Now and Then: LITTLE WOMEN

Greta Gerwig’s Little Women faithfully adapts that novel’s cozy qualities, its warm-hearted temperament, closely observed sentiment, and its easy grip on its audience’s sympathies. The story of the four March daughters and their quiet domestic pleasantries and tragedies, relationships and developments, is put across faithfully with great spirited sisterly energy, as loving and honest as the best, closest sibling friendships. Certainly, Louisa May Alcott’s beloved novel of Civil War-era family life has produced plenty faithful adaptations before. Gerwig casts well, keeps a good pace, shepherds expert production design and textured cinematography, dramatizes every memorable scene, and has a keen eye for filmic detail. But what really lifts it off and sets it apart is the structure. She takes the two halves of the book — the early younger days where the young ladies are first flowering into adolescence and figuring out themselves and world; and then as slightly older young women as they mature into the adult lives they’ll live — and places them side by side. There are many other adaptations to reiterate the text in sequential order. Here it’s both familiar and fresh, enlivened by the contrast. Cutting intuitively between these two periods of time, each with their own conflicts and concerns, yet intertwined through the personalities of the women involved, there are echoes and comparisons, connections and collisions. Viewing the events in this way is a freshly productive way of understanding the classic story, of seeing anew how the decisions and personalties of girlhood directly inform and shape the outcomes of womanhood as they grow and change, either fulfilling their early dreams or deciding to go about them in a different way.

There’s great maturity and inquisitiveness here, seeing the grown-up concerns of money and careers and family obligations set against the children’s imagination and fervor and mood. It also serves to stack moments of great emotional peaks on top of each other, weddings atop funerals, recoveries atop deathly sickness, reunions atop separations, loneliness atop togetherness. And yet each scene works splendidly on its own, apart from the brilliant structural conceit, Gerwig imbuing the moments with tender humanity and deep wells of feeling. Saoirse Ronan (Jo), Emma Watson (Meg), Florence Pugh (Amy), and Eliza Scanlen (Beth), deftly balancing between the timelines with depth, energy, and poise, make believable sisters, jostling their differing personalties and divergent paths against each other over a consistent underpinning of love. (The rest of the cast — Laura Dern, Meryl Streep, Chris Cooper, Bob Odenkirk, Louis Garrel — is perfectly assembled out of character actors who bring their decades of good work and reliable screen presences to the overwhelming sense of comfort and compassion, even in hard times, in this telling.) With an enveloping spirit of goodwill, charting the family’s dramas in sweet, sharp episodic detail, Gerwig builds to a climax of such tricky dexterity, an intertwining of plot catharsis with a sweetly considered, effervescently casual metatextuality that pays off with delicate, simple visual flourishes and an overflow of emotion. It sees passionately in Jo a creative spirit, all too aware of the compromises expected of her gender and class, headstrong in pursuit of her ambitions, and heartrendingly perceptive about her strengths and weaknesses, borne aloft in the end by the strength of her own story. What a thrill that Gerwig has not only built a fully satisfying, deeply moving retelling of a classic novel, but also builds into the bones a compelling argument about it.

Tale Retold in Time: BEAUTY AND THE BEAST

Disney’s latest attempt to spin box office gold out of affection for their old masterpieces is Beauty and Beast. Less alive and animated than the 1991 drawings, which added up to a film of lovely, romantic elegance, this new live-action effort nonetheless fashions its own charms. The foundation is sturdy, and the elaboration is vivid, in the grand old Hollywood tradition of lavish widescreen song-and-dance epic spectacles. It has the same ornate backlot flavor, the voluminous colorful production design, the matte paintings (albeit now as CG swooshes), the masses of extras, pokey pace, and earnest sentiment that the lumbering musicals of the 1960’s accrued. Here, like in, say, Gene Kelly’s 1969 Hello, Dolly!, is the charmingly stiff sweetness of eagerly putting on a show, of making sure every penny of a massive budget glitters on screen as famous faces sing their hearts out and dance as best they can, while the soaring score and witty lyrics make up for any doubts you may have about their performances. It’s easy enough to get caught up in the big-hearted gleaming nostalgia factory on display.

Differing from other recent Disney remakes, they haven’t enriched (Cinderella), reshaped (Maleficent), tinkered with (The Jungle Book), or overhauled (Pete’s Dragon). They’ve simply brought it back to the screen in new fashion. Despite the evident charm and ageless brilliance of the old music and lyrics, I remained skeptical that we’d be seeing anything other than an expensive reiteration, an animated classic unnecessarily elaborated into a glittering live-action repetition. The music bursts to life with the performers’ joy, and yet what is it but corporate karaoke at the highest level? And then, the real magic happened. I got totally swept up in the experience. The filmmakers rise to the challenge, using their evident love for and serious approach to the material to make something at once old and new, a concoction that hardly bests, and certainly never replaces or improves upon, Disney’s original telling, but instead finds a fine widescreen compliment to it.

Director Bill Condon, whose energetic and affecting Dreamgirls is one of the best theater-to-screen musicals of recent memory, invests in the heart and the spectacle, swooping the camera as its characters swoon and yearn. There’s poignancy and melancholy here, and even a touch of playfulness to its phantasmagoric romance, which contains a touch more backstory than its streamlined inspiration. Unlike the much-performed Broadway adaptation, this hugely crowd-pleasing film is never lethargic and rarely ridiculous in transposing the original’s vibrant visuals into something approaching live-action visualization. It’s loaded with glamorous visions decked out in resplendent production design and slathered in CGI accoutrements, real people and photo-real(ish) talking dishes and knickknacks investing in the emotion to this fantasy.

As the movie begins, past a brief prologue in which an enchantress’ curse turns a callow prince (Dan Stevens) and his servants into a Beast and his castle’s objects, respectively, it settles into the familiar rhythms of its inspiration. Small-town French girl Belle (the bookish beauty is played by Emma Watson, her casting surely a wink to cinema’s other great recent bookish charmer) laments her provincial life. The villagers chime in “Bonjour” for the big ensemble opening number that so quickly and wittily sketches in their small-minded attitudes and stuck-in-a-rut-routines, even bull-headed Gaston (Luke Evans), who mistakenly thinks Belle will fall for him.

