..Gary Dretzka
..Noah Forrest
..Leonard Klady
..David Poland
..Douglas Pratt
..Ray Pride
..Kim Voynar
..Michael Wilmington

..Wilmington on DVD ..MCN Weekend

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince , (500) Days of Summer and
Three Monkeys
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Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (Three Stars)
U. S.; David Yates, 2009
    
From the moment right near the start of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince when we see three dark, murderous Death Eaters swooping across London, wreaking CGI havoc on the foggy city below, right up to this new movie‘s hellish climax, with teen wiz Harry Potter (Daniel Radcliffe) observing and his wizardly mentor Prof. Albus Dumbledore (Michael Gambon) fighting in a lake of fire filled with deadly, squirmy creatures, the new Harry Potter movie drenches us in a mix of horrific fantasy and teen romance/sexuality that’s a world away from the series’ sugary magical school days 2001 kickoff, the Chris Columbus-directed Harry Potter and the Sorcerer‘s Stone.
     
Back then, Potter and Company stirred and slurped up a confectionary fantasy that, despite the picture’s high-prestige British adult supporting cast, wasn’t so far, in style and mood, from ‘60s Mary Poppins-era Walt Disney -- and closer in feeling, to the gung ho kids’ adventure of an early Star Wars.
     
Now the series has gone dark and arty. (More than a few have compared it to Star Wars‘ somber sequel The Empire Strikes Back.) The supporting adults are juicier and more theatrical, the villains increasingly threatening and stylishly devilish (here, Alan Rickman, as the snobbish, over-lordly menace Prof. Severus Snape, surges to the fore).
    
And its still youthful heroes and heroine (the pensive Radcliffe as Harry, the increasingly photogenic Emma Watson as right-hand lass Hermione Granger, and the brawnier Rupert Grint as sporty sidekick Ron Weasley) are taller, more filled-out, more teen-idolish and more preoccupied with affairs of the heart and glands, as well as with the dark-side horrors and potential cataclysms that rightly preoccupy Harry as a dutiful young Chosen One.
     
The story has grown and ripened, and so have the young protagonists, over the seven volumes of author J. K. Rowling‘s fabulously popular series -- and they have in the movies as well. I still prefer the middle two films, directed by Alfonso Cuaron and Mike Newell, to the first two, by Home Alone‘s Chris Columbus, and the latest two by BBC helmer David Yates. In a way, Half-Blood Prince strikes me as a bit too dark, arty and creepy -- while the Columbus opening episodes were too blithe and bouncy. (Yes, I know, the kids are growing up. Life gets darker, meaner. It’s all relative.)
     
The arcs of all the stories though, have stayed pretty much the same, with Harry and his chums again encountering British boarding school crises, while evil forces gather around Harry, and final battles must be waged.  Here, in addition, Harry and friends must adjusting to specifically teen romantic problems, while Harry and Dumbledore investigate the dark past and hold off the increasingly awful and awesome  assaults of the off-screen dark Lord Voldemort’s onscreen torpedoes -- including Snape, Helena Bonham Carter as the demonically sexy and ferocious Bellatrix Lestrange, and Tom Felton as sullen student baddie Draco Malfoy.
     
The Rowling series blends several British classic youth-reader literary staples, the school romance and the horror fantasy, with unusual fullness and detail. The movies, mostly scripted by Steve Kloves -- who once gave us, as writer-director, that delightful adult romantic drama The Fabulous Baker Boys -- are as faithful to the Rowley novels as David O. Selznick always tried to be to his adapted books. The films compress the novels’ large spans of events, and give us as many characters as they can -- often played by the cream of Britain’s older British thespian talent, like Rickman, Carter and Maggie Smith.
    
Here, Michael Gambon pretty much steals the acting honors, along with a dithering new Professor of Potions, Horace Slughorn, played with his usual priceless distraction by Jim Broadbent. But there are also sharp turns for Rickman, Carter, Smith (as the magisterial Minerva McGonagall), and, very briefly, Robbie Coltrane as stout fella Hagrid. These older stars tend to have a field day in their parts, while the younger Potterites -- including Harry, Hermione and Ron -- are less flavorsome, even if, as here, they happen to be in the throes of youthful desire.
      
Gambon and Broadbent are the treasures here. Gambon, a superb actor whom most of us first may reckoned an acting genius in either Peter Greenaway‘s The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and her Lover, or in Dennis Potter’s BBC masterpiece The Singing Detective, has a gravity, penetrating eye and sonorous authority that make him equally effective as villain or not-exactly-hero -- and he was a perfect bad aristo-heavy/victim in Robert Altman’s Agatha Christie-meets-La Regle du Jeu mystery, Gosford Park.  
    
