From Slough to Bag End

Though we don't post a lot on film news, the Tolkien-nerd in me cries out that I give notice to the fact that several roles in The Hobbit have officially been cast. In addition to several Dwarves to be played by actors whose names I don't recognize (yet), Martin Freeman—Tim Canterbury (a.k.a. the "Jim" role) on the original Office, Arthur Dent in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and Dr. Watson on the BBC series Sherlock—has been cast as the title Halfling, the reluctant burglar, he that walks unseen, the ring-winner and luckwearer, Bilbo Baggins, Esquire. It's a choice that's been kicked around for years now, mostly because it's a very good one; Freeman is great at playing the everyman (especially the English kind), with a sense of being ordinary, compliant, and a bit put-upon, but with a potential for unexpected (seemingly uncharacteristic) courage when the need arises. The only other actor I can think of who might be equally good for the role is Tom Hollander, who starred in last year's excellent In the Loop. So Freeman's casting is some welcome, if not exactly shocking, news.

This is a production that's needed some good news for a while. Peter Jackson had been devoping it with Guillermo del Toro for some time, with the latter planning to direct it for MGM as two films—one covering the events of the novel itself (or at least most of it), and the other covering the six decades or so between that and Bilbo's eleventy-first birthday party with which The Lord of the Rings begins. But MGM's mounting financial problems (leading to the studio's upcoming bankruptcy) delayed work so long that del Toro left in May to pursue other projects. (While two del Toro Hobbit films was a tantalizing prospect, the fact that his next project will be his long-awaited adaptation of Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness certainly makes his loss to Tolkiendom much easier to bear.) Though Jackson has now assumed the director's chair for both films, he has faced legal disputes over the rights with the Tolkien estate and New Line, the studio behind his Lord of the Rings trilogy, as well as labor disputes with actors' unions that may force Jackson not to film in New Zealand.

Given that most of the news about the Hobbit adaptation has been negative for some time, the fact that it's apparently soldiering on regardless is encouraging and gives me hope that we may soon enjoy once again the wonder and spectacle that Jackson first brought us nine years ago.

P.S. — If Jackson has any sense, he'll find a way to incorporate this into the films. Forget Howard Shore; the main theme for the score is already written!

Scott Pilgrim & the Infinite Awesome

SCOTT PILGRIM VS. THE WORLD

This has been kind of a weak summer movie season. That's not to say it's been a complete disappointment—Toy Story 3, MacGruber, I Am Love, and The Other Guys were all good (for very different reasons), Iron Man 2 and Predators were fun, and I'm looking forward to seeing The Expendables in the very near future—but going in there were really only two films I could honestly say I was really excited about: I've already seen one of them three times, and I just saw the other for the first time less than an hour ago. I can now say with complete confidence that those two definitely make the rest of the summer worth it.

Having just finished (as of last night) the sixth and final volume of Bryan Lee O'Malley's Scott Pilgrim saga, "Scott Pilgrim's Finest Hour," and watched the great Edgar Wright's adaptation, I'm just astounded at what a perfect match these two artists, the graphic novelist and the filmmaker, are for each other. Both the Scott Pilgrim comics and Wright's work—Spaced, Shaun of the Dead, and Hot Fuzz—combine a high-energy, cartoony aesthetic with interesting, realistic, full-bodied characters and genuine, honest stories about those characters' search for meaning and connection in life. Scott Pilgrim, a goofy, well-meaning but immature young man clumsily, painfully feeling his way into adulthood, fits right in with Tim, Daisy, Shaun, and Danny. However, despite the similarities, Wright isn't just reciting O'Malley's story but telling his own, and isn't afraid to make the characters his own. Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is just as much an Edgar Wright film as it is a Bryan Lee O'Malley story.

— SCOTT PILGRIM'S PRECIOUS LITTLE SPOILERS (for both the comics and the film) —

That said, the film borrows very heavily from the comics, especially for its first two-thirds or so (covering roughly the first four volumes). During that part of the film, virtually every change Wright made was merely taking things out rather than adding his own material—though what's there, while originating with O'Malley, still bears Wright's distinct stamp. Despite how much from the comics Wright was able to cram into the film (without overdoing it or slowing down the pace), there are a number of elements that didn't make the cut: Ramona's glowing head, Knives Chau's father and Scott's old friend Lisa from vol. 4, most of the details about Scott's history with Kim and Envy (to which the film merely alludes), the trip to Honest Ed's in vol. 3, the recording of Sex Bob-omb's album, and Scott's battles with various robots in vol. 5. As the film progresses, though, it differs increasingly from the comics: Scott's battles against Roxy, the Katayanagi twins, and Gideon are very different, Envy's "weak point" behind her knees is transferred to Roxy, and Ramona's battle with Knives is moved from vol. 2 to the film's climax. I'm not really complaining or anything, it's just interesting to see the degree of faithfulness to the source material change over the course of the film.

