best when you left that kind of thing to the imagination and didn't overliteralize the experience. Well, overliteralizing is Reloaded's primary problem, I'd say, and probably the reason most people complained it didn't hold up to the original.

In each and every one of the above examples of serializing standalone science-fiction/fantasy stories, the second installment expands the world by exploring further reaches of the world. The Empire Strikes Back expands the story to bounty hunters, Imperial Armadas, and Jedi training; both the future and an alternate-reality present are explored in Back to the Future II; the savage humans and their proto-"culture" are explored in Beneath the Planet of the Apes; new pirate-mythologies are expanded on in the second Pirates film; and the city of Zion and the nature of the Matrix are explored in The Matrix Reloaded. The problem in each case is you expand the world by making concrete some of the more telling abstractions from the original, and the more literal it becomes the more you open your story up to skepticism. The more time I spend with time travel, or a world with intelligent apes and savage men, or a universe of (space | sea) pirates and (aliens | sea-monsters) and (Jedi knights | magic curses), the more I start to question the validity of it all. I buy wholesale into the Matrix of the first Matrix movie because it's sharp, elegant, and an easy-to-grasp metaphor I haven't seen done (on the big screen) before. But when you open up the world and start talking to me about rogue programs and architects and we actually see the city of Zion and its culture, people, government -- well, the more rules and boundaries you show me, the more I start to question the ramifications of those rules and boundaries. To put it another way: if you show me only a clock face, I am pleased and impressed that the thing tells time so accurately and applaud you on the elegance of your design... but if you open it up and start showing off the gears and clockwork, I might see weak points and inconsistencies, and the magic will be utterly gone.

Further, The Matrix was full of all these fascinating and maudlin monologues unabashedly pontificating on various philosophical themes, and while the dialogue was never "good" in a traditional sense, it was enjoyable on many levels. The Matrix Reloaded, however, seems hellbent on being very direct and straightforward, literal with what is said. Even when philosophy gets discussed, it is in egregiously straightforward (and muddled) ways, as when the Merovingian explains his idea of causality (vs. freewill) by serving a "program" (slice of cake) to a woman which triggers in her an orgasm and somehow convinces her to sneak off to the bathroom (where, we learn two scenes later, she gives him a blowjob). It's confusing and frustrating, but it's not a symbol: he literally does the thing he's saying he could do as an illustration of an idea he lays out in no uncertain terms. It actually feels a lot like someone else wrote a sequel and didn't have the grasp of layered dialogue and visual metaphor that the original creators had. Of course, that's tacitly not the case, and so I'm left to wonder why this film lacks the magic of the first. It's not that it's bad, mind you, it's just too obsessed with continuing a story, and the more poetic, thematically driven elements of the first are set aside to that end. More's the shame, honestly.

Additionally, I can't leave without noting: in each and every one of the above "manufactured trilogy" examples, the story is made darker by putting the characters in more dire straits and ending on a cliffhanger: Han Solo is in carbonite and Luke is a one-armed kid with some shocking family news in Empire; Doc Brown has been thrown back to 1885 and Marty's stranded in the past in Back to the Future; Jack Sparrow throws himself into the massive vagina dentata of the kraken in Pirates; the astronauts set off the nuclear bomb and destroy all life on Earth in Apes; and Neo is told that the prophecy is bunk, Agent Smith has escaped the Matrix, and the sentinels are on their way to finally eradicate all of Zion in Matrix Reloaded. Every time, you explore the nooks and crannies of the world, expand the mythology and cast of characters, and you end on a devastating low-note, anticipating your third installment.

Well, I'll start the third installment, but I doubt I'll finish it tonight. Then again, I predicted I wouldn't finish the second.

The Matrix

This is one of those movies that I've seen too many times over the years. It's also one of those movies that's equal parts mythology and story (if not more mythology than story), and as such it garners instant love and worship from some factors and instant disdain and snobbery from others. The thing is, especially now that I'm viewing it from a bit of a distance, the "bad dialogue" and hammy acting all contribute properly to a story which is precariously (and reasonably successfully, like it or not) balancing heavy-handed (simplistic but resonant) philosophical musings with mind-bending and genre-bending action and suspense.