Soon enough, Belle’s eccentric father (Kevin Kline) is stuck in the forgotten castle in the wild forests outside their town, a captive of the beast, and she trades her freedom for his. This becomes the slowly thawing story of connection as empathy and romance as understanding that you’d hope to see. Belle and The Beast (here a CG-assisted buffalo man, not as crisp as his drawn counterpart or as haunting as Cocteau’s makeup version in the forties, but nonetheless the right balance of handsome and perverse) come to realize they’re both outsiders. Yearning for acceptance they fear the town will never give them, they therefore have to find it for themselves. A great added detail to the curse has made explicit the townspeople’s lost memories of the castle and its inhabitants, lost to suffer alone. Crisply making sense of the simple emotional beats, the movie plays nicely in the familiar while providing an emotional texture that is different enough without distracting.

The story of the curse and the potential for true love’s kiss to life it is told through the usual boisterous musical brio – “Be Our Guest” and “Something There” – and the soaring title ballad, the late Howard Ashman’s lyrics as sparklingly clever as ever. Composer Alan Menken returns to the mix as well, stirring in lovely additions to the score and terrific music-box gentle numbers that add to the film’s emotional underpinnings. Now Belle gets a chance to sing mournfully and wistfully of her childhood, and her dead mother. The cast of animate inanimate objects (French period detail speaking with the great voices of Emma Thompson, Ian McKellen, Ewan McGregor, Audra McDonald, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, and Stanley Tucci) laments their lost “days in the sun.” And, most moving of all, The Beast thunders out a ballad brushing up against Brief Encounter depths to what he sees as a bittersweet potential end to his story.

Sturdy, solid, industrial-strength studio craftsmanship, the film stretches out with a reliably enjoyable and transporting balance of faithful recreations and sweetly subtle new grace notes (an extra sigh, an added look, slightly richer subplots for the objects and the villagers). These moving considerations serve up exactly the movie its audience of pre-sold fans expects while noodling around the edges for new emotional terrain on the margins. It's doesn't all work. A few of the classic numbers are a touch clumsy as reimagined, usually through awkward attempts at rooting it all in gravity and probability. Did we need to know where the spotlight in “Be Our Guest” came from? Not really. We’re already buying a talking candlestick. So the movie loads up the airy fantasy with some over-explaining. But in other ways, the film’s core is strong, and the intoxicating tug of fairy tale logic is embroidered with appealing new embellishments, and the production is lavishly phony, a blend of theatrical fakery and computerized production design melded in velvety cool blues and gold cinematography. It borrows its best moments, but pulls off a likable, even transporting, new entertainment, with the music magnificently flowing, the images a picture book theme park, every big emotional beat landing, and the moving finale misty and warm in the best way.  You’ve seen it before, but, oh, how it works again!

Rich Girl Gone Too Far: THE BLING RING

The true story of L.A. teens from comfortably affluent families burglarizing the homes of celebrities is a big fat satirical target, but Sofia Coppola is too empathetic a director to get too savage with her filmmaking. In The Bling Ring she approaches the subject with tenderness and understanding, creating a vivid look into vacuousness. No frivolous froth or hysterical cautionary tale, this is a film that's concerned deeply about shallowness without condescending. (Well, okay, it's more like "rarely condescending.") Even if Coppola takes shots at their societal surroundings, she doesn't knock the kids themselves or the celebrity targets, some, like Paris Hilton, making brief cameos playing themselves. It’s a film that’s often very funny, not because it’s mean-spirited, but because it acknowledges the inherent seriousness of the silliness in which the characters find themselves, a fact that escapes them for much longer than you’d expect.

The film focuses on a group of stylish high schoolers who conflate brand worship with aspiring towards celebrity. They see the kind of famous represented by being a socialite in a dubiously real reality show like The Simple Life or The Hills and access to prestige brands that can be gained by it. Not actual prestige, mind you; the brands are all they’re after. These are kids who live in a town of celebrity and glamour of one kind or another. They spend their lives so close (and yet so far) to the lifestyles of the rich and famous. We see they’re frequently at a club Hilton, Kirsten Dunst and "a producer of Entourage" frequent. This group of kids takes advantage of the proximity of celebrity and the ease of information access to do something so simple it’s amazing no one had thought to take advantage of it before. They’re pioneers of a sort. The addresses of the stars are a Google away, as is news of the celebrity travel plans and social engagements.

At the core of the film are the ringleader (Katie Chang) and the boy (Israel Broussard) who has a crush on her and is drawn into her world. First, she opens unlocked cars and lifts money. Then, she moves on to wandering into the mansions of vacationing classmates. Soon, she, he, and eventually a small group of friends, go on riskier, more frequent trips, loitering in empty homes of Hilton – she’s a favorite – and Lindsay Lohan, Audrina Patridge (a star of The Hills), Orlando Bloom, Megan Fox, and Rachel Bilson as well. There’s a sense of mob mentality slowly bubbling up out of group dynamics as the crime escalates with more and more brand-name purses, dresses, shoes, and shades lifted from the target mansions. They’re showing off for each other, grabbing talismans of cultural currency and imagining they have the lifestyles they feel they deserve.

Coppola and her cinematographers Harris Savides and Christopher Blauvelt (who took over after Savides passed away) take a dynamic, but composed approach to shooting these antics. I particularly loved a static wide shot of a glassed-in home at night, rooms lighting up with the intruders scrambling in. There's little Ocean’s Eleven pleasing fizzle or Bonnie and Clyde tonal whiplash here. Their capers are coldly presented. What at first seems a surprising crime is drained of its surprise through repetition of the act - the home invasions are frequent and similar - and a camera that observes rather than sensationalizes. It’s all shiny surface, shallow, brightly lit by day, by night, vivid montage, the big houses cool oasis in humid darkness. The perspective from which Coppola views the events is easy and restrained, comfortable watching and cataloguing the goings-on. She’s objective, but hardly disinterested. The deceptive emptiness of the filmmaking sometimes makes this a hard film to enjoy, but a rich film to reflect upon.

