Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

You know, for being a normal (albeit magical) kid, Harry Potter sure does get into a lot of trouble.  Every school year, there is some deadly threat that rears its ugly head, and it always seems to target Harry.  Up until this point in the series, that felt like an abstract coincidence.  Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, the fifth film in the series, changes up the formula a bit; this isn't about the dreaded Lord Voldemort trying to return in some overcomplicated fashion; he's back, and he has a mad-on for killing Harry.

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The story picks up a few months after the end of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.  Harry (Daniel Radcliffe) finds himself returning to school under more scrutiny than ever before; since he was the only living witness to Lord Voldemort's (Ralph Fiennes) return and was then immediately sent on summer vacation in the muggle world, a lot of people are doubting his claim.  The wizard government and newspapers have taken the stance that Harry is a spotlight-loving glory hound, content to lie and frighten the masses for attention.  This is mirrored in the student population at Hogwarts, too.  Before, Harry was a kid with a burden; now, he's a teenager that is actually being conspired against.  Cue some teenage angst.

Harry and his friends (that believe Lord Voldemort is back) want to learn more about protecting themselves from evil wizards, but the Ministry of Magic sends a new teacher to Hogwarts, Dolores Umbridge (Imelda Staunton), to prevent that from happening.  She starts off small, by assuming the teaching role of the Defense Against the Dark Arts classes and forbidding magic in the classroom, and works her way up; as the story progresses, she gains more and more power, forbidding more and more things, until the wizard school is a joyless, um, normal private school.  But Harry knows that he needs to learn more magic to fight Voldemort and his evil wizard posse.  He would like to join the official anti-Voldemort club, the Order of the Phoenix, like his godfather Sirius Black (Gary Oldman) and his idol, Professor Dumbledore (Michael Gambon), but he is told that he is too young.  How can Harry and his friends learn to protect themselves if the nasty Umbridge won't allow them?  If Harry is at school, and that school is Voldemort-proof, how does the bad guy plan on getting to Harry?  And what is up with the creepy waking dreams Harry keeps having about Voldemort?  As luck would have it, this film tries to answer those questions.

Seduction of the Innocent?

As per usual in the Harry Potter series, the main child actors are getting better.  This was definitely the most varied performance by Daniel Radcliffe to date, and he managed to come across as a hell of a lot more likable than his character did in the book.  Rupert Grint keeps getting uglier as he grows up, but he's less melodramatic this time around, so it seems that he's getting better at acting.  Emma Watson turns in another quality performance, although this part is probably her weakest in the series.  The returning adult cast is of the same quality as they always are; none have particularly large roles, but they're all solid.  That means that Robbie Coltrane, Brendan Gleeson, Jason Isaacs, Maggie Smith, David Thewlis, and Emma Thompson all played their parts well enough.  Michael Gambon and Alan Rickman had slightly more important roles in this film, and I enjoyed the charm and spite that they respectively brought to their parts.  This film also gave us a longer look at Ralph Fiennes as Voldemort, and he definitely enjoys playing the bad guy here.

Finally!  A Harry Potter spin-off!

The new cast members were great, but that's kind of typical for the series.  Helena Bonham Carter looked the part of a half-crazed evil witch, and I loved her childish taunting.  Her character design was pretty awesome and, despite the relatively short amount of time she is onscreen, she is quite memorable. 

This is what Tim Burton wakes up to.

Imelda Staunton was also excellent in her part.  When I heard that she was cast in this role, I assumed that she would be great, because she plays subdued but evil characters quite well.  I was right.  She hits every insincere line perfectly, forcing the audience to hate her abuses of authority at least as much as the Potter bunch do, if not more. 