Inside the Matrix, nearly every line is a metaphor. About the only times in the entire film when someone speaks literally inside the Matrix is when giving commands or orders, and then the dialogue becomes curt, direct, and decidedly barebones. Otherwise, the language isn't just colorful, it's symbolic. Outside the Matrix, dialogue tends to be somewhat reverent, acolytes discussing prophecies and holy lands, leaps of faith and quests to free their brethren. None of this is very deep or subtle, but it sets a strong tone for a lot of brilliantly unsubtle actors to tell a story that does a pretty good job of combining first year existentialism and a beginner's course on Joseph Campbell. Not since Star Wars have so many tropes been used so excitingly.

Jen (my lady) also pointed out the visual motif of the grid (tiled floors, skyscraper windows, rows of monitors), in addition to the visual motif I was focusing on, which is a sharp verticality on an anamorphically-horizontal canvas (the crawl down the inside of the walls, the elevator shaft, the fire escapes). A lot of attention has been given to the look of the film -- arguably too much, by some standards? -- and many shots cleverly and beautifully illustrate the dynamic or import of the scene at hand. An obvious example for me was the famous red-pill/blue-pill sequence: Neo reflected in each of Morpheus's lenses, and beneath him, one hand each. The left hand holding the red pill in the left lens, and the right hand holding the blue pill in the right lens. It's not exactly the way the reflection should look, of course, but it's a reasonable approximation, and a really elegant illustration of the two diverging destinies that lay before Neo: return to the fold or break away from the world and learn the truth. It (along with several other shots throughout, actually) also speaks to the scenes in the third film with the Architect, which is a nice bit of foreshadowing, intentional or not.

Now, on to the second one. Though we'll see if we make it to the end.

Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo (The Good, the Bad and the Ugly)

Okay, I lied. This truly is the best of the trilogy. With each film, Leone expands in all the right ways. For one, the budget goes up considerably, as does the polish and production value; but more than that, the characters multiply and deepen, the world gets bigger, the plot more complicated (in an interesting way), and the themes become more nuanced. By the time we get to this, the most famous of the three, everything seems to be working together, a perfect storm of a film. The damn thing is three solid hours long, and although it feels it, you're never bored at all.

In fact, the three hours seem almost perfectly broken into equal-sized acts. The first hour is spent building the three characters, particularly the relationship between Blondie (the Good) and Tuco (the Ugly), with the ever-looming spectre of Angel Eyes (the Bad) homing in slowly on a load of money. At the one-hour mark, Blondie and Tuco stumble upon Bill Carson and each learn half the information needed to find the treasure. Act Two is spent bumbling through a mission, the confederates, the yankees, and eventually teaming up with Angel Eyes and his gang. At the two-hour mark, the showdown in the ghost town equalizes the three and sets them up for the final chase to the cemetery. Act Three is spent crossing the final thresholds and squaring off one-on-one-on-one in a fascinating if awfully convenient standoff to end all standoffs.

It's such a film about sides and shifting loyalties! You've got a constant backdrop of the end of the civil war, and the characters bounce between both sides, impersonating with little difficulty whichever side is likely to help their cause. Then you've got Blondie and Angel Eyes, explicitly demarcated for us as "Good" and "Bad" respectively, even though both are fairly underhanded throughout (but it's never ambiguous: Blondie is definitely the compassionate one, Angel Eyes the ice-cold murderer), and this obviously leaves Tuco, our Ugly, as the wildcard, the middle, the shifter. Tuco bounces easily between being as backstabbing and devious as Angel Eyes or as warm and amiable as Blondie (which, for this world, is remarkably warm and amiable, actually), and this has a double effect. First, it makes him the key to the whole story, because shifting allegiances and constantly choosing sides is what the story hinges on in so many ways. It also makes him the most interesting to watch, as he is the most dynamic, unpredictable character of the three. (Eli Wallach is really the star here, if you ask me, stealing every scene he's in.)

The climax of the film hinges on the fact that Tuco has more or less sided with Blondie throughout, that he was never really as bad as Bad, he never really allied with Angel Eyes after all, and since it was a pull for power between two (not three) sides, since this was a tug-of-war between Good and Bad, having Ugly side with Good tipped the scales. In a film all about shifting allegiances, it has to all come down to who the wildcard sides with.