The camera lingers on logos and representations of behavior. On laptop screens, gossip sites and Facebook converge. The Bling Ring is performing for each other on much the same playing field as celebrities in the public of the Internet. Their posts and their actions are both empty gestures representing tedious lives barely covered by the impression of activity. Even their break-ins lose the transgressive edge. They’re just as bored and purposeless anywhere; burglarizing and partying is all the same to them, shiny surfaces with which they can hide their emptiness. For the most part, the celebrities they rob exhibit similar shallowness, celebrity and lifestyles built solely around conspicuous consumption and living out tabloid fantasy, where what got you famous or infamous isn’t as important as the trappings of fame itself. (Though poor Bloom, Bilson and Fox, working actors, get roped into the mess as well, throwing off the pattern.)

The Bling Ring itself is made up of characters who seem like real kids, with some of the dialogue sounding so true in a you-couldn’t-write-something-so-perfectly-oblivious way that it could be plucked right from depositions and the reality show that a few of them would in real life end up on. The acting is loose and natural. Especially good are Taissa Farmiga, who played the troubled teen in the first season of American Horror Story and Emma Watson, Harry Potter’s Hermione. Used to playing smart young women, they prove themselves more than ever to be smart performers as well. Playing these rich California girls, they let their eyes go blank and accents drawl into Valley Girl stylings. They, as well as the other girls (Claire Julien and George Rock, in their debuts), blend together in the crowd scenes, all of them aspiring to stand out by fitting in. (That old chestnut.) The group is full of performances impressively inhabited. All the kids have a kind a vacant babbling, but it’s not limited to them. A mother played by Leslie Mann, the only one we more than glimpse here, has a pop pseudo-philosophy Secret-inspired homeschooling curriculum built around dream boards, wishful thinking and Adderall.

Coppola's film is an empathetic critique, even when the walls of justice, as represented by cops, lawyers, and judges, close in on the group. What felt consequence free for so long is suddenly not. The character played by Watson gets the last word, her character shamelessly promoting herself right up to the credits, claiming the crimes were a great “learning lesson,” and trying to put in a plug for her website. It had me thinking of Repo Man’s famous death scene of a white suburban punk in which the teen says "I know a life of crime has led me to this sorry fate, and yet, I blame society. Society made me what I am." The Bling Ring doesn't allow its characters this satirical insight. Society made them what they are and they'd greedily lap up the attention as long as society would mention them in the same breath as the people from whom they stole. They’re kids for whom being famous is to have your face on TMZ and so infamy gets you just as far.

Bitter(sweet) End: HARRY POTTER AND THE DEATHLY HALLOWS PART 2

Oh, what a treasure it is to return once again to Hogwarts, the school of witchcraft and wizardry, home to many magical adventures, endless inventive expressions of imagination, and the greatest fantasy creation of recent memory. The occasion for the return is Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2, in which the trio we have followed across seven films in ten years, Harry, Ron, and Hermione (Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, and Emma Watson) come back to school to finish what was started so long ago. The last film was spent in wandering prologue, finding scraps of the snaky, villainous Voldemort’s (Ralph Fiennes) soul in order to render him mortal once more. Now, their quest winding down, these three young people find themselves coming into their closest encounters yet with death and destruction. The story of Harry Potter, the boy who lived, and his fateful integrality in the evil plots of bad wizards, is coming to an end.

What I’ll miss most of all about this series, other than the memorable universe it has created and its many wondrous characters and creatures, is the way the filmmakers increasingly used the clout of their hugely successful endeavor to make big budget studio franchise productions of uncommon artistry and patience. Take, for example, the calm-before-the-storm that opens this particular installment, directed yet again by David Yates and adapted by Steve Kloves. Harry and his friends are huddled in a safe house on the shore, contemplating their next move. The goblin Griphook (Warwick Davis), rescued from the clutches of villainy at the end of the last film, sits brooding in an upstairs room. He may or may not help them; in fact he has the potential to do more harm than good. There’s a striking shot (it’s a film of striking shots courtesy cinematographer Eduardo Serra) that finds the main trio standing on the staircase, speaking in hushed voices, silhouetted against the bright white light streaming through the window half-glimpsed behind them. The composition creates a startling tension that would be lost entirely if the scene were shot in a more conventional way.

This way of creating extra tension through unexpected choices continues throughout the film. There’s a scene where characters sneaking past a dangerous dragon are encouraged to keep the creature at bay by making noise using handheld wooden devices that make an eerily soft rattle when shaken. There’s a sequence in which Harry and friends use the cover of nightfall to sneak into Hogsmeade, the village adjacent to Hogwarts, that finds the town blanketed in snow and lit with the soft, gorgeously creepy light of what appears to be hundreds of candles in just as many windows. Later, on the cusp of chaos erupting into the walls of Hogwarts, an entire army of Voldemort’s henchmen is both reduced and heightened in the image and overwhelming sound of one man crunching his foot just one step further, testing for the lack of a magical force field.  These are striking choices of filmmakers willing to make artistic choices with their surefire hit, rather than merely pushing out the bare minimum.

This being the conclusion of all this Harry Potter, Yates and his team have gone all out bringing memorable sights and characters from all previous installments back on screen, even if it’s just to give them one last great moment. With a cast this deeply and broadly talented, a veritable who’s who of the British acting world, it makes sense to put them to good use. The late, great Dumbledore (Michael Gambon) gets a nice ghostly speech. Maggie Smith’s Professor McGonagall gets her best moments in years with a great “man the battle stations” scene and a terrific standoff with Alan Rickman’s sneering Severus Snape. Speaking of Snape, Rickman, the ultimate acting MVP of the entire series, gets an impressive send-off that deepens and redeems his character, revealing his tormented complexity once and for all. Other choice moments are handed out for conflicted bad boy Draco Malfoy (Tom Felton), humble, charming Neville Longbottom (Matthew Lewis), the fiercely protective mother Weasley (Julie Walters), and the wild, evil Bellatrix Lestrange, (Helena Bonham Carter, who is asked to do the trickiest acting of her role when a character impersonates her with some Polyjuice Potion). Others, like Jim Broadbent, Emma Thompson, Robbie Coltrane, Gary Oldman, David Thewlis, Jason Isaacs, Helen McCrory, and John Hurt have little more to do than show up and get their close up, but it’s wonderful to see each and every one of them, even the seemingly long-absent Gemma Jones as Madame Pomfrey and Miriam Margolyes as Professor Sprout.