The Devil Wears Pink

This is the first Harry Potter that was directed by David Yates, who only had television credits before this.  I have to say, this is a very impressive directorial film debut.  Yates doesn't do a whole lot that is too fancy with the camera or special effects (although I do like the subtle reddening of Harry's scar when he thinks of Voldemort), but he manages to get very good performances from the entire cast and made a compelling, two-and-a-quarter-hour movie from an 870-page book.  Bravo, good sir!  What impresses me most about this film is that it is based on my least favorite book in the series; the book has Harry acting like a pissy teenager (which he is) that bitches and moans for 800 pages.  Yates let the frustration and anger of Harry show, but he did it in a way that kept Harry as a likable character and didn't make me want to slap the magic out of him.

Magic-slapped!

For me, this is one of the best Harry Potters in the entire series.  The acting just keeps getting better, the big-picture storyline finally starts to heat up, and we get to see just how cool adult wizards are.  I like the tone of the movie, I like the washed out colors in it, and I really enjoyed the Voldemort vs. Dumbledore fight.

Wizard fight!

This feels like a step away from the childish wonder that anchored the first half of the film series; there is an important character death, there is no quidditch, and Harry's love life seems hopeless.  Instead, this is a movie that focuses on small victories in the lives of its characters, and it shows just how well Harry and his classmates stack up against real witches and wizards.  It might not be as much fun as some of the other films, but it does a good job balancing the comedic and dramatic.  If I had to pick one Harry Potter movie to get someone interested in the series, I would probably choose The Order of the Phoenix for its balance of character development, cool special effects, and tangible threats.

 

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

It's almost time for the final chapter of the Harry Potter series to hit theaters, so it's time for me to re-familiarize myself with the last few films (and review them) before the final wizarding battle.  Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire is the fourth film in the series, and in many ways is the turning point in the seven- (or eight-, if you count the Parts 1 and 2 of the final movie separately) part tale.  The kids are starting to look like teenagers (because they were actually becoming teens), we finally get some face time with the (to this point) mysterious villain of the series, Lord Voldemort, and the children are finally old enough to be legitimately accountable for their acting skills.  This is also the first movie that was forced to make drastic changes between the novel and the screenplay, since the book was over 700 pages and the movies from the 300 page novels clocked in at over two hours each.  The Goblet of Fire is my personal favorite book in the series, but that doesn't always translate into liking the screen version, does it?

Like the past few movies, The Goblet of Fire focuses on an entire year of schooling at Hogwarts, and the trials and tribulations that young Harry Potter (Daniel Radcliffe) and his friends Hermione (Emma Watson) and Ron (Rupert Grint) go through in their fourth year.  This year offers something unusual, though.  In an ongoing effort to make the wizarding world a friendlier place, the legendary Triwizard Tournament is set to be held at Hogwarts; the chosen champions from three schools will compete in a series of tests, with the winner gaining fame for him or herself and honor for their school.  That means that a sizable group of students from the vaguely French Beauxbatons Academy of Magic and the vaguely Eastern European Durmstrang Institute will be staying at Hogwarts this year.  This shouldn't directly affect Harry, since he is under the age restriction to compete, but his name is selected --- along with champions from Beauxbatons, Durmstrang, and Hogwarts.  It's called Triwizard for a reason; this fourth selection is a bad omen, because someone very sneaky and powerful had to be responsible for it.  But why would someone want to arrange for Harry to compete in the Tournament?  Perhaps because it is extremely dangerous.  Perhaps there is another reason.  Nevertheless, Harry has to worry about this on top of all his normal studies.  This year is actually worse for him than usual, because his selection makes him notorious within the school and with his friends as a glory hog; add that to Harry's first real attempts to date a girl, and you have the recipe for an awkward year.

Speaking of awkward...nice suit.

