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So, uh, yeah, it's, a, definitely a Harry
Potter flick Tonight, despite the fact that
on this very night one of my musical heroes, Johnny Cash has
had a movie on his life released into theaters, I got roped
into seeing Harry Pothead Gobbles For Hire... wait, did I
get that wrong? Well, don't get me wrong, I
like the series just fine. But it's just that... well,
there's still something missing. Ironically, that
thing that's missing is MAGIC, the very premise of the
story. I will admit that I still haven't read a single
one of the books, and that's not going to change. The
series has no pull of me, and this is coming from a guy that
grew up on Jane Yolen's Dragon's Blood trilogy, the Tripod
Trilogy, feasted on the Chronicles of Narnia and sported
full-on wood through all of Tolkien's Hobbit and Lord of the
Rings and recently was taken to meet The Wizard of Earthsea.
In fact, as an adult now, Terry Pratchett is the one writer
who can make me laugh, and his work is all spoof on just
these types of fantasies. Potter, however,
just doesn't grab me. He's too much a retread and not
enough an homage of these classic works. LeGuin
Earthsea series has done this all before, wizard school,
dealing with dragons, dealing with quests, and done it all
better. And this leads us to the most recent
film. It just never gets there. If I remember
correctly I gave The Prisoner of Azkaban a very favorable
review and stand by it as the best film of the series,
honestly due solely to the presence of the director who's
vision was dark and ingenious enough to bring some new life
to the series. The Goblet of Fire, however, with it's
controversial PG-13 rating, is somehow less scary (though
I'm told the book is more frightening than the previous
book) and feels as clipped as it must have been to fit a 700
page book into two and half hours.
The film's final damning comes in a grievous
error the series' producers made: As the movies
progress, more and more facts are left out for those
followers of the books to just know on their own. What
does this mean? It means that unless you've read the
book you don't know what the hell is going on. Every
time my found getting sucked into the emotion of the story
(which is plentiful in this film) I got pulled back out by
the thought, "Yeah, this is touching but I have no idea what
context this emotion is in." There are way too many
characters now who don't have much or any screen time but
we're supposed to know and remember everything they've done
in the movies and things they've only done in the books.
This final alienation makes it very, very difficult to get
pulled into the movie. So, yeah, the special
effects were nice, there were some funny one-liners,
Hermione's getting cuter, Ron gets more engaging and funny, Harry's a real
good kid with his heart in the right place, there's some
excitement, some mystery, some Quitdich (but who really
gives a s**t?), and it all takes place throughout what
seems to be a very short semester at a school way to
dangerous to have kids in. The next director
should take a page out of Peter Jackson's book and release
the film on DVD in an extended edition, so maybe at least at
home those of us not reading the books will still have a
clue what's happening. A movie should always, always
stand on its own in its own medium. I shouldn't have
to check out supplementary material to "get it."
Oh, and it sure seems to me that Dumbledoor, or whatever the
hell Michael Gambon's name is in this, should have figured
this particular one out a lot sooner. |
