Don't Tell Mom the Boogeyman's Back:A BABYSITTER'S GUIDE TO MONSTER HUNTING

Older kids know that becoming a babysitter is a portal to power, an important first step into a larger world. So of course it only makes sense that there could be a secret order of babysitters sworn to secrecy and pledged to protect their innocent charges from the Boogeyman. That’s the charm of A Babysitter’s Guide to Monster Hunting, which is imbued with the tween energy of getting some measure of control over your life, while still bound by the duties of being a kid. It stars Artemis Fowl’s Tamara Smart as a plucky math whiz teen who’d rather be at the cool kids’ Halloween party instead of watching her mother’s boss’s son (Ian Ho). Still, it pays well. And mother said she must. So off she goes, gathering the necessary sheets of instructions from the cold, persnickety mother (Tamsen McDonough) — swanning about dressed as an Ice Queen, the irony not lost on our hero — and seeing the kid safely off to bed, despite his hesitations and stories of vivid nightmares. Shame, then, that the Boogeyman (Tom Felton, looking like a glam Tim Burton castoff, or like something out of the classic DCOM Don’t Look Under the Bed) arrives and carries the tot off to a dream-harvesting underworld. This is where our hapless babysitter is introduced to the noble secret monster-hunter cause, by way of a super cool older girl (Oona Laurence). She swoops in a motorized scooter wearing a leather jacket and slick cotton candy hair perfectly coifed. She knows all the tricks, and so the two girls zip around tracking the gently designed beasties that lead the way to the villain’s lair, with stops at a basement laboratory, the aforementioned Halloween party, and the Art Deco home of a silent-film star turned witch (Indya Moore). Scripted by Joe Ballarini from his own children’s book of the same name, the whole thing is fast-paced and cute. It is carried along with gentle buoyancy, adventurous without being overwhelming, and possessed of only the mildest of creep factors. It’s a kids picture and knows it. Director Rachel Talalay (Tank Girl) brings the lively Goosebumps by way of Spy Kids style, with sharp blocking, sparkling fantastical sets, and zippy action. She also coaxes the sweetest, appealing performances out of her young cast, steering hard into their likability, and the bouncy young person’s adventure of it all. It’s an all around charmer.

Pride and Prejudices: BELLE

Bracingly sharp, Amma Asante’s Belle is a lovely character study and handsome period piece that navigates its complexities with invigorating intelligence and dexterous empathy. Set in 18th century England and based on a true story, it tells of Dido Elizabeth Belle (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), a mixed-race child of Captain Sir John Lindsay (Matthew Goode). She was raised in his absence by his aunt and uncle, Lord and Lady Mansfield (Emily Watson and Tom Wilkinson), on a gorgeous estate. Freed from a life of slavery by virtue of her father’s station in life, she’s still trapped by the color of her skin.

As she grows older, Dido questions the social order, asking why she’s too high class to dine with the maids, and yet too low to dine with guests. Her inheritance gives her independent wealth, a luxury many women, including her close cousin Elizabeth (Sarah Gadon), do not have. Dido does not need to marry for rank or income. She’s lucky, and yet stuck. Women are property no matter the color, not all slaves, but the well-to-do are stuck in a gilded cage of societal rules and expectations.

The film is stimulating as it gracefully turns circles around issues of race, gender, and class. It illuminates a time and place, deftly laying out the reasons for Dido’s circumstances, a rigid social structure that keeps women and people of color oppressed. Her uncle is the highest judge in the land, hearing the case of a slave ship that dumped its human cargo overboard and is now suing their insurers who refuse to compensate for the damages. Through this legal argument, brought into their house by his prospective pupil (Sam Reid), Dido is drawn into larger social awareness of the struggles of people who share her color.

She’s also growing keenly aware of the struggles of her sex, as she and her cousin are of age to be courted. Her cousin draws the attentions of a miserable racist wretch (Tom Felton) with a pushy, gossiping mother (Miranda Richardson), scrabbling to improve their family’s rank through marriage. Her other son (James Norton) is drawn to Dido, who knows not what to do with circumstances she was hardly expecting. Together, the girls have the blessing of belonging to a respected family, but Dido's difficulties are unique and hers alone.

It is in many ways a traditional period piece, with beautiful gowns, ornate sets, a lush orchestral score, and fastidious design, a dash of Austen romance here, a bit of Dickensian social commentary there. But Amma Asante’s writing and direction is uncommonly assured, well written, wonderfully photographed, and briskly paced. It lays out an argument for basic rights for women and people of color by having its historical characters grappling with these questions literally and explicitly throughout the course of the plot. They stand as symbols of the argument – gossiping racists, sniveling misogynists, noble activists, brooding legal scholars – and yet never appear to be merely constructs of a debate come to life.

The writing is in a clever, elevated Merchant-Ivory style, wittier and lively, full of fantastically droll asides, tremendous personality in all the supporting parts (including a small, choice turn for Penelope Wilton) and rich with evocative subtext. And the plot and theme go hand in hand, stirring and resonant social consciousness informed by character every step of the way. And what remarkable characters! All are colorfully brought to life with fine, full performances memorable in personality and conflict. Dido, especially, is imbued with great humanity by Mbatha-Raw, whose performance is wisely situated between privilege and disadvantage, open curiosity and wounded cynicism, hopeful romance and pragmatic resignation.

The movie so vividly and convincingly sketches in a portrait of her world, blessed with wealth and advantage tempered by the prejudice of a power structure that restricts women’s choices and confined the mother she never knew to a life of slavery. The filmmaking is tenderly attuned to the nuances of its lead performance. There’s a remarkable scene in which Dido’s suitor tells her that she’s so lucky he’s willing to overlook the curse of color her mother passed down to her. Her eyes well up with the faintest pained mistiness, and yet her proper smile never quivers or falters.