Once again, the acting in this Harry Potter is a marked improvement over its predecessors.  Daniel Radcliffe finally seems to be getting the hang of things and does a good job of playing an awkward teenager.  Emma Watson is given a more complex part this time, and she nails it; her scenes at the dance were great.  Rupert Grint finally seems to be stepping up to the challenge, too, although his improvements are primarily in his comedic timing.  There are a few noteworthy additions to the cast at large in this film, with the most obvious being Brendan Gleeson as Mad-Eye Moody.  Like the past few guest-starring Hogwarts professors, Gleeson is given a lot to work with, and he clearly has a good time as the eccentric and war-scarred professor.  Ralph Fiennes makes his Potter debut as Lord Voldemort, and he does a good job of being EEE-veel; I'm still not a fan of his noseless character design, but it is taken from the books, so...whatever.  This is also the first time we see Miranda Richardson as the tabloid-writing Rita Skeeter; she is fine, but her parts in the films never approaches her presence in the novels.  David Tennant has a small but important role as a fidgety over-actor.  Two of the other Triwizard competitors have popped up in other films; Clemence Poesy has had a few small American movie roles, and Robert Pattinson has been in...something...I forget what.  Neither is very impressive here, but most supporting child actors aren't.

Foreground: a vampire and a wizard.  Background: ethnic diversity.

The rest of the supporting cast is still around, and as solid as ever.  The teaching staff of Hogwarts is great, as usual, even with limited screen time.  Michael Gambon, Maggie Smith, Robbie Coltrane, and Warwick Davis are all good, but I really enjoyed some of Alan Rickman's subtle choices, especially how he chooses to reprimand students.  Gary Oldman makes a cameo in a pretty cool special effects scene, but he doesn't get to add much to the overall story.  Similarly, I thought Timothy Spall, Jason Isaacs, and Tom Felton were fine in their returning parts, but none really had much to do in this movie (except Felton, who isn't much of an actor yet).  One of the more welcome expansions to an existing role was that of the Weasley twins, played by Oliver and James Phelps; they had been around in the past few movies, but they played a larger part here, and their mutually shared dialogue was endearing.

I think Oliver's the one that blow dries his hair.

This movie was directed my Mike Newell, andI think he did an impressive job editing this movie down to a digestible length.  The pace is pretty quick and it centers on the Triwizard Tournament, at the expense of the typical glimpses into everyday life at Hogwarts.  I liked that choice, as it kept things fresh and made this a very different film than the previous three.  This movie had the best performances from the cast to date; whether that was through his work or because the cast was getting old enough to sharpen their acting chops, I don't know.  This film has a more washed-out look to it, which mirrors the more serious tone that it would take.  Overall, I think he did an admirable job maintaining the spirit of the book while cutting substantial amounts from the film.

This movie marks a lot of firsts for the Harry Potter series.  This is the first time that the kids looked like normal students; they wore street clothes, grew ugly shaggy haircuts, and wore their school uniforms as sloppily as possible.  Incidentally, this movie has my favorite hairstyle for Harry; before this, it was just a mop top, after this it's very neat, but this is the unruly mess I pictured from the books.  This is also the first time that romance reared its head in the Harry Potter series, and it was handled surprisingly well.  This is also the first movie to skip the wizard game of quidditch (yes, it's mentioned, but we don't watch a match); that was always a "wizards have fun" part of the earlier films, but skipping that aids the more serious tone of this movie.  Most importantly, though, this is the first film in the series that makes good on the ever-lingering threat of Lord Voldemort.  Finally, we get to see bad wizards doing bad things, and we even get a wizard duel.  It was all pretty sweet, I have to admit.  I should also point out that one of my favorite pop stars, Jarvis Cocker of Pulp, was the lead singer in the Weird Sisters, the wizard rock band that played the Hogwarts dance; fans of Pulp and Radiohead might recognize some of the other band members.  Let it be known, even wizards like to rock.