It’s bittersweet to see the cast and the sets one last time, especially with a film devoted entirely to tying up the loose ends and ending definitively and conclusively. With J.K. Rowling’s final book chopped inelegantly in two, stretching across two films, neither concluding chapter lives up to the full potential. The last film, a minor disappointment for me, was a frustratingly incomplete film with great moments but little momentum, a film that stopped rather than ended. Now Part 2 suffers from a similar problem, starting rather than beginning and spending the majority of its runtime with conflict and climax. Both films feel lopsided. I wish that we had been given one great four-hour finale instead of two mildly hobbled two-hour segments. To my mind, the split has had the unfortunate effect of rendering each half curiously small with neither allowed to use the other to more immediately inform the epic stakes of the full narrative arc.

And yet, the film moved me. It draws on the entire history of the franchise, using snippets of footage and music from past films in elegant flashback fashion that gain an added power through their mere reappearances. These are memories not just of a decade’s worth of incident in the lives of the characters, but a decade’s worth of memories for the audience as well. I grew older right alongside these kids. Now we’re all young adults. The filmmakers lucked into three wonderful children who happened to grow into wonderful actors. The whole sweep of the franchise has been about aging, about learning, about growing and changing. In a lovely epilogue, we see that, though the immediate story of Harry Potter may have ended, the story of Hogwarts, the story of this magical world will continue, delighting the next generation just as it did their parents.

The Beginning of the End: HARRY POTTER AND THE DEATHLY HALLOWS PART 1

The filmmakers of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows have been telling us that the decision to split the film into two parts was made with purely creative reasons, the better to faithfully reproduce J.K. Rowling’s text, but having seen Part 1 I can only think that the reason had to have been Warner Brothers’ desire to double their profits. This is a decision that has only hobbled the creativity. Sure, Stuart Craig’s production design is outstanding. The cast is excellent. But director David Yates and screenwriter Steve Kloves don’t quite know what to do with all this extra screen time on their hands. They create some really wonderful moments but separate them with meandering and wheel spinning that distracts and, ultimately, makes the experience feel like a let down. Alexandre Desplat’s score can barely even manage a few bars of John William’s great original themes. It’s like someone promised fireworks only to set off a couple of firecrackers and call it good enough.

Oh, the fun one swift three-and-a-half-hour finale could have been. Instead, we have been served up a two-and-a-half hour prelude to next summer’s main attraction. There’s a lot of monotonous exposition to be found here. The film begins by picking up where last year’s wonderful Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince left off. Harry (Daniel Radcliffe), Ron (Rupert Grint), and Hermione (Emma Watson) are facing a posthumous task from Headmaster Albus Dumbledore (Michael Gambon) to destroy the devices that allow the evil Voldemort (Ralph Fiennes) to remain immortal. Meanwhile, evil forces are gathering, taking over the Ministry of Magic, installing the snaky Severus Snape (Alan Rickman) to the position of Headmaster of Hogwarts, striking fear in the hearts of all good wizards and witches, and spilling menace into the Muggle world.

Our three heroes are unsure how to proceed. A host of British character actors are there to help them, at first. Returning once again are, among others, David Thewlis, Brendan Gleeson, Robbie Coltrane, Julie Walters, Mark Williams, John Hurt, and Toby Jones. New to the cast are Rhys Ifans as a threatened publisher and Bill Nighy as the new Minister of Magic. The adults are used most sparingly in the film. Even the villains, including Helena Bonham Carter, Jason Isaacs, Helen McCrory and Timothy Spall, are rarely glimpsed. The film features our three heroes alone for much of the run time, saddled with a somewhat repetitive, often perfunctory, script. Luckily, by this point they’re wonderful actors. I suppose growing up around all these supremely talented thespians will do wonders from a young actor.

But the rich ensemble is greatly missed, as are the magical riches of Craig’s sets for Hogwarts. I know they’ll be utilized to a far greater extent in the next installment, but that knowledge did little to ease the empty feeling where Hogwarts belongs. There’s a sense that the filmmakers, taking their cues from Rowling, are deliberately thwarting series-finale nostalgia by shaking up the form of the series, sending our characters adrift into the Muggle wilderness, hunted and stalked. Indeed, there are many affecting and effective moments to be found here. A memory-changing spell opens the film on a sad note, a daring infiltration into the Ministry of Magic is thrilling, a coffee shop shootout is tense, a small dance as a respite amidst danger is tender and touching, and a deadly dark cloud of fear that bursts forth from an evil enchantment sets the stage for a harrowing emotional high point for the film.

I’m sure that the film sets up the narrative and emotional points needed to launch into the conclusion proper. Having read the books, I can see that the filmmakers haven’t lost the thread of the plot. Having loved the movies, I can tell that the technical qualities of this entry are as good as any. What’s missing is a sense of shape, of drive, of a journey. So many of the books’ subplots have been stripped away from the previous adaptations that it’s hard to have a film that tries to make some of them matter without prior introduction. (Have we even seen the character Mundungus before?) The details don’t always feel properly relevant. We begin the film knowing that Harry and his friends are in danger from an increasingly powerful source of evil and end the film with little gained or lost. There are some nice moments, sure, but the film, as a whole, should feel a whole lot livelier. It leaves much to be desired. I don’t know what I was expecting, heading into the film knowing full well that this was only half a Harry Potter movie and fully aware that it would likely be a faithful adaptation of the dullest patch of plotting in the book series. As should have been expected, the film is the first of the series to not feel densely packed with characters, plot points, and magic.

