Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

Try not to be too surprised, but the sixth installment in the Harry Potter series is not good. (Oh hell, you've probably already seen it anyway.) The pit-falls are many, and before I get more in-depth I'll just say that the dialogue is for the most part pretty stilted, and, let's face it, these poor kids can't really act. (Daniel Radcliffe performed well enough in his Equus stint, but when it comes to portraying normal human interaction he still misses the mark. And I say "kids," though actually they're all now in or nearing their twenties.)

It starts off well enough: a beautifully rendered sequence of furious, smoky forms hurtling through the streets of London, Muggles looking on in pitiable nescience, and culminating with frightening intensity in an attack on the Millennium Footbridge — but immediately, the film fails to capitalize on its elegantly unsettling atmosphere by thrusting us into a jarringly unrelated space. The jumping continues as we're fed event after event, each giving us just enough information to see that it's probably relevant, but not so much as to enrich the experience. David Yates, who also directed the Order of the Phoenix, treats almost every scene with the same contemplative slowness, with the result that even those actions you know must be exciting plod on in languorous dispassion. (He seems also to have had an aversion to the immobile; for all the gently drifting tracking, crabbing, tilting, panning shots, this picture may as well have been filmed in boats.)

The larger problem with Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is its failure to take responsibility for itself. As an audience, we are expected to know what's going on whether it's explained to us or not. Little or no effort is made to connect events or introduce characters, or to impart the gravity of a situation. It's understood that we've all read the book, that the real reason we're there is to see what we've only until now imagined. We already know how to feel. . . . This film is nothing but an illustration of its progenitor. Without the strength to stand, it leans for support; it lacks the heart to propel itself. A similar disservice might be the stage production of The Lion King . . . without music.

But, the visuals are awesome, so we keep coming back.

This is the still larger problem with the American movie audience. Our demands are too shallow. Too many fans of J.K. Rowling content themselves with whatever they're given, satisfied by the mere sight of the story. I spoke to one such satisfied customer who said, Well, I don't really have an expectation that these will be great movies. Another fan, this one angry, though I think he still enjoyed the film, complained only that there is a scene which "is not in the book!" Yet another, observing more than complaining, placed the blame for the movie's impotence on Rowling herself, saying, She's not quite Oscar Wilde when is comes to writing sexual tension.

!

A movie is not the book. If it tries to be, it will fall short: merely, as I have said, an illustration. A film must be thought of as separate from its source. Having taken a text or any other material as its starting point, it should be free to evolve and function independently. Without such freedom, Ed Wood may never have met Orson Welles, Jiminy Cricket would have been crushed before he even got on the road, and can you imagine a Jurassic Park with all the trouble in Jurassic Park? (There are limits to how long people will sit.) Of course, Harry wouldn't have found himself flirting with a waitress in a tube station either, but the independence of the Half-Blood Prince serves little purpose.

What we need is to stop being cowed by the wow! of visual effects, and demand movies that stand on their own.

What the remaining two Harry Potter films need, is Alfonso Cuarón. :(

Public Enemies

More often than not, when I have a problem with a Hollywood blockbuster, my primary gripe is with the script. We've all seen them: those big-budget, star-studded, action-packed, over-the-top fiascoes that fall flat because the writers were paid to shit something out as a jump-start to the process rather than worry about crafting anything that even remotely approaches worthwhile—movies that nevertheless make all the money they were meant to because the viewing public is dazzled into hollow satisfaction. Well, Public Enemies has different problems.

At $100 million, Michael Mann's latest comes through with excellent costuming and set design. It would be hard to find a bigger pairing than Johnny Depp and Christian Bale, neither of whom disappoints, bringing the quality performances (and accents) I've come to expect. Though I wouldn't call the film action-packed, there's certainly no shortage of gunfire. (It is about a bank robber, after all.) Throw in French, Oscar-winning beauty Marion Cotillard and who can complain?

Where Public Enemies misses the mark is in the seemingly unlikeliest of places: lighting and cinematography (/ staging). It starts out innocently enough; the hand-held camera and oppressive yellow suit the opening prison-break (even if the shot framing Depp starkly against the blue sky as his car speeds away is a little strange). It's not until the plot slows down and Depp's John Dillinger finds himself in the dark ballroom where he will first meet his sweetheart (Cotillard), that we begin to realize darkness is obscuring some of the critical actions. As the couple dances we become aware of the over-use of close-ups, and as they dine we begin to wonder if the hand-held shake is really appropriate for every emotion. Later, when Bale's Melvin Purvis speaks to his team of investigators, we get our best view yet of how distracting all this mishandling can be as we watch the oddly cast shadows swim over his inappropriately sickly pallor.

If you want to know how the movie ends, I can't tell you. (I walked out.) I kept wanting the performances and story to carry me through, but the plot moved just slowly enough to be overwhelmed by the quick pans and low light (and was not helped along by staging that sometimes de-emphasized important movements). I just couldn't care anymore. The shots you saw in the trailer were the best the film had to offer, and they were too fast, too few and too far between to hold the story. I mentioned the sets, but in truth we weren't really allowed to appreciate their grandeur, washed-out and poorly framed as they unfortunately tended to be. With all the elegance of a Discovery Channel docu-drama, this film looked like it could have been shot in my back yard, so much so that as I walked home under the streetlights I felt like I was still trapped in the screen. Mann's unruly, ill-lit, gritty style may have been appropriate for the modern-day, late-night LA of Collateral, but falls well short of conveying the period romanticism that Public Enemies deserved.

The film isn't terrible, just unwatchable. For this story, send me the novelization.