Speaking (some more) of faithfulness to the source material, it's worth mentioning that the film was already in production before O'Malley finished the final volume (which was only released last month), so the two versions of the Scott Pilgrim saga's finale differ greatly. — ÜBER-SPOILAGE TO FOLLOW, OBVIOUSLY — What's interesting are the elements that the two versions share (but utilize in different ways): the NegaScott, the final showdown at the Chaos Theatre, Scott's death, his resurrection thanks to his 1-up. So there must have been some collaboration between O'Malley and Wright regarding these details. However, the overall "message" with which the story concludes differs significantly between O'Malley's version and Wright's. In vol. 6 of the comic, Scott comes to realize that the source of his immaturity is his unwillingness to address his past actions truthfully and learn from them; instead, he's always remembered his past in such a way that he's always the good guy and those he's hurt either were evil or weren't really hurt at all. Though alluded to throughout the series, it doesn't become explicit until Scott visits Kim in vol. 6, when she contrasts the reality of Simon Lee, her harmless high-school boyfriend Scott beat up to date her, with Scott's fantasized memory of a "villain" from whom he had to rescue her in vol. 2. By perpetually lionizing himself and demonizing or ignoring those he's hurt, he never had to change or improve; as Kim tells him, "if you keep forgetting your mistakes, you'll just keep making them again." That puts the entire premise of the series—"Scott Pilgrim vs. the World," the good guy forced to battle bad guys and win the day—into an entirely different light, as an expression of Scott's childish, selfish view of himself and the world. It's only when he owns up to his own failings that he's able finally to overcome Gideon and get another chance with Ramona. The film doesn't include this thematic element other than several references to Scott's being an irresponsible "heartbreaker" and his incredulity at this; instead, the lesson he learns is "self-respect," which involves his admitting to cheating on Knives with Ramona (and vice versa) but has more to do with his fighting his battles for his own reasons rather than just to win the girl. That's fine in itself, but it doesn't fit especially well with the failings we've seen Scott exhibit previously or with how he plans to go forward at the film's end; if anything, doing things for himself rather than others seemed to have been much the problem in his life, and in the end he still ends up winning the girl anyway. This doesn't really take away from the film, but it does make its conclusion a bit less meaningful and "earned" than the comic's. — BACK TO REGULAR SPOILAGE —

But what, you may be asking, about the film as its own beast, independent of O'Malley's comic? Pretty darn great. I'm already a substantial fan of Wright's work, and Scott Pilgrim fits right in: energetic, imaginative, hilarious, with real characters dealing with real issues. Though Scott isn't dramatically different from the kinds of characters Michael Cera generally plays, he isn't just channeling George Michael Bluth for the umpteenth time; Scott's much more of a spazzy slacker than the uptight, rather nebbish Bluth boy. Mary Elizabeth Winstead's Ramona is exactly the right melding of sexy, sympathethic, and cold, coming across, like O'Malley's Ramona, as multifaceted rather than schizophrenic. The rest of the cast is great too, especially Kieran Culkin as Wallace, Scott's gay room- and bed-mate. Strangely enough, while Sex Bob-omb frontman Stephen Stills mostly hangs in the background in the comics, I really liked him in the film (played by one Mark Webber). Each of the evil exes gets his (or her) moment to shine, except for the Katayanagi twins, though, to be fair, they don't make much of an impression in the comic either. My socks were thoroughly knocked off when the Vegan Police who showed up to exact vegan justice on Todd for his vegan transgressions were played by Tom Jane (who just wants his kids back!) and Clifton Collins (who just wants his testicle back!). (Funny, Jane appeared in an episode of Arrested Development with Cera, while Collins appeared in Mike Judge's Extract with AD alum Jason Bateman, so feel free to use that info the next time you're playing six degrees.) Since music is a pretty significant part of the story, it's a good thing that the original music composed for the film (by Beck, among others) happens to rock. And no mention of the film's music would be complete without saying how much it warmed my geeky little heart to hear samples from The Legend of Zelda, like mother's milk to one raised in bygone days on the NES.

Indeed, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is awesome, surprising no-one.