Jarvis needs to know if you can dance like a hippogriff

As the complete lack of criticism above might indicate, I really liked this movie.  It is definitely my favorite Harry Potter chapter to this point.  A lot of it was done in pretty simple ways; it builds upon the foundations laid in the earlier films.  It's San Antonio Spurs-basic competence, but it works.  Is this a deep movie?  Not particularly.  Will it bring in new viewers into the series?  Probably not.  It is a treat for those that have followed the series and grown up with it.  The Harry Potter franchise has always stood out for making the right decisions on how to adapt its stories, and this was the film that showed that it was possible to adapt a huge book into a regularly-sized film.  This was also the last film that the cast was contractually obligated to make; this could have been the last in the series, or the precursor to an abrupt shift.  Instead, it took the serious tone that The Prisoner of Azkaban hinted at and ran, making this appealing to both the magic-loving innocent in us all and the dark part of us that wants to see bad wizards doing bad things.  Definitely the strongest entry in the series up to this point, and a promising look at things to come.

Oh, I thought up one criticism.  Wizard sports have to be the worst spectator sports ever invented.  All three Triwizard tests had the audience staring at nothing for most of the matches (an empty arena, the surface of a lake, and at the edge of a hedge maze).  Don't even get me started on quidditch.  Wizards need to take a page from muggle sports and build a damn jumbo-tron.

...And, because I love Jarvis Cocker so damn much, I have to include this interview with him.  At the time, he hadn't released any new music in about four years, so it was refreshing to see and hear from him again.  Man, I'm such an Anglophile sometimes.

Green Zone

Yeah, I know...you were really hoping that Green Zone would be a true-story Bourne movie, right?  It's got Matt Damon as the lead and Paul Greengrass directing, so that's not a bad assumption, actually.  Greengrass even mimics the cinematography from The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum, so the look and feel of this film matches his earlier work.  Hell, this is even a government conspiracy movie, too!  Unfortunately, Green Zone is based on the non-fiction book, Imperial Life in the Emerald City.  I don't mean to demean the book, but any movie based on a non-fiction account of anything from the Iraq war is going to be heavy on government screw-ups and relatively light on the awesome hand-to-hand combat and driving sequences that helped make the Bourne series so unique.

That comparison may seem unfair, but it's the filmmaker's own fault.  Green Zone is essentially a political conspiracy movie disguised as an action movie.  If they wanted this to be a conspiracy movie, that's cool.  I'm down for some convoluted conspiracy plots.  This film throws in a decent amount of war movie-type shootouts, though, so the action and the political intrigue sometimes seem disjointed.

Since the movie is very plot-driven, with all the twists and turns that implies, I don't want to give away any spoilers; I'll just give a quick recap.  Officer Roy Miller (Matt Damon) is in charge of a US squad looking to capture Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs) in 2003 Iraq, right around the time where President Bush gave his infamous "Mission Accomplished" speech.  As you might have heard, anyone looking for WMDs in Iraq was going to go home disappointed, and this film is about that.  After finding zip, zero, and nada for a while, Miller begins to openly question the value of the military's intelligence.  This movie deserves some credit for not once making any "oxymoron" comments about military intelligence, despite several obvious opportunities to do so.  Miller begins to dig for the truth behind the intelligence being supplied to the military.  On his side, he has CIA agent Martin Brown (Brendan Gleeson), a local Iraqi man that is willing to bastardize his given name and be called "Freddie" so stupid Americans don't mispronounce his given name (Khalid Abdalla), and a Wall Street Journal correspondent (Amy Ryan).  On the "Truth?  You can't handle the truth!" side, we have Iraq's resident Pentagon guy, Clark Poundstone (Greg Kinnear), Iraqi General Mohammed Al-Rawi (Yigal Naor), and a Special Ops guy, Briggs (the always evil Jason Isaacs).  Of course, nothing is as simple as Miller would like, so he chooses to bypass the chain of command and wage a one man campaign to capture the truth.

Side note: bypassing military chain of command in military situations has absolutely no negative repercussions, as long as you are Matt Damon.