Like the first several hundred pages of the book, Deathly Hallows Part 1 begins to set up a finale. Just as those pages alone would not make a satisfying book, this is not a satisfying film. After the full story is complete, the film could look retroactively rosier, but as of right now the experience of seeing the film is more than a little tedious. This film can’t, and maybe shouldn’t, stand alone, but I wish it did a little more to stand out as something better than a mere mechanical set-up for the forthcoming resolution. Sure, it’s nice to see these characters and this world once again, but I’m looking ahead. I’m looking forward to (hopefully) having more time to luxuriate in the world’s imaginative details, enjoy the deeply talented ensemble, and to experience the magic once again.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (2009)

At this point, it is satisfying enough to go to a new Harry Potter movie looking for subtle differences, similar themes and scenes played in different keys and at different tempos. With six films, the series is consistently good in all aspects of its production. It’s simply enjoyable enough to be reunited with these characters, these actors, for another few hours. There’s a joy to be found in merely seeing these people again. Oh, look how they’ve grown, we can say about the child – no, young adult now – actors. More importantly, once we are absorbed into the world, we can say Look, there’s Hagrid! McGonagall! Flitwick! Why ignore the pleasures of entering into a fantasy world and enjoying its texture, its populace, its richness of imagination?

With The Half-Blood Prince, the Potter films have become a firmly mature piece of fantasy storytelling. This movie cannot be dismissed as mere child’s play. It’s a beautifully languid film of great humor and emotional impact, powerful in its exploration of the ways the past intrudes on the present, the ways children of all ages will behave when hoping to carry out the wishes of a parental figure. In this film, there are two students on two separate missions for their elders. There's Potter himself, working for Dumbledore, but Draco Malfoy stands out in a wrenching and tense plotline that gives Tom Felton some real acting to do after five films of practicing his sneering. Malfoy has been chosen by Voldemort to carry out an aspect of his evil plan, which sends Malfoy into an unbearable angst. He becomes more than a stock bully, more than a proxy for his more villainous father (played by the great Jason Issacs). Malfoy gains great depth and becomes a richer, more interesting character through his torment.

All of the characters get richer characterization, more emotional dialogue, this time around. The characters are older once more, sending the teens headlong into fully realized crushes and romances in addition to the usual doom and gloom of the foreboding encroaching forces of darkness. At times the film threatens to become a tad too sudsy or cutesy but pulls back at just the right moments. The lead trio – still Radcliffe, Grint, and Watson – have become more confident and skilled, once again, successfully navigating this tricky tone. Interspersed among the students' antics and the dark wizard’s evil schemes, as usual, is the great adult cast. Some, like Maggie Smith and Robbie Coltrane, have little more to do than show up once in a while to remind us of their presence and their perfect inhabitation of their characters. Others, like the always great Alan Rickman and Michael Gambon, in their best performances of the series, get more to do this time around, meatier monologues, shocking revelations and satisfying moments. Still others, like Jim Broadbent, are new to the series and fit in perfectly. Has there ever been a better cast series of movies? Every role thus far is perfectly filled and perfectly played.

Taking the directorial reins once again is David Yates, who merely competently handled the last installment. Here, working with veteran – but new to the series – cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel, he creates one of the finest looking Potter films yet, casting even the lightest, funniest scenes in a haze of melancholy. The compositions are splendid; a charming early scene looks straight up the middle of a winding staircase with different characters at different heights. Later, an underwater scene plays out in a long, nearly silent, take with a beautiful dapple of green and orange. It’s ostensibly a scene of terror, and so it is, but it’s shot through with a deadly hypnotic visual charm. Throughout the film there are scenes of equal skill. It’s as if Terrence Malick was collaborating with the ghost of Orson Welles to create such skillful visual interest. It’s an approach that is vastly different from Cuarón’s work in Prisoner of Azkaban, but an approach that creates an equal effect. With an effortlessly moving camera revealing angles and crannies, gorgeous colors and palpable atmosphere, never before has the wizard world, Hogwarts specifically, looked so eminently livable, explicable, fit to explore.

This is a film in no hurry, drunk on its own mood and tone. At first glance, that may seem like a backhanded compliment, and for a lesser movie it would be, but after so many hours of Potter films, I care about this world, these characters, and I feel a genuine swelling of happiness and familiarity in getting to spend more time here. It helps that the mood and tone are first-rate and evocative. We’re truly in horror territory at times, with long gliding shots down gloomy hallways, creepily distended tension, and even a few great jump moments. At other times, we’re in a great boarding-school melodrama, with easy comedy, moody students, shifting allegiances, and a sinister and strange faculty. This is a magical series indeed, with so much feeling and warmth consistently present amidst its shifting tones. The film feels of one piece, sending warm laughter and cold shivers in equal measure, sometimes shifting in seconds. (Look at the scene involving the love potion cure for an example). Near the film’s end, we are given one of the most elegantly moving scenes in the entire series, a scene that fills the screen with a soft light that, however briefly, chases away the encroaching clouds of darkness. The movie does the same. It's a fine piece of escapism, a fine piece of Hollywood craftsmanship, and one of the finest Potters.

The Half-Blood Prince succeeds not just because it’s a compelling world, a gripping story, or an interesting allegory, though it is all three. It succeeds not just because it has excellent production values, great source material, and a hard-working and uniformly excellent cast and crew, though it has those too. It succeeds because we care about these characters, have seen them grow, age, and change, and are consistently presented reason to have confidence that this series will do them – and their source material – justice.

Franchise Flashback: Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (2007)

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix is a dark and often scary film, satisfying in most of the usual Potter film ways with top notch design, effects, and costuming. But do I need to say the production design, special effects, and costuming are exceedingly well done? At this point it would do just as well to simply state that it’s a Harry Potter movie as excellence in these areas is now a given. It’d be more surprising if it failed on those counts.