The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of

INCEPTION

I know that lately this blog has been neglected to the point that we should worry about hearing from Blog Protective Services, but it seems like it's been a while since I saw a film that really motivated me to throw my thoughts out into the electronic ether. Inception (trailers) is that film.

— YOU MUSTN'T BE AFRAID TO SPOIL A LITTLE BIGGER, DARLING. —

The first and foremost thing I have to say about Inception is: You see things you've never seen before. I don't mean that hyperbolically, but literally (unless you happen to have the imagination of a Fellini or an Arthur C. Clarke). The kind of sheer imagination on display in Inception is a rare and precious thing, especially in today's Hollywood and especially given the amount of resources usually necessary to pull it off convincingly. The city of Paris folding over onto itself; a freight train plowing down the middle of a busy city street; people fighting in a rotating hotel hallway; crumbling skyscrapers falling into the sea like a glacier. Even for these purely visual aspects of the film, to think that they all came from one imagination gives me even greater respect for Nolan—who both conceived of them as writer and executed them as director—that I had before.

In addition to the breathtaking visuals, the story itself is a marvel. For almost the entire running time—two and a half hours that flew by as quickly the second time seeing it as the first—it seemed that at least every ten minutes some new element entered the story that made me stop and think, "That's really cool," or "That really interesting," or "I can't wait to see where this will lead." Starting in the first fifteen minutes with using a dream within a dream to compound the subject's vulnerability, on through the use of totems, the dream-projections' violent reaction to dream invasion (and the extent to which anti-invasion training can take that, as seen once the team enters Fischer's subconscious), the differences in the perception of time between waking and dreaming (and its exponential multiplication as more dream-layers become involved), the necessity of a "kick" sensation to wake the dreamers, the revelation that the Mal who keeps appearing in dreams isn't an outside invader like the team but Cobb's own projection of his dead wife, Cobb's responsibility for her death and how that was done—Inception's story was so fascinating, so engaging, and so well and intricately constructed that it never gave my interest a chance to flag.

Just how well constructed this story is, just how much thought and care Nolan put into it over the decade or so he was working on it, is made particularly evident in the film's centerpiece, the team's invasion of Fischer's subconscious. Not only do they use three dream-layers to plant the idea deeply enough without his noticing, but each layer serves a particular purpose: the first (the rainy city) plays off the resentment Fischer feels toward his father; the second (the hotel) establishes distrust between Fischer and Browning; the third (the mountaintop hospital) creates the positive, emotional basis for the idea, the "catharsis." Eventually, all three layers are active simultaneously and affecting one another, seen most dramatically in the first layer's effects on the second, from the tumble-cycle hallway effect as the van flips over to the weightlessness created when Yusuf drives it off the bridge.

As we've already discussed, the various layers have distinct roles not only in the team's plan, but also in the narrative and drama of the film itself. In the first dream-layer, the van's slow (from the other layers' perspectives) fall toward the river below serves as the ticking clock against which everything else must race; in the second, Arthur must use both brawn to fight off subconscious security and brain to figure out how to create the kick necessary to awaken his sleeping teammates in a zero-gravity environment; the third is a classic action sequence with guns, explosions, and an army of faceless bad guys; in the fourth, limbo, the drama and suspense are emotional rather than action-based, as Cobb must finally confront and overcome the destructive pain and guilt he feels about Mal. These four layers are simultaneously interwoven in a tour de force of stunningly effective storytelling and editing, a cinematic Swiss watch.

Of course, all these scenarios would be insufficient without interesting characters and talented actors, and Inception has both. DiCaprio's Dom Cobb joins the ranks of protagonists haunted by their past familiar from Nolan's filmography: Guy Pearce in Memento, Al Pacino in Insomnia, Hugh Jackman in The Prestige, and, the exemple par excellence, Christian Bale in the Batman franchise. Like them, Cobb is essentially a loner but is forced by necessity into uneasy alliances of convenience with others, imbuing him with an intriguing tension. The other members of the team are much more peripheral, but that doesn't mean they're one-dimensional or without color: the professional Arthur's longstanding but often tense working relationship with Cobb; Eames and Arthur's barbed exchanges; Ariadne (I see what you did there, Nolan!) as the simultaneously eager but cautious outsider, a role both giving an opportunity for explanatory exposition for the audience's sake and providing a fresh pair of eyes to perceive the damage and danger caused by Cobb's obsession with Mal; Saito acting both distantly first as target then as suspicious employer, and closely as an active member of the team. In addition to these, we get Batman alums Michael Caine and Cillian Murphy, as well as too-brief appearances by Pete Postlethwaite, Lukas Haas, and Tom Berenger (who's been AWOL from marquees too long, if I might be permitted a little Platoon reference). Though the amount of screen time some of them get is limited, they all come across as real, vibrant characters.

