Last train to Hogwarts

Image: www.cinemablend.com 

The eighth Harry Potter film, part two of the “Deathly Hallows”, is as good an adaptation of the climactic confrontation between the boy wizard and you-know-who as can be. Between emotional strife, romantic reconciliation and a long, spectacular battle, one of filmdom’s most financially successful franchises comes to a vivid end. Where “Part I” was about character interaction and setup, about preparing mentally and strategically for the final showdown, “Part II” is for most of its running time all about the showdown. It’s the franchise’s “Kill Bill”, but with the bloody part last. 

After the numerous trials of the past ten years, Harry (Daniel Radcliffe), Hermione (Emma Watson) and Ron (Rupert Grint) proceed with the final challenges in their fight against the forces of darkness, the center of which is Voldemort (Ralph Fiennes). In addition to the dark lord, the young heroes also need to contend with the treacherous Snape (Alan Rickman) and locate the Horcruxes that house pieces of Voldemort’s soul. By now, the many familiar faces – the teachers at Hogwarts; the Death Eaters; the Weasley family – need no reintroduction, and the film proceeds swiftly and accurately in dealing with these characters. As with “Part I”, much of what happens carries great weight, and when certain things are revealed, it happens with considerable gravitas. 

Part of the series’ continuing success (I maintain that there is no bad “Harry Potter” movie) has to do with the long-term involvement of screenwriter Steve Kloves, who surely knows the characters and their drives as well as Rowling. While Kloves ensured narrative integrity, the story benefited from the different visual approaches brought to the material by directors such as Chris Columbus and Alfonso Cuaron and finally David Yates for the last movies. It was wonderful to see Hogwarts – particularly its geography – change from film to film. Since this magical place exists in the imagination as much as anywhere else, why shouldn’t it be open to change? Technically, these movies have always been top notch, and it is again the case here, where a dragon is convincingly brought to life and non-human warriors are recruited to fight on both sides. 

The series started out with two children’s movies, proceeded to more mature themes and styles and finally became serious minded, committed adventures pitting a vulnerable good against a near absolute evil. Even if many suspected that good would eventually triumph, all were certain that it would happen at great cost, and it does. Throughout the films, the actors grew into their characters and surely only the most hostile of purists would still chastise Radcliffe’s acting. The young actors are all superb, with Grint having obtained an appropriately cool, weathered look along the way. But finally, the star of these movies is Alan Rickman, whose Severus Snape is a deeply wounded creature. What he achieves in his limited screen time in “Part II” is nothing short of incredible. 

If I have one complaint about the last film, it’s that it’s too short; this is a selfish remark based on the notion that I would not have minded spending more time in the familiarity of the many environments of  Rowling and Yates' meticulously created universe. When she first sat down in the coffee shop all those years ago to write “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone”, could the author have had any idea that it would come to this? “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part II” is the perfectly kinetic complement to its character-driven predecessor, and a great finale to an overall momentous and very re-watchable franchise. 

Note: I saw the film in 2-D, and the suggestion of depth certainly does not require a third dimension. 

The “Harry Potter” movies in order of personal preference:
“Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban”
“Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Parts I & II”
“Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince”
“Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire”
“Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets”
“Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix” “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone”

Of nerds, ghosts, aliens, Vikings and devils

Another round of capsule reviews; I’m off to a conference soon, and hopefully August will provide an opportunity to return to Hogwarts for the last time. For the record, I’m all superheroed out – I blame it on “Chinatown”. I’m not seeing “Green Lantern”, “Captain America”, etc – I hope I can manage some excitement for “The Avengers” next year. (More on my ‘disinterest’ in a forthcoming post.) 

For now, let us talk about technology and magic. 

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David Fincher’s “The Social Network” is, for most of its running time, testament to the filmmaker's ability as master visualist. I’ve followed Fincher with great interest through his masterful “Seven”, his commercial efforts such as “Panic Room” and the impressive, intelligent anti-serial killer serial killer movie “Zodiac”. Now that the hype has died down and the Oscars are all but a distant memory, “The Social Network” is a nearly brilliant film that’s not quite on par with Fincher’s best efforts. In telling the story of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg (a chilling Jesse Eisenberg), Fincher and screenwriter Aaron Sorkin make for a mostly riveting narrative that constantly plays friends and enemies off of one another. The film’s opening scene – a date gone wrong – is the key to the whole film, and ignites the film with such energy that the slowed down third act disappoints, especially given the over explanatory ending. Kudos to Reznor and Ross for an immersive ambient soundtrack.

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Kim Ji-woon’s “A Tale of Two Sisters” (2003), an atmospheric ghost story, is my least favourite of his films due to its predictability and unnecessarily delayed ending. That said, it’s still a good supernatural thriller where Su-mi (Su-jeong Lim) and her sister Si-yeon (Geun-Young Moon) return to the dark home their father shares with their  stepmother. All the characters seem slightly skewed from the get go, and the house itself, where most of the action is set, is scarily underlit. Unlike in the indulgent “I Saw the Devil”, Ji-woon makes good use of silence and a slow pace to ratchet up the tension. (The was recently remade as the American “The Uninvited”, unseen by me.) 