The story deals so well with the absurdity of right and wrong, the brutal pointlessness of war, the fundamental lack of difference between "good" and "evil" as opposing forces, and the soul-wearying effect war has on a culture, not to mention comments on class, desperation, friendship, religion, family, and community as well. It's so rich. Too layered for me to do it justice here, that's for sure. I've heard somewhere or other that Leone's masterpiece is supposed to be Once Upon a Time in the West, but it's hard to imagine a film better than The Good, the Bad and the Ugly for revisionist 60s westerns (spaghetti or no). Then again, I said something similar about For A Few Dollars More pretty recently, so.

Only one way to find out.

Per qualche dollaro in più (For a Few Dollars More)

Compared to the roughness around the edges of A Fistful of Dollars, this film feels much more the work of a skilled director working with a crack team. The photography is crisper, the performances feel more assured, the characters more fleshed out, and the story and dialogue (while a little hurky-jerky in terms of motivation) feels light years ahead to me. Fistful is a movie you can appreciate with a caveat. For A Few Dollars More pretty much doesn't need one.

My one criticism is, the story feels needlessly complicated at times, and is a little too willing to indulge in novelistic side-stories. It takes its time getting into the heart of the action, as well. But many moments stand out, and many images and scenes feel iconic, which makes the slow pace worthwhile. There's even some nice dramatic moments from Lee van Cleef and the actor playing El Indio.

It's been a long time since I've seen all of The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, and obviously I'll be watching it again, soon, to complete the trilogy, but so far I might like this one best. The world feels the right kind of lived-in and historied, and there seems to be a good balance between darker and lighter moments. Again, if the pacing weren't quite so full of fits and starts, and maybe if they'd cut the movie by about twenty minutes runtime, I'd call it nearly a perfect spaghetti western. As it is, and based on memory, this might be my favorite of the Man With the No Name films.

Per un pugno di dollari (A Fistful of Dollars)

It's interesting to note that in this, the film that made Clint Eastwood, the actor looks just a little too pretty-boy to be believed as the badass stranger he's meant to play. Because he went on to embody this archetype so absolutely over the next two decades, there's a kind of cognitive dissonance in watching him here. It's like watching a man in an ill-fitting suit, even though you've seen that man in the very same suit dozens of times and you know it's a perfect fit.

A cursory glance through Wikipedia tells me that this was Leone's first spaghetti western, and that it was early in the genre's life, which makes sense. Like Eastwood it feels like the genre and the director are both finding their footing here. It's a little rough around the edges, but it's definitely got something. I wonder how we'd view Fistful if it hadn't been followed by For a Few Dollars More and of course, The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly, among so many others. If Leone and Eastwood hadn't gone on to be the defining names of this type of storytelling. Taken on its own merits, it's a western remake of Yojimbo (itself an adaptation of Hammett's Red Harvest, such an awesome road from mobsters to samurais to the old west), and it's got a lot going for it but it's also clearly a b-movie in a b-movie genre; it doesn't quite transcend. It's impossible for me not to see this through the eyes of someone who's seen later, greater works in the genre, not to mention who's acutely familiar with the source materials that led us here. Trying to view it as a stand-alone piece, I think it's fine, but that's about it.

Also, this film influenced more than just the stylistic choices of Leone's later films and spaghetti westerns in general. Eastwood would later direct two films of his own, High Plains Drifter and Pale Rider, about a stranger who rides into a corrupt town, fights the forces that be with cold brutality and shifting allegiances, and then rides back out at the end. In fact, if memory serves, he remains nameless in both films and they're implied sequels to The Man With No Name. More to the point, though, I found both of them to be stronger films than A Fistful of Dollars, definitely the work of a man with a firm grip who'd found his voice and his style. But I guess it all started here.