Inception was a joy to experience, and my hope is that its success will make it easier for similarly ambitious and visionary stories to get produced. I've already heard it described as the kind of film—like The Matrix over ten years ago, and Star Wars and the early Spielberg films twenty years before that—that will send kids to film school in the years to come, and I think the fact that it's so imaginative that it doesn't just put its creator's imagination on display, but also sparks its audience's imagination, makes that prediction a pretty likely one. We'll be fortunate if budding filmmakers find inspiration in Inception, with its creative vision, intelligence, thrilling action and suspence, moving drama, technical mastery, intriguing characters, and vast ambition. Inception is the cinematic total package.

P.S. — For this post's title, I was also considering "Beyond Your Wildest Dreams" and "Immaculate 'Inception,'" but I think you'll admit they're a bit over the top; and, after all, you can never go wrong with the potent combination of Hammett, Houston, and Bogie.

Best Date Movie Ever

ANTICHRIST

It's been about two weeks since I saw Lars von Trier's latest, most controversial film (trailer and clip), and I have to admit I haven't made a lot of headway in wrapping my head around it or parsing its many elements. (Not to point any fingers *ahem* but it hasn't helped that I haven't had anyone else to discuss it with.) So don't expect too much in the way of full-fledged analysis or brilliant insights here; I'll be the first to admit that with this film, I'm pretty far in over my head. I may not have really understood Antichrist, but I was awestruck nevertheless.

The film begins—its "prologue" is so similar stylistically to the opening sequence of The Fall, with its breathtakingly beautiful black-and-white photography of initially seemingly disparate images, shot in glacial slow-motion and silent except for its classical score (in Antichrist's case, Handel's Lascia ch'io pianga), that von Trier might need to worry about a call from Tarsem's lawyers—with a couple (Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg) passionately making love, while their toddler son escapes from his crib, climbs out an open window, and falls to his death. Months later, he seems to have come to terms with it, while she's still tormented by guilt and grief. A therapist, he's distrustful of her doctors and the medications they prescribe her and takes her emotional recovery upon himself; meanwhile, their marriage becomes increasingly strained, with their child's death bringing latent dissatisfactions and resentments to the surface. Insisting that she face her fears head-on in order to overcome them, he takes her to the place she says she fears the most: Eden, their isolated, rustic cabin in the woods. Once there, he has her undergo several tests and exercises in hopes of getting to the bottom of her feelings of guilt toward their son, her increasingly unstable (almost bipolar) feelings toward him, and her powerful, seemingly irrational fear of nature. (As she tells him at one point, chillingly dispassionately, almost as a non-sequitur, "Nature is Satan's church.")

Watching Antichrist, I was alternatingly entranced and repulsed. The cinematography is stunningly beautiful, especially of the woods surrounding Eden. Dafoe and Gainsbourg both deliver fantastic performances, particularly Gainsbourg (winner of the best-actress award at Cannes this year), who's at times coldly calm or indifferent, as if in shock, and at others bestially, ferociously passionate, with emotion pouring out from the depths of her soul. Thematically there's so much going on that I don't really know where to begin: gender, power, sexuality, guilt, fear, loss, revenge, violence, life and death, rationality, history, man in nature, man against nature, nature against man, fantasy and reality, archetypes, modernity, health, psychology, just for starters off the top of my head. A library's worth could be written about this film. It also doesn't flinch from depicting graphic violence and sex—in some cases at the same time. At times it was terrifying, gruesome, and pretty difficult to watch; that isn't a criticism, but puts in alongside other great, very unpleasant films like Requiem for a Dream, United 93, Funny Games, and Come and See.

A lot of the controversy surrounding Antichrist comes from its perceived misogyny, but that seems to be a somewhat simplistic take. It's true that the film's concerned with the differences, real or perceived, between men and women, and that in many ways the husband acts in a traditionally masculine fashion—rational, in control, methodological—while the wife acts in a traditionally feminine fashion—hyper-emotional, even hysterical at times, without the ability (or perhaps desire) to cordon off and set aside her feelings. But it would be a mistake simply to read the film as saying, "When men grieve for a dead child they're all like this, but when women grieve for a dead child they're all like this" (said like a bad stand-up comic). The wife ends up doing some pretty atrocious things to her husband and herself by the end of the film, but I can't really say yet that von Trier intended those things to be a condemnation of her or of women in general. (That's what keeps it from being an art-house torture-porn version of The Room; both von Trier and Wiseau made their films from an intensely personal, emotional place, but somehow I don't think von Trier made Antichrist to get back at a girl who'd dumped him.) I can't say I have a definite, or even vague, answer at this point, but there's just too much going on simply to write it all off as a woman-hating screed.