What is surprising this time around, after four consistent improvements, is a backslide. There’s pacing problems again. The movie is rushed, smashing past and glossing over what seems like important points. Other times the film moves a little languidly. This adaptation is perhaps the most awkward of the five, most likely a result of the switch in screenwriter. Steve Kloves adapted the first four books, and has adapted the last two books, but chose to take a breather with this installment, leaving the work to series newbie Michael Goldenberg. Now, I mean no slight to Goldenberg, who surely did the best he could in the time allotted and with the dual constraints of honoring Rowling’s novel and fitting within the context of an already established franchise. His adaptation, though, is just not as polished as it should be. To be fair, he was adapting my least favorite book of the series. On the screen, as well as on the page, the plot in this installment seems like so much wheel spinning. There are great concepts and visuals (we finally visit the Ministry of Magic!) but the plot is merely laying track for the impending endgame of the franchise.

Putting that aside, however, and we are left with the wonderful production, and the continuingly great acting from the cast. It almost goes without saying that the kids are older and even better. Radcliffe brings a great intensity to the angst of Potter’s emotional state; after the events of the last story, he’s surely suffering from post-traumatic stress. Watson and Grint do well, as do the other kids in the cast. The adults are still a wonderful patchwork of British character actors both new and returning, though many of them pop up only long enough to say a few lines and show that, yes, they're still in the series.

Speaking of new, the director is new once again. British TV veteran David Yates does an admirable job with this fantasy universe, even if he’s not taking as many risks as previous directors in the series like Cuarón and Newell. Joining the cast is Helena Bonham Carter as a pure force of unpredictability. I get the feeling the only direction she needed was "crazy witch" and she was off and running.

But the best new cast member in this installment is the new teacher who springs from Rowling’s writing to life: Dolores Umbridge, every horrible teacher you’ve ever had rolled into the worst teacher imaginable, a torturously warped Dahl-like figure of pleasant authoritarian cruelty. Imelda Staunton plays her to such heights of perfection that I still wish she’d gotten an Oscar nomination. (She’s also the inspiration for composer Nicholas Hooper, filling in for the still absent Williams, to create his best piece of music for the film, one that fits Williams established mood and orchestration perfectly).Watch the way she struts across Hogwarts, using spells to pull the student body closer towards her view of proper, which has long been hopelessly warped through years of bureaucratic training to be endlessly shortsighted. Watch the way the smile stays tremulously frozen on her face when confronted with the truth that doesn’t square up with what she is certain is true. And watch the way she pleasantly stirs her tea while torturing a student. And watch her smug satisfaction as she hangs increasingly Animal-Farm-style rules on a wall of the Great Hall.

Speaking of Orwell, the Ministry of Magic, especially leader Cornelius Fudge, is the major factor in the political resonance in this installment. The book and the movie were both released during the second term of George W. Bush, and I vividly recall the political themes really hitting me when I read and watched the story unfold. The erosion of civil liberties, the anti-intellectualism, the close-mindedness and willful ignorance of facts, really resonated with me, so much so that a late scene in the film that finds an oversized banner of Fudge ripped to shreds as a byproduct of battle, and another that sees Umbridge’s rules crash down, were some of the most cathartic political sights in the summer of ’07 for me. These feelings rush back to me as I watch, now tinged with an odd nostalgia. Though it seems strange to be nostalgic for something that happened only two years ago, it’s easy to see that I’m already thinking So that’s how I felt back then.

But for all the positives, the movie’s only serviceable, though still a slick and exciting entry in one of the most solid of all film franchises, especially those that last this long. But then again, what’s the competition at this point, with five released titles? Friday the 13th? Police Academy? I’ll stick with Potter.

Franchise Flashback: Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2005)

The third installment of the Harry Potter series was the first to really stick. The fourth, Goblet of Fire, is the first to pack a wallop. This time under the direction of British director Mike Newell, the film is, like the others, perfect in craftsmanship but is the first in possession of a well-crafted feeling of momentum. It’s all climax, sustained for two-and-a-half hours, without ever feeling its length, constantly besting itself creating faster, scarier, and more exciting moments throughout enough set pieces to sustain a half-dozen lesser films.

Benefiting from the structure Rowling used in her book – there’s a tournament going on and Harry is a participant – the movie tears from one moment to the next, always building, and never stalling. After a scene of true horror – with an elderly man investigating what should be an empty house –we start the film proper at the Quidditch World Cup, a sequence of sensational effects and gut-twisting heights. From there we have an introduction of visiting schools to Hogwarts, a suspenseful, yet whimsical, introduction to the Goblet of Fire, and then the tournament is about to begin. From there we have dragons and mer-people and ghosts and golden eggs and mazes and murders. The tension is heightened with each new feat of effects and emotion, so that by the time we get to a wailing-strings graveyard resurrection the movie is almost unbearable suspenseful. That this sequence is followed up by an evocative punch of paternal pain (it lingers long after the movie ends), a razor-sharp reveal of a double-agent, and a somber announcement shows that the movie isn’t stopping for anything.

The reason this relentless entertainment never gets numbing is the variety. Sure, we have sensational action sequences and moments straight out of a genuine horror movie, but sprinkled in amongst these are touching, sweetly human, character moments. These culminate in the middle of the film at a school ball which may be my favorite sequence of all the films so far. The music swells, the characters arrive, and the dance begins. It’s a sensational feat of staging, design and costuming, sure, but it also allows the teenaged characters to be just that, in a sumptuous yet relatable setting. The movies are at their best when they are mere magical twists on the most muggle of feelings, like the first film’s mirror scene of longing, the classroom moments, the clashes with odd teachers and boisterous bullies, hurt feelings, wayward children and young love.

But none of it, none of it, would work if it weren’t for the amazing cast that – young and old alike – grows in size and talent with each new installment. The kids, older again, and more talented too, improve once more, growing into fine young actors with infrequent clunky line readings and confident screen presences. Daniel Radcliffe has become comfortable with his relatable reluctant hero while Emma Watson and Rupert Grint have developed excellent comedic timing and wonderfully open faces that reveal turbulent emotions and thoughtful eyes. The adult cast’s comfortability with their roles grows stronger as well with Alan Rickman, with his jet-black hair and slow snapping of lines, a continuing standout.