Here, he’s a fatherly magician of the first order (phoenix or otherwise). And Broadbent, whose watery eyes, shameful half-grin and beefsteak face give him a wonderful dissipated-uncle look, grounds the whole movie in earthy Brit reality, from his first scenes on. Bravo to both of them, and to the producers for casting them.
     
About the younger actors, I’m not as enthusiastic. They’re good, never great, and perhaps it’s wrong to expect them to be.  They are, after all, intended as conduits for the emotions and dreams of the huge youth audiences the movies intend to rally. At that, they’re still fine, if not always dandy.
           
The movie’s sheer darkness, and its refusal to talk down to its vast audience, are what makes the Potter series increasingly interesting -- one of the few franchise movie series, that has tended to get better and more ambitious and difficult as it has gone along. The later Potter movies, like this one, tend to give us more of the qualities of the books. They’re more literary and theatrical, and, though they still rely on heavy displays of special effects and CGI prowess, this one tends to flaunt them less, kissing off the showpiece Quidditch match in a way that the earlier moves wouldn’t have.
      
Obviously, a huge franchise movie like one of these Harry Potters, is playing by different rules, and in a  different arena, than the art films it may sometimes recall. Yet it’s nice to see that the producers of the films of such titanic bestsellers, aimed initially at children, feel a compulsion, along with supplying the requisite catalogue of cinematic and hormonal wonders, to make their movies deeper, smarter, classier. Harry Potter movies are not at the top of my must-see list, but its also good to be able to sit through them without wondering why adult needs and desires aren’t being serviced with such lavishness. Here, they are. At their best, the movie and its series remain magical, for all of us.      

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(500) Days of Summer (Three Stars)
U. S.; Marc Webb, 2009
       
Five hundred days, arranged in anti-chronological, skip-along-and-skip-back order, which tell the often witty story of a dubiously romantic, greeting card writer Tom (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), who’s obsessed with the church scene in The Graduated, (“Elaine!” “Ben!”)  and his dream girl Summer (Zooey Deschanel), who says she’s not up for anything serious, and unfortunately means it.
       
A clever romantic comedy which pleases the eye, tickles the mind, but doesn’t exactly warm the heart. How could it, when co-writer Scott Neustadter (who, along with co-writer Michael H. Weber, committed The Pink Panther 2) admits in the credits that the movie is a partial act of revenge for a failed relationship of long ago? Gordon-Levitt is a good Benjamin-style putz (if I were him, I’d stock to greeting cards), and Deschanel comes across as more sensible than femme-fatale-ish -- which Neustadter undoubtedly realizes. This is another middle class young adult romantic comedy, with a yen for Manhattan, but it’s sharper than most, and as Tom’s buddies, Geoffrey Arend and Matthew Gray Gubler are swell.
     
By the way, this review was written as a partial act of revenge for a failed relationship of long ago. Or maybe it wasn’t. At any rate: Here’s to you. Mrs. Robinson.

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Three Monkeys (Four Stars)
Turkey/France/Italy; Nuri Bilge Ceylan, 2008
      
Nuri Bilge Ceylan, the brilliant Turkish cineaste (Distant, Climates), whose exquisite visual  tableaus, minimalist plots and flair for long dramatic silences, irresistibly recall the heyday of  Michelangelo Antonioni, here offers more plot than usual, in the film that won him the “Best Director” prize at the Cannes Film Festival.
    
There’s so much plot, in fact, that Three Monkeys, at times, suggests a foreign language neo-noir, something like Christian Petzold‘s recent German Double Indemnity redo, Jerichow. Like many a good noir, Three Monkeys plunges us, at first, into night -- and then leaves us there, even when the sun rises. Servat (played by Ceylan’s co-writer Ercan Kasal), a nervous politician who falls asleep at the wheel, wakens to find he’s killed a pedestrian. Desperate, he begs his driver Eyup (Yavuz Bingol) -- who wasn’t present at the accident -- to take the blame and go to jail, in return for later cash and favors.
      
But, after Eyup goes through with the deal,  his lazy, self-indulgent son Ismail (Ahmet Rifat Sungar) wheedles his attractive mother Hacer (Hatice Aslan) to get an advance from Servat, so he can get an expensive car. She does, Servat is smitten -- and disaster obviously looms.
    
Ceylan may be a great director -- he‘s certainly the most impressive Turkish movie talent since Yilmaz Guney (the writer of Yol) -- but I wouldn’t quite call Monkeys a great film. Maybe, in the balance, it’s too melodramatic. As a stylistic coup though, it often knocks your eyes out, and the acting has the spare, unexaggerated power of one of the major European art films, not only Antonioni‘s but Herzog’s or Angelopoulos’. This is the kind of movie that rive tingly opens up another world, in this case modern urban Turkey, before our eyes.

Read Michael Wilmington on DVDs

- Michael Wilmington
July 16, 2009

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