Though I may never muster the courage to watch it again, knowing now what I'd be getting myself into, Antichrist is certainly one of the best films of the year, and among the most beautiful, most challenging, and most frustrating I think I've ever seen. I've heard it described as von Trier's take on the horror genre; toward that end, he was able to imbue it with an unspoken sense of threat and foreboding long before the fantastical, bizarre, and gruesome events toward the end. (For instance, there's a very Lynchian shot, at the end of the scene early on of the husband visiting his wife at the hospital, that centers on the seemingly empty space between them and very slowly zooms in on the vase of flowers on the table beside her bed until the screen is filled with the green, murky water in the vase, as the monotonic score hums boomingly; very, inexplicably unsettling. Lynch is a master of making the mundane creepy; if you're going to borrow, borrow from the best.) I haven't seen much of von Trier's filmography, just Dancer in the Dark (trailer), another unpleasant film about which I found things both to like and dislike. Having seen Antichrist, I may have to man up and see some of his other films (about which I've heard good things, but which are supposed to be similarly hard on the audience); whatever the have in store for me, at this point I can't say I wasn't warned.

Adaptation Discussion 2: The Revengening

ALICE

I don't have a whole lot to say at the moment, but the film we watched last night, Alice (unofficial trailer) by Czech filmmaker Jan Svankmajer, got me thinking about a subject we discussed a while ago, namely the liberties filmmakers take when adapting either another work of fiction or historical events to film. The film begins by saying it's "inspired by" Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, and in many regards it follows it—the White Rabbit running late, Alice growing and shrinking, tea with the Mad Hatter, flamingo croquet with the Queen of Hearts—but in many respects deviates from it, not only in its events but in its overall tone and mood, to the point that it's clear that Svankmajer felt no need to follow the source material when he didn't want to, presumably based on his own artistic choices and sensibilities. Alice is aesthetically much darker than Carroll's novel, and whereas much of the novel's appeal comes from its wordplay, the film is almost silent, and what dialogue there is is often repetitive. Svankmajer may have used Alice's Adventures in Wonderland as a jumping-off point, but he was obviously making his own film, not just adapting Carroll's novel.

This seems somewhat different from what we were discussing earlier, though, since that was about adapting historical events rather than existing fiction. While I generally think that filmmakers should tread carefully in the former case (e.g., Che, The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, Battleship Potemkin), I don't necessarily think the same holds true for the latter. Whereas an historical adaptation has no clear, "canonical" text on which it's based and to which it can be compared for accuracy—even first-hand accounts aren't ironclad—an adaptation of fiction does have such a text—the original work of fiction—and so doesn't carry the same burden. I guess that's why I have no problem with the fact that Alice deviates greatly from its source material; Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is still there for anyone to refer to, so I think that Svankmajer, Tim Burton, Walt Disney, or anyone else doesn't bear the same responsibility (for lack of a better word) and is free to deviate from it however he sees fit.

So do you think that distinction is legitimate, between historical adaptations and fictional adaptations? Or do you think a film like Alice should stick more closely to its source material? That an adapter like Svankmajer owes something to the work he's adapting? Thoughts, feelings, reactions?

Curiouser and Curiouser

ALICE IN WONDERLAND

So the first trailer for Tim Burton's adaptation of Alice in Wonderland is up over at Moviefone. Just a few thoughts off the top of my head (or from somewhere anyway).

The Alice, played by nineteen-year-old Australian Mia Wasikowska, is really old. I hesitate to say "too old," lest I come off as some Carroll fanboy shouting, "She's way, way too old! Burton doesn't get it! Boycott!!" into the infinite void of the Internet. I will, however, say this. Isn't it kind of the point that Alice is a child? Not only is it a story about a child suddenly finding herself in a bizarre conglomeration of children's stories and fairy tales, but it seems significant that a child is the most sensible and logical person in Wonderland.