Toy Story 3 *

I generally don't like movies trying to encapsulate the "four quadrants" of moviegoers. There's just something about a movie that aims to "have everything" (romance, action, tragedy, comedy, adventure, philosophy) that makes it hard to like -- usually aiming for something so broad leads to an unfocused mess of a story with many shoehorned-in elements just to please different types of viewers -- but the truth is, when a movie actually nails all the things it aims for, even (especially) if/when it aims for a little of everything, it makes for a pretty satisfying film.

Where Toy Story 2 did it right by expanding the characters, the world, and the themes in just the right ways, 3 wraps up a trilogy-arc in a really, really satisfying way, by taking us to the inevitable conclusion: the end of Andy's childhood and the end of his need for such toys. And 3 does something I haven't seen a Pixar movie do yet, which is really go dark and a little nightmarish at parts. Sure, the "cannibals" in Sid's bedroom were a little nightmare-lite, but act two of Toy Story 3 doesn't really pull its punches in terms of pathos and visual terror, and act three ratchets the stakes up as high as they can go and then some. It's a bold move with a safe franchise to explore dark places like this, when it could have easily just spoonfed the audience something easy and unchallenging, rehashing or overcomplicating the themes and conflicts from the previous two films, and still make all the money in the world. Plus, then to acknowledge loss and maturation -- that's actually something cartoons almost never do in this country, and something Disney hasn't broached that I can remember since the glory days. People grow up. Loss happens. Sometimes there is no happy ending to choose. (Of course, the movie cleverly gives us the happy ending we all want, but only after making its characters make difficult and painful choices.)

If I had any complaint (other than fucking Randy Newman and the return of "You've Got a Friend In Me," though I found the Spanish version less painful), it's that the humans don't really make any sense. If you look at it from the toys' perspective, Andy and Mom and Molly and Bonnie all act just as they (the toys) deserve them to, but if you look at it from the humans' perspective, there's something fishy about a boy who's in love with his cowboy doll for so many years and has no human friends of his own. But like I say, the characters we care about are the toys, and how the humans treat them makes a certain kind of emotional sense from their perspective, and they are given what they deserve for their trials and tribulations, and so I can't really fault the movie too much... still, part of me wishes the humans made more human-logic sense as the trilogy unfolded over the years.

I've got to be honest, though: over all, this movie was pretty astounding, and probably the greatest third in a trilogy/series I've seen. Whereas Up and Wall-E were great with fairly major script flaws and seemed indicative of a Pixar willing to delve into broad emotion and good-old-fun at the expense of character and story, Toy Story 3 proves that the studio that made Ratatouille and The Incredibles still has it. I know Up was nominated for a Best Picture Oscar and won Best Animated Feature last year, but this is the movie I think deserves those accolades. If you were thinking of releasing an animated feature film this year, you might want to wait until 2011, because this is not one you want to have to compete with. It's just that good.

Seen at the Regal Lloyd Cinemas.

Toy Story 2

I gotta give 'em credit, this is what a sequel ought to do. If you're going to do a sequel, I think you're obliged to go deeper into character, deeper into your world, and deeper into your themes. Here we expand on the mythology of both Woody and Buzz and while we're at it, we explore deeper layers of each character's identity and crisis from the first movie. Each has a legacy. Woody is the older, rarer, grandfathered-in toy, whose "origin" opens up; Buzz is the newer, flashier toy, whose modernity leads naturally to mass-production, newer models with fancier gizmos, and video-game tie-ins. Both get new characters to populate their little sub-worlds. And better still, both expand on the idea of what it means to be a toy (being a collectible as well as a plaything; having a zillion versions just like you). And on top of all that, the story does what a sequel has to do: it takes the first story and turns it on its head. Now it's Woody who has to be reminded he's "just a toy," but for a whole new reason, and we even get to revisit (for laughs) Buzz's arc from the first Toy Story through the eyes of the New Buzz. Pretty fuckin' smart there, Pixar.

But honestly, every time Randy Newman's god-awful song "You've Got a Friend In Me" came back, with lyrics so painfully, egregiously spot-on that it threatened to sour the movie, I hated it more than the previous time. There is no excuse for that song to exist, or for his lyrics to be a part of the Toy Story experience, and I fucking already dread the fact that this song (and surely new songs with equally blatantly expository lyrics) will be a part of 3. Other than Randy Newman, though, I've got no complaints.