New this time is Brendan Gleeson, in a gleefully ominous role, and Miranda Richardson, a hoot as the worst kind of gossiping reporter. Also new is a slinky, serpentine Ralph Fiennes as the evil Voldemort himself, in the trappings of what is surely one of the most creepily designed movie villains of all time, right up there with Hannibal Lecter and Darth Vader. He’s truly terrifying.

Mike Newell directs with a sumptuous eye for color and detail. This is a pure visual delight that strikes the perfect balance between the storybook tableaus of Columbus and the dense and busy camerawork of Cuarón. The colors are vivid with eye-popping earth tones and gorgeously magical, ethereal even, bright blues. The tone is fluid, skipping effortlessly from creeping horror, pounding thrills, melodrama, laughs, tears and kisses and back again. Hogwarts feels the most like a real school this time with the emotions, playfulness, and drama of real high school students.

This is the most involving, the most fulfilling as a motion picture. It moves so fast, while still retaining both clarity and breathing room, I could have watched for much longer. It’s also the most expansive, the most dynamic, and the most dangerously menacing of the first four films. This is the Potter films at their best, successfully balancing while riding the lines between child and adult, fun and scary, tragic and tragicomic perfectly while also managing to capture Rowling’s tome’s tone.

Note: John Williams sits this installment out; that year alone he’d already scored Star Wars: Episode III, Memoirs of a Geisha, Munich, and War of the Worlds. He’s greatly missed, even though his replacement, Patrick Doyle, uses a few of Williams’ themes and creates some nice musical moments of his own.

Franchise Flashback: Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004)

With Chris Columbus leaving the Harry Potter series, Mexican director Alfonso Cuarón stepped into the void creating Prisoner of Azkaban as a weird and wonderful installment, besting the first two installments in nearly every way, not by smashing expectations, but by taking the great work and expanding and prodding it into better and more daring places. With this movie, the series is officially not exclusively kids’ stuff. Cuarón has a restless camera that gazes about this darker plot as it shakes and slides and shimmies up and down the corridors of Hogwarts, the streets of small communities of wizards and even the dull suburban streets where Harry spends his summers.

The film opens there with a delightful scene of macabre humor as Potter, in anger, expands his Muggle-aunt like a balloon (she had it coming). Then we’re off to Hogwarts where the students are all atwitter about the escaped killer, Sirius Black (Gary Oldman), who is widely assumed to be hunting Harry. As a result of this new threat (more real-world than the more conceptual, fantasy threats of the first two stories) totally creepy guards known as Dementors, sucking all cheer and warmth from the characters – and the screen – with their very arrival, keep careful watch, casting a chill and setting the tone for fresher menace in this outing.

The kids’ skills have grown once again with the central trio of Radcliffe, Watson and Grint getting more talented as well as slimmer, taller, leaner, older. The adult cast continues to satisfy, each installment adding more and more perfectly cast character actors. This time, in addition to Oldman, who brings intensity to his several nice moments in the climax, there are Emma Thompson, as a greatly loony divination professor, Julie Christie as a weary tavern proprietor, and Timothy Spall, who has one scene and makes the most of it, turning his face into a ball of ticks and twitches.

But the new cast member who stands out the most is David Thewlis as the new Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher (the school seems to have that position open every year). Thewlis has a warm, easy emotional relationship with Radcliffe. In their character’s conversations there’s a sense of real connection, a building relationship of trust that starts as mentor-student and turns into something closer to father-son. They form the emotional bedrock of the film.

Between films, Richard Harris, the man who so skillfully inhabited Dumbledore, passed away. He is replaced by Michael Gambon, an equally skilled but also very different actor. He brings to Dumbledore a slightly different spin but doesn’t stray too far from the conception of the character originated by Harris. I do not envy him having to walk the thin line between creating his own character and replicating what has already worked for the series, but Gambon is up to the task.

As with the cast and casting, the score, design, and costuming continues to be top of the line (John Williams even uses the occasion to write the single best theme ever composed for a Potter movie), but what makes this installment so distinctive and compelling is Cuarón’s direction. He and screenwriter Steve Kloves realize they are making an adaptation, not an illustration. They are not supplanting the book, merely telling the same basic story in a different medium. The plot is tweaked and condensed to become a more cinematic rendering even if it crashes through plot points at times. And through it all is Cuarón’s relentless specificity.

This is a deliriously detailed and tactile picture, packed with background information and scrupulous attention to every corner of the screen with grace notes of whimsy, like a tree shaking snow off of its branches, an aunt appearing in the background sky, and the camera floating (symbolically) twice through the gears of a clock. Cuarón allows the camera a fluid grace to glide through the world which is just as magical but has a greater realism in feeling and tone. This movie gets under my skin. The fantastical realism extends to the feelings of awakening adolescence within the young characters. Cuarón understands the yearning, the mystery, of aging and depicts the vivid mental states by understanding that magic does not make these kids any less like kids. One of the best scenes, and one of the simplest, involves a group of boys eating candy and joking with each other in a way any group of 13-year-olds might. The best effect of the film is the sound-effect accompanying a very satisfying punch thrown in the face of a bully.

Cuarón makes the fantasy a wild extrapolation on the characters' uneasy, awkward steps towards adulthood, finding the intrinsic link between basic human experiences and the phantasmagorical tales we tell that is the hallmark of all great fantasy from Grimm to Rowling to Pan’s Labyrinth. This Potter is the first of the franchise to not just delight and entertain, but to sting and resonate as well.

Franchise Flashback: Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (2002)

The second Harry Potter film, Chamber of Secrets, once again directed by Chris Columbus and adapted by Steve Kloves, is an interesting film, poised on the brink of the maturity the films would develop while still keeping a foot firmly in the kid-friendly zone. Darkness is starting to creep around the edges but this is still very much a kids’ film, broad and accessible with only teases of the direction the franchise will go. This is a film that simmers with an underlying creepiness, an uneasy sense of danger, but it never explodes into full-blown terror. The students at Hogwarts are threatened by a mysterious menace and the creaky camera angles and slow pans down dark hallways help to close the danger in on the characters.