And I think the CG Garfield movie has ruined all large CG cat heads for me forever. (It's doubly unfair because I haven't even seen that movie! Just catching glipses of the trailer back when it came out was enough!) But maybe this movie will be the one that will finally cleanse my psyche of this curse, so that I won't think of an ugly CG representation in a terrible movie based on a terrible comic strip whenever I see images like this movie's depiction of the Cheshire Cat. (If you don't believe me that "Garfield" is a terrible strip, check out this—live-action re-enactments of actual "Garfield" strips, followed by even more bizarre music videos—and this—"Garfield" turned into an existentialist tragedy about Jon's pathetic life, simply by removing Garfield. Even the biggest Jim Davis apologist has to admit that those are fifty times funnier than anything he's ever produced. The old Saturday-morning Garfield cartoon, on the other hand, is one of my fondest childhood memories.)

Those rather tentative qualms aside, I'll admit I'm looking forward to this film with mild anticipation. It's got nothing on Spike Jonze's Where the Wild Things Are—which, not to build it up too much, I fully expect to have me weeping tears of joy by the end—but it does seem like the kind of project that's just up Burton's alley. In fact, I'd say that this is probably the film he was born to make. It's the perfect wedding of childlike whimsy and a very dark aesthetic and narrative sensibility; see many of his best films—Pee Wee's Big Adventure, Beetle Juice, Edward Scissorhands, The Nightmare before Christmas, Ed Wood—for examples of this. This may not quite rise to those films' heights, but he's definitely in his element.

And one last thing. Although Burton and Johnny Depp are pretty much joined at the hip at this point, I think that—at least in terms of physical appearance—Burton himself would have made an even better Mad Hatter. Discuss amongst yourselves.

A Muggle Weighs In

HARRY POTTER AND THE HALF-BLOOD PRINCE

As you know, I'm not a Harry Potter fan. I don't particularly have anything against the series, either the books or the films, but they've just never interested me that much. (As I may have told you before, Tolkien ruined me for all other fantasy; everything else just seems to pale in comparison to the scope, depth, and poetry of his works. Why should I read thousands of pages of adolescents going to boarding school and speaking in pseudo-Latin when I can have epic, millennia-spanning power struggles and genuine invented languages?) Though I've never even cracked any of the books, I think I've seen all of the films—I may have missed The Goblet of Fire, I can't remember—though never more than once. Generally, I've found them fun and entertaining, but never especially moving or compelling, and sometimes confusing—I often find myself wondering why Harry has to find the X or discover the secret of the Y, which then hinders my ability really to get into what I'm watching. (I'm reminded, again, of the fact that Nabokov would give away the ending of Anna Karenina when teaching it, so his students wouldn't focus on following the plot. This also explains why I can often watch the same film a second time right after the first—as I did with The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser—since the first time I tend to miss a lot of the forest of a film's craftsmanship for the trees of its plot points.) So take my comments for what they're worth, a pure layman's perspective.

— SPOILERIA SUBSEQUENS —

I just got back from seeing The Half-blood Prince, and I think I enjoyed it about as much as any of the other films in the series. Though, given your opinion of it, I'm not sure if that means I liked it less or more than you did. Having read your assessment before seeing it this evening, I couldn't help but carry what you'd said about it into the theater with me and compare it to what I was watching. I found myself agreeing that it had an episodic, "series of events" structure, rather than an clear, coherent plot course; you'd think the mystery of the "Half-blood Prince" would be a major element of the plot, given the title, but it's set aside for most of the film while Harry gets to the bottom of Voldemort's past and present activities, until Snape reveals that he's the Half-blood Prince (what the significance of that revelation is, though, I have no idea, other than that he knows some good potions). Meanwhile, interspersed throughout, the kids fall in and out of love ad infinitum, there's the obligatory Quidditch match (though better integrated into the plot than in the earlier films, as I remember them), and Helena Bonham Carter (consistently showing no respect for others' personal space, in my opinion) and crew attack Harry at that big house and chase him through the grass, leading to perhaps the most inappropriate use of shaky-cam I've ever seen. All in all, as with the previous films I had a good enough time, but I just didn't really take anything from it.

I will say this for the Harry Potter series, though, I do enjoy the unmistakable Britishness of it. The kids attend a neo-Gothic boarding school, they and their teachers regularly go to class in their caps and gowns, they go to pubs and drink ale (oh, how I miss the Horse Brass), and most of the characters have names that are strange in a particuliarly eighteenth-and-nineteenth-century-British way: Hermione Granger, Albus Dumbledore, Severus Snape, Horace Slughorn, etc. (An almost-too-good-to-be-true real-world example of this was Sir Cloudesley Shovell, an English admiral involved in the capture of Gibraltar in 1704. Also, not to keep bringing up Tolkien, but such names were also common among Hobbits: Peregrin Took (Pippin), Meriadoc Brandybuck (Merry), Gerontius Took, Fredegar Bolger, Lobelia Bracegirdle, Drogo Baggins, etc., etc., etc.) I'm a bit of a Britannophile (being of Scottish and Irish descent, I could never bring myself to call myself an "Anglophile," especially since my interest extends throughout the isles, not just to England), so I can't help but see and enjoy the Harry Potter series as, partly at least, a kind of celebration of British cultures, institutions, and peculiarities at their most distinctive and colorful—oops, sorry, I mean "colourful."