 As far as the cast goes, almost everyone does a solid job.  I like Damon, even when his role requires him to look frustrated or impassive for an entire movie.  Brendan Gleeson and Jason Isaacs are always entertaining character actors, and they don't disappoint here.  I wasn't familiar with Khalid Abdalla or Yigal Naor, but I thought both did well with surprisingly complex supporting roles.  I was not impressed with Amy Ryan or Greg Kinnear, though.  Ryan's seemingly indifferent performance might be an accurate representation of a journalist (I'll give her the benefit of the doubt), but it makes for a boring character to watch.  Kinnear had the opportunity to play a slimy politician and he does that well.  He kind of overdoes it, though; I'm pretty sure I've seen Cobra Commander display more human complexity than Kinnear did here.

The directing was fine, too.  I like Paul Greengrass as a director.  I liked how the movie looked (kind of gritty) and the pacing of the action.  He was able to capture some pretty good action sequences, as you might expect.  Greengrass is able to make complex plots understandable with his direction, and that was a key to enjoying this movie.

Despite a lot of quality ingredients making up this movie, they don't quite add up.  Part of that is due to the plot and part is due to the presentation.  The plot is effective as a suspense/political intrigue movie.  There's just one problem: the audience already knows that there were no WMDs in Iraq.  Well, maybe I'm wrong...you know the P.T. Barnum quote: “You will never go broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.”  Let's pretend that you don't know about the WMDs.  Even then, the big reveal doesn't deliver the dramatic punch that you would expect it to.  When Miller confronts the person responsible, he is essentially blown off, and the eventual ending is missing the catharsis that the story demands.  Obviously, the hero is going to do something heroic, right?  Even after Miller makes his big play, I was left unsatisfied.

Presenting this movie as a thinly-veiled fictional story about our recent past was probably not the way to go, either.  If they had just mentioned that the names of the people involved have been changed, etc., etc., then the lack of catharsis would be more understandable.  Sometimes, real life doesn't provide the ending you want.  Still, even if the filmmakers had played up the "true story" angle, it wouldn't explain the lack of consequences shown in the film.  I don't want to give anything away, but when the movie ended, I was waiting for some sort of postscript to tell what happened to who after the plot is resolved.  But nothing is added and I was left with the impression that nothing had changed.  That's a bad feeling to have after watching a conspiracy movie. 

This movie was well made and I enjoyed it while I watched.  I just feel that the conclusion was lacking.  That might not be a huge problem for a comedy, but plot-driven movies need to have effective resolutions.  I think the flat-out evil portrayal of Kinnear's Pentagon insider is overly simplistic (I'm fine with him being evil, but at least have him justify his actions!) and Miller's actions had several severe consequences that are brushed over.  I think this is an important story, but it is told in a good-guy vs. bad-guy way that cheapens the message.  Unless the message is "Screenwriters: Stay in school until you cover 'Satisfactory endings' in class."

Dark Blue

Even if you haven't seen Dark Blue, believe me, you are already familiar with it.  This is a good cop/bad cop tale with an experienced cop/rookie cop dynamic to it.  If that sounds like a blend of Tango and Cash and Training Day, it should.  If that sounds like an unlikely recipe for awesomeness, that should, too.