It’s fun to see the kids (Radcliffe, Watson, and Grint) start to grow in the craft of acting. The first film found them naturalistic with the kind of easy presence that child actors can have where they seem to be barely aware of the artifice of it all. Here, the untrained magic is gone. They’re miniature professionals by now, but it’s astonishing how skilled they are this early in their careers. The adult cast is, once again, uniformly excellent with the added bonus of the welcome addition of Kenneth Branagh playing the delightfully loopy Professor Gilderoy Lockheart. Branagh delivers hilarious line readings made even funnier by his pauses, his shifting eyes, and his easy, lopsided grin. He provides a vibrant lightheartedness matched only by the kids’ naturally buoyant and quick-witted dispositions. Together, the four of them do much to ward off the darkness of the plot that could easily have slipped the whole film into ponderousness.

Once again, the score from John Williams is superb, as is the production design. The effects work is a little sharper this time around, more easily convincing than the often clunky sequences the first time around. The artisans behind the franchise have gained confidence from their work in the first film and seem to be using the confidence to great effect here, allowing themselves to push their crafts further than before. In general, the look and sound of the picture is even sharper and more refined than before (listen to those spiders in the forest, especially in surround sound), expanding with the expanding needs of Rowling’s plot.

Despite that expanding plot, the adaptation by Kloves makes slightly better sense of what to cut and what to keep when pruning the plot from book to film. The film plunges into the plot proper and moves much quicker than the first film. The puzzle-solving climax of the first has been replaced with a more satisfying action beat. These were the books’ climaxes too, but this one translates better to film. Unfortunately the movie then takes too long a time to finally end, stalling through a slightly unnecessary dialogue scene and then dribbling into a puddle of sentimentality that doesn’t quite fit by excessively applauding a character (charming though he may be) that has been pushed to the sidelines for most of the plot.

But no matter, the film is still an entertaining experience, faster, funnier, and creepier than the first, if ultimately a smidge less satisfying. Even though it repeats some mistakes and makes new ones, there is an admirable sense of growth and change shifting within the filmmaking, rare within franchises of this magnitude, fixing what was barely broken to begin with. This is an attitude that will serve the franchise well. The craftsmen behind the undertaking realized they did a great job the first time and, instead of growing complacent looking at the box office numbers and patting themselves on the back, decided to best themselves. If it didn't kill its momentum in its last few scenes - and was a bit more streamlined throughout - the movie as a whole would be up to the task of besting its predecessor.

Franchise Flashback: Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (2001)

With this Wednesday's release of the sixth Harry Potter film, it's the perfect time to revisit the franchise from the beginning to see how it holds up and to chart how it has grown.

By 2001, the Harry Potter books were a full blown cultural phenomenon, with four books published and three more on the way, each published book setting records on the bestseller lists. And they were good, too. Critics, children and parents adored author J.K. Rowling’s imaginative look at a young boy, Harry Potter, and his experiences at Hogwarts, a magical British boarding school, and the deft mixing of Dahl-like macabre with the swift thrills of a modern blockbuster. So it was only inevitable that the books would become modern blockbusters. The first, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, was released in the fall of 2001 and quickly became one of the biggest hits of the post-9/11 weeks.

Now, eight years later, I returned to this movie, wondering what I would find. The movie is older and so am I. Which one of us has changed? Despite my trepidation, the movie holds up remarkably well. Director Chris Columbus directs with a crisp, storybook style that’s rather unremarkable but has the benefit of showing off the resplendent production design by Stuart Craig. The walls of Hogwarts are vibrant and wondrous with floating props (and ghosts), shifting stairs, and a vast population of moving artwork. There’s a real feeling of magic here, awfully entertaining, but is capable of being awfully generic. More inventiveness went into designing the costumes and sets than finding ways to film them.

But this is, after all, an introduction. We, as the filmmakers themselves, are getting our bearings in the cinematic world that is being spun from Rowling’s words. This is the first time we heard the notes of the tremendous score by John Williams, a work of cinematic scoring that equals his great themes for the Star Wars, Indiana Jones, and Superman series. This is the first time we’ve seen the charming child actors who are the leads. Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, and Emma Watson are almost impossibly charming – and cute – little actors, fully capable of the task before them: holding their own against a solid cast of British character actors. Richard Harris (Dumbledore), Maggie Smith (McGonagall), and Robbie Coltrane (Hagrid) are the lead adults inhabiting their literary characters with warmth and perfection. (Speaking of perfection, there’s Alan Rickman as Professor Severus Snape. In a perfectly cast film, he’s the most perfect). Among all the cast the lines are performed with perfection, tripping across the tongues in melodious British flavor. Between the score and the cast, this would be a movie great just to listen to if the visuals weren’t so strong.

This is the first time the camera has shown us the accoutrements of this world, a vivid and imaginative world that has rightfully taken its place among the greatest fantasy settings in cinema history, the kind of settings that cause reverence and awe among filmgoers both young and old. This film has a childlike sense of wonder at its world, and also a more kid-friendly tone. As such, the story is slighter than the others to date; the pacing is a little awkward. What works in the book doesn’t always work on the screen. The filmmakers would gain confidence in later movies to bend and condense more than they did here. Scenes of exposition drag and the finale is a bit too puzzle-like to be truly engaging.

But still, I was enchanted with the imagination of the proceedings, the red-blooded adventure, the charm of the visuals (even the few effects that now – already – feel dated), and even the nostalgia that is already settling around the film, cloaking it with a protective layer of memory. There’s real magic here, though, in the way little moments charm and big moments cause the heart to swell. It doesn’t always work moment to moment (every so often it looks like a movie about people in funny hats) but it settles satisfyingly in the end. It’s a solid start to what has shaped up to be a great franchise.

Stay tuned to this very blog for further posts on previous Potters which should pop up like clockwork through the new release, culminating with a review of the new film late next week.