And an added bonus of this film was the fact that Jim Broadbent reminded me a lot of a favorite history professor of mine at Reed, Ed Segel (and perhaps it's not a coincidence that Prof. Segel describes himself as an Anglophile). Basically, if the film's Horace Slughorn lost some weight, taught nineteenth- and twentieth-century diplomatic history instead of potions, and spoke with a rhotacism (like Jonathan Ross (here), or Nickolas Grace's Anthony Blanche (here and here) in the Brideshead Revisited miniseries (another indulgence of my Britannophilia) minus the cartoonish flamboyance), you'd have Prof. Segel. So that was cool.

P.S. — While we're on the topic of movies (haha), this is pretty cool: "The 50 Greatest Trailers of All Time," courtesy of the Independent Film Channel. (I suspect that this is the only list imaginable where Cloverfield ranks above Citizen Kane.)

Harry Potter and the Half-Baked Adaptation

HARRY POTTER AND THE HALF-BLOOD PRINCE. I bet you were not expecting to see a negative review of the new movie, were you? I myself am confused by what I have seen and surprised at how disappointed I feel. I realize you don't care too much about the series so I'll keep it short. This is probably more for myself to get this out than for conversation, so indulge me.

I am possibly not the best to judge the movie, which is getting remarkably good reviews (it has gone down to 89 percent on Rotten Tomatoes), as I admit that my judgment is a bit clouded. But I'll give it a shot before talking about what is conflicting me. It should be noted that, as is usual for the series, the supporting performances stole the show this movie thankfully allowed Alan Rickman's Professor Snape to step back into the spotlight after having been rather marginalized in the last couple of movies. I even enjoyed Jim Broadent's interpretation of Professor Slughorn, who came across quite differently than J.K. Rowling's character but ended up working in its own way. They main characters continue to grow and I was also happy to see swine-flu patient Rupert Grint get more to work with as Ron. A number of elements, including the connection and conflict with Draco Malfory, Potter's nemesis, were handled quite deftly. Visually the movie was again quite well crafted both from the production design and the camera work. Unlike in the last movie, The Order of the Phoenix, this movie, however, seemed to have a less clear idea of what story it was going to tell and reminded me more of the "series of events" style of construct found in the first couple of movies than the coherent, well-plotted third and fifth movies.

What bothered me about the movie was that it was not at all what I expected. In my previous post I talked about looking forward to both the political background so well articulated in the last movie and a stronger connection to the past through a series of trips into peoples' memories. So much for that. The theme of the book had a lot to do with the nature of evil and how people deal with the threat of it in their lives on both a personal and societal level. Might be pertinent, huh? It definitely stood out on its own and I do not remember ever thinking it was just setting the stage for the last book. I could not say the same for the movie. I could also not say that the movie captured the spirit or ominous tone of the book. I am not a person in general who has expected absolute fidelity to the source material. In fact, I used to have disagreements with a former coworker, Sarah -- who is a new reader of ours, in which I came down much stronger on the side of considering a movie distinct from a book and having different needs in storytelling. This was the first out of 6 where the departures bothered me more than just a few quibbles with favorite scenes I wish had not been cut.

Maybe its a movie better suited for those who have not read the books and it does make me sad that after avoiding this for 5 other movies, it would end up that way late in the game with a director, David Yates, whom I though was reliable. There were some good things going on in the movie but I was so distracted by the lack of existential tension and what a friend described as the PTSD-like trauma Harry has following the events of the end of his fifth year at Hogwarts. I kept anticipating seeing more about the development of Voldemort and disappointed when he the ultimate villain seemed like an afterthought. A coworker liked the movie a lot and brought up in particular an emphasis they put on relationships -- not just the high-school romance -- and I think he has a point. Perhaps if I see the movie again then the shock of seeing an adaption by someone who seems to have had a much different reading of the source material than I did will have worn off and I could appreciate it more.