The movie opens with Sergeant Eldon Perry (Kurt Russell) pacing in a hotel room, seemingly coming to a decision, and leaving with a shotgun.  The movie flashes back to five days earlier; I find that especially informative as a viewer, because now I know that Sgt. Perry will decide...something...in just five short days.  The suspense is killing me!  What did he decide?!?  He decided to start the actual movie with a convenience store robbery; two thugs (Dash Mihok and rapper Kurupt) appear to be trying to steal the cash register, but in reality are looking for a secret safe.  In the process, these two thugs kill four people and wound one.  Meanwhile, Detective Bobby Keough (Scott Speedman) is across town, defending his use of deadly force to a police board; Sgt. Perry, Keough's partner, backs up his story and they leave with Keough being exonerated.  In and after the hearing, we meet two important characters.  The first is the Assistant Police chief Arthur Holland (Ving Rhames), who is very suspicious of the shooting and is connected to talks about cleaning up the police department.  The other is Jack Van Meter (the undeniably Irish Brendan Gleeson), Keough and Perry's superior.  In private, Van Meter cuts through the crap with his subordinates and we learn that Perry did the shooting that Keough is accused of; apparently, Keough didn't have the guts to shoot another human, so Perry did the dirty work for him.  It is more or less explicitly stated that Van Meter and Perry are the type of cops that will plant evidence to convict someone they believe is guilty, but only if they can save the taxpayers money by staging an "escape attempt" that turned fatal.  Van Meter is a dirty cop, and the convenience store shooting was ordered by him.  While Perry and Keough figure out who committed the murders, Van Meter flat out tells them to choose another pair of perpetrators to blame for the crime --- and make sure that they don't make it to trial.  Yikes.  It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out where this story is going.  Perry stays loyal to Van Meter, but Keough is new and is confused and disillusioned with his superiors.  Eventually, that disillusionment leads to Keough to agree to help Arthur Holland in his quest to catch crooked cops.

While the story is fairly stock, I was pleasantly surprised by some of the acting.  While this isn't Kurt Russell's best work, it is always nice to see him play someone with an edge.  So much of the time, it feels like he is trying to coast on his Disney-era boyish goo looks and Overboard-era Supermullet, but he can play bad when he want to, and he does so with charm.  Here, he plays a cop that is clearly a bad guy, but at the same time, he still appears to be someone's fun drinking buddy.  Ving Rhames, sadly, is not given much to do here, but he delivers when he gets the chance.  I always like seeing Rhames in scenes that require him to stare down other characters.  I know I would look away from angry Ving, wouldn't you?  Brendan Gleeson was also pretty good here.  He usually plays characters that are much more virtuous, but I liked him as a complete bastard here.  Scott Speedman probably had the most difficult role in this movie, since it was the most emotionally diverse; unfortunately, his role required more than he could deliver.  Aside from possibly playing Scott Stapp in a Creed biopic, I have no use for Speedman as an actor.

The story was equally hit and miss.  Yes, the plot was fairly derivative, but it made a great choice by being set in the days before the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles, with the film's climax and the acquittal of the LA police officers involved in the King beating occurring on the same day.  In retrospect, it's an obvious time and locational choice for a movie about police corruption, but it's the only film I've seen that takes advantage of the obvious story parallels.  The story manages to veer away from this tense situation by inserting not one, not two, but three subplots about the love lives of these policemen.  None of these stories is particularly interesting, despite a solid performance by Lolita Davidovich as Perry's wife.  I found both Michael Michele and Khandi Alexander to be underwhelming, at best, and annoying, at worst, as the women in Holland and Keough's lives.  On the other hand, the screenwriter David Ayer's dialogue is pretty good, as are the parts of the story that deal with crime and corruption.  The film takes a noticeable turn for the worse after Kurt Russell's character reaches a turning point; Russell does a good job with his character's progression, but the overall film suffers at his expense.  Director Ron Shelton doesn't try and do much of anything fancy in this movie, opting to let the LA riots do a lot of the work for him.  I am disappointed in Michael Michele and Scott Speedman's performances, though, because they could have really made this movie work.  Neither is a particularly accomplished actor, so Shelton needed to do a better job guiding their performances to mediocrity (or even better).

Honestly, I liked Kurt Russell, Ving Rhames and Brendan Gleeson.  If these guys wanted to make another cop movie, I'd totally be there to watch it.  I thought the framing device (opening the film with Russell in a hotel, which is just a snippet of a scenes toward the film's end) was clumsy and completely failed in its attempt to establish suspense.  The subplots only slowed this movie down, and at almost two hours, it could have used some trimming.  At its core, there is a good story about police and corruption buried here.  It would only take some editing and a fourth halfway decent lead actor to make that happen, neither of which Dark Blue had the benefit of.