Assante unfailingly illuminates such breathtaking moments of emotional and psychological nuance. Unlike 12 Years a Slave, which summoned up detailed historical horror with unflinching punishment and cruelty, the better to make us wince and feel it, Belle goes about its effect in a tremendously inviting and empathetic way, making us feel the pointed sting of rejection, the quick gasp of love, the heartache of internalized oppression. In a scene late in the picture where Dido dares sneak out to see a man who may love her for who she is – all of who she is – there’s a trembling insert shot, no more than a split second, of her neck, a nervous tensing. Earlier, we saw them meet in a garden, a late night happenstance that also found another insert shot, a hand on a hip, a sharp intake of breath.

We see this sharp observation and warm compassion in scenes of dialogue between many combinations of characters in this ensemble as people slowly figure out how best to reconcile their notions of right and wrong with the rules of the society at the time, how best to do the right thing. The movie sits closely, attentively with its characters, making them flesh and blood human beings treated with understanding and compassion. In doing so, it casts light not just on history, but on modern tensions and fears, core dehumanizing inequalities that go by different names, but linger, no matter how circumstances may have changed in the meantime. I found the film completely engaging, expressively smart, and deeply moving.

Go Ape: RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES

The main character of Rise of the Planet of the Apes, a combination reboot / remake / prequel of the kind increasingly common to moribund franchises these days, is a startlingly well-drawn, patiently developed and deeply sympathetic creation. He’s an incredibly talented youngster who grows exponentially in intelligence and capacity as he ages. One unfortunate day, he attacks a neighbor while defending a member of his surrogate family and is locked away in a prison-like environment. There, he discovers his own kind and begins to plot an escape. His name is Caesar and he is a chimpanzee.

All of his character development is done with a handful of sign language symbols sparsely translated, but otherwise through entirely wordless passages in which body language and small shifts of expression – it’s all in the eyes – tell more than you need to know about his emotional state. Even more impressive than just the mere fact that an expensive studio production would willingly turn over so much time to quiet and nuance is that Caesar is a computer-generated character, quite possibly the most convincing one yet. He’s performed via motion capture by Andy Serkis, the same digitally-assisted chameleon who breathed life into the pixels of Gollum in The Lord of the Rings and the giant gorilla in Peter Jackson’s King Kong. Not only is Caesar convincing, but he captured my emotions as well. I had a rooting interest in this character and was on the edge of my seat waiting to see what he would learn, what he would decide to do next.

When Caesar arrives amongst other primates, very convincing effects work all, in an animal control prison lorded over by an inattentive Brian Cox and a sneering Tom Felton, encounters with chimps, orangutans, and gorillas are similarly convincing, thrilling, and suspenseful. The hierarchies of this little prison society are made startlingly clear in what seem like lengthy sequences in which the only sounds are growls, snorts, and various ape vocalizations. By the time the simian inmates form a makeshift army – after some convoluted sci-fi business about enhanced intelligence – their strategy meetings are similarly thrillingly clear despite the lack of speaking. It’s all in the eyes, which in these cases are most definitely windows to souls.

If this movie were mostly just apes, this review would be on-track to be a nearly unqualified rave. As it is, the film has lots of human stuff dragging down the level of quality. Perhaps that’s because, unlike for the apes, writers Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver are required to write speaking role for the humans. There is so much intelligence, thought, and humanity in the wordless ape roles, that it’s a shame that the movie lacks human intelligence. Oh, they all play their parts just fine but the dialogue is really clunky and the plot requires some humans to make Very Bad Decisions for the sake of moving things along. The lead human is scientist James Franco who is close to a breakthrough in his work for a cure to Alzheimer’s. We see that he likes to take his work home with him when we learn that his father (John Lithgow) is suffering from said disease. When Franco’s work testing his cure on chimps is shut down by his Big Pharma boss (David Oyelowo), he saves a baby chimp from being put down and brings him home too. That would be Caesar. It’s a good thing that Franco woos a pretty veterinarian (Freida Pinto) who can keep a secret.

The slick production just blasts forward, rocketing upwards at a terrific pace, escalating all the while. Director Rupert Wyatt, in his first big studio effort, has a great hand at keeping the effects perfectly utilized. He neither leans on them, nor tries to hide them. He knows he has a good thing going and makes great use of the skilled work of thousands of animators and dozens of mo-cap performers. The spectacle is truly spectacular, made all the more so by the simple fact that I cared about what was happening on the screen. Not since 1968’s Planet of the Apes found astronaut Charlton Heston falling through time and space and landing on a future Earth ruled by the apes, has a Planet of the Apes film been so fully satisfying.

Rise flips the frightening central scenario. Instead of a man being oppressed by apes, this film shows apes being oppressed by men. It’s a terrifying what if scenario both ways. What if apes got tired of being treated as second-class species? Though Rise sees unwilling to maintain the same commentary on the cauldron of societal ills that informed the sensibilities of the original films, there is still a potent sense of wrong in the treatment of these animals, and a potent terror in their eventual strike back. It’s all the more terrifying for seeming justified. Caesar is a charismatic character who grows into a charismatic leader. The great success of the film is not only the way it so brilliantly builds this character, but also in the way it has an audience rooting for the defeat of mankind, rooting for the rise of the Planet of the Apes. The film doesn’t quite get there, concluding by merely leaving tantalizing threads for future sequels. It’s funny that the franchise, which started with Heston’s angst at the destruction of humanity, has come full circle to the point where an audience cheers it on. It’s excitingly transgressive. When a character in this new film shouts “Get your stinking paws off me, you damn dirty ape!” The film’s thrilling, hugely entertaining and disturbing answer is “No.” 

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.

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.