Gentlemen, start your broomsticks

So I know you have at least watched some of the Harry Potter movies out there, but as a bit of an expert on the field, I think it might be worth giving a little background to understand the phenomenon for some of our other readers. All 2 of them. Should we be so lucky. Really I also would like to take advantage of the fact that I just watched the last 5 movies this past week in preparation for seeing part 6, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince at midnight on Wednesday morning.

Since this is a movie blog, I will mainly be writing here about the movies and will try to keep this brief. It is really quite remarkable how the makers of this franchise have been able to keep it going strong into the 6th movie both in terms of creativity and audience support. Perhaps you can think of something, but I cannot think of a movie series other than maybe the Star Wars films that were still making blockbusters (as this is expected to be) this far into the canon. As works of children's literature, J.K. Rowling's books surely have carved out their place in history by being the biggest phenomenon the genre has ever experienced. The sheer fact that The New York Times created a listing of children's books to keep her work from dominating its standard best sellers list is testament to how influential they will be to the business of book printing, the writing of youth-oriented literature, and the approaches of getting children interested in reading. What does not get a much attention is how well the filmmakers have transferred the adoration many have for the novels into such a great movie franchise that I think will be remembered historically as one of the most successful series ever.

One reason I think the movies have done so well is that, like the novels, they have grown with their audience. Although in listening to the audiobooks a couple of years ago I found the first novels to be much darker than my memory, they were truly for a younger crowd and had rather simple themes and conflicts by comparison to later works. As the years passed and her readers grew along with their Hogwarts cohorts, Rowling created much more sophisticated storylines that brought in issues ranging from psychology (think dementors as physical manifestations of depression) to the hidden danger of authoritarianism (see Prof. Umbridge). The novels do much of the same thing with the earlier efforts directed by Chris Columbus serving as mainly kiddie fair that introduced the characters and whimsical, childlike view that was shattered in the more harrowing Prisoner of Azkaban (3) that took the opportunity to reinvent the Harry Potter universe in a more realistic way than either the two earlier books or the books, to be honest. That movie and the following two lost some of the whimsy of the earlier efforts but replaced it with a substitution of fear for danger as a major driving force and cast it as a teenage struggle for survival both on an internal and an existential level, which is honestly how most teenagers feel at the time.

As individual movies, I think there are some remarkable contributions in the Potter films as well. The first two are pretty standard, although well-produced, fare, but the third movie really broke from that and Alfonso Cuaron's reinvention was fantastically filmed (as is all of his work) but also challenged the reader to think about more than just the plot. For the first time I found myself on the edge of my seat, even though I knew what would happen. My knowledge of the story (one of my two favorites of the seven) was even expanded as Cuaron through visual composition and storytelling puts an emphasis on how Harry sees himself in a way that draws out more than what I remembered from the book. Being a Potter film it is hard to view it otherwise, but I think if one detaches from that aspect of it, one could also find it to be a quite excellent coming-of-age story that uses its fantastic atmosphere to tell a rather universal story.

Although the fourth movie, The Goblet of Fire, I found a bit lacking, the fifth movie was also a good movie beyond just being a well-crafted Potter chapter. The Order of the Phoenix, like the third movie, set out to do more than just adapt the story and instead we got another great exploration of youth through the idea of isolation as well as the aforementioned political intrigue that is to continue in the next story. So without even commenting at all on the caliber of three pretty talented child actors and an entire stable of some of the best British actors around, I have discussed how I find this series of movies to already feature two good movies and four pretty good movies. With the next two stories -- or three movies as the last book is being split into two films -- being told by the Phoenix director, David Yates, I have high hopes that quality will continue.

So what am I hoping to see in the next installment? Well the sixth book battles with the third as my favorite so I am expecting good things from this one. As you know I enjoy stories that use time to explore the themes and skipping through different eras and how the past affects the future is one of the main plotlines of this story. In addition, it is not giving much away to say that this story features one of Rowling's more clever writing as she rebukes Bush-era policies of using fear and false efforts at security (although there is no duct tape) by staying strictly to the world she has created and never explicitly making the connection, but subtly making clear to anyone reading closely that she is trying to teach them about more than just horcruxes. With Order of the Phoenix and the British State of Play, Yates has shown an aptitude for telling political stories and I am excited to find out what he does with this one.

Overall I will just have to admit, I am a Harry Potter geek and I am eagerly awaiting the next movie. But as a film connoisseur (well...maybe an amateur one if that is possible), I can attest that being familiar with this film franchise will in the future be a key part to knowing what the true history of this century's early cinematic history.