Park Chan-wook’s “Joint Security Area” (2000) starts off like a typical military thriller – remember “Basic”? “The General’s Daughter”? – when a bloody crime is committed in the demilitarised zone between North and South Korea. The usual outsider figure, here a female investigator, Sophie Jean (Yeong-ae Lee), is commissioned to investigate why Sgt. Su-Hyeok (Byung-hun Lee) killed four men. The film introduces an unexpected humanity in its second and third acts, and by the end the film has shifted from taut thriller (despite some terrible accents as some European actors attempt English) to a surprisingly moving drama. Fans looking for an earlier version of “Oldboy” will be sorely disappointed. 

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Jim Caviezel stars as a humanoid alien in Howard McCain’s culty SF-adventure “Outlander” (2008). Kainan (Caviezel) crashes his spacecraft in a lake close to a Viking village. Yes, a Viking village. At first the natives do not trust him and believe him to be a spy for their tribal opposition, but slowly Kainan wins over their ruler (John Hurt in the Pained Elder Anthony Hopkins role) and his feisty daughter Freya (Sophia Myles). Kainan knows that there is a greater threat to Viking existence than tribal differences: there is another alien, the monstrous non-humanoid Moorwen, who thrives on the flesh of the living and the dead. I could not resist “Outlander’s” charms – aliens and Vikings in the same movie! – but the film is ponderous and utterly formulaic. A DVD blurb calls it “Braveheart meets Predator”; the film pales in comparison to both those movies, though it’s much better than “Aliens vs Predator”. While the Viking setup looks convincing enough, the special effects, especially those constructing the Moorwen, are rather terrible. Most of the time it looks like the Vikings are up against a giant lizard that swallowed a whole lot of fireflies. At least there’s a drinking game: every time a character in “Outlander” refers to Kainan as “Outlander!”, take a shot. If the word is exclaimed particularly loudly, take two shots. 

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Finally, Michael J. Bassett’s “Solomon Kane” (2009) stars James Purefoy (the randy Mark Anthony in HBO’s “Rome”) as an English soldier in the 1600s. Kane is responsible for some great victories in the name of his country, but these victories come at a price: Kane, you see, is a cold blooded, brutally violent killer, and he soon finds his soul damned to hell. After coming face to face with a representative of the devil, Kane valiantly tries to redeem himself and save his soul. When a great evil sweeps through England, Kane finds that you sometimes need evil to fight evil, and a return to his old ways is on the cards. Purefoy makes for an entertaining hero, while Bassett (adapting from Robert E. Howard’s source material) directs with an appropriate sense of scale and spectacle as befits the material. I haven’t had this much fun with dubious material since, well, the original “Conan” movies. The story is predictable but the cast pulls it off with such conviction, and the film is so clearly made with reverence for its protagonist and his supernatural-infused world, that I was spellbound for nearly two hours. There’s some solid character work from the late Pete Postlewaithe, and the villain is someone worth fearing. Note that the film’s particular religious inflection may offend some viewers.

Hunter prey

I’ve written about the polished films of Kim Ji-Woon before, and here is possibly his most beautifully shot film yet, the unsettling and gratuitously violent “I Saw the Devil”. It’s one of the best-looking serial killers movies I’ve ever seen, and is aesthetically comparable to both “Seven” and “Zodiac” (both by David Fincher). 

“I Saw the Devil” is not about the hunt, but about the catch and what happens to the prey once caught. Choi Min-sik (“Oldboy”) is Kyung-chul, a sick man with a face that too easily looks kind and caring. One snowy night, he murders a young woman who was stranded by the roadside due to a flat tyre. It turns out that the woman’s fiancée, Kim (Lee Byung-hun), is a policeman. Devastated but coldly focused, Kim puts in two weeks of leave to catch Kyung-chul. As Kim assumes the role of predator as he tracks down Kyung-chul, it is evident that Kim is as much a madman, in his own way, as his nemesis. “Evil”, the movie’s tagline tells us, “lives inside”. It doesn’t take long for Kyung-chul to be caught, and that’s when the film really steps up the gore and depravity (if not the tension). 

“I Saw the Devil” is torture porn. That it looks like a world-class sophisticated thriller does not change the fact that it’s torture porn. At the same time, the film is disappointingly conventional while requiring quite a lot of suspension of disbelief – will a police force wait by the side as one of their own illegitimately hunts down and toys with a stone cold psychopath? And while I can accept that the first victim’s fiancée turns out to be in law enforcement, I cannot buy into him being a near superhuman wall climbing martial arts expert badass. Consequently, “I Saw the Devil” remains rooted in the movie world, and does it not feel as if its terror seeps into the world outside of the movie. This is where Fincher is a master thriller director and easily outclasses Kim. What “Zodiac” also got right is in showing the banality of evil, how tedious it can be, while “Devil” makes evil cinematically horrifying and appealing. 

At almost two and a half hours, “I Saw the Devil” is palpably long but Kim always keeps things (disturbingly) visually interesting and sometimes unnecessarily graphic and misogynistic. Towards the end things get really heated and horrifying as the two madmen attempt to one-up each other, leading up to a disturbing ending with a stunning final shot. All in all, “I Saw the Devil” does its best to be more violent/graphic/shocking than similar genre movies, and in the process shoots itself in the foot. (For a superior, subtle South Korean serial killer movie, see "Memories of Murder".)