When the first Harry Potter movie came out ten years ago I didn't think that the film series would be completed. I didn't think peoples interest would hold out, I suspected Potter was a fad, now we know that its firmly rooted in the cultural zeitgeist and it probably will be for some time to come. I'm impressed that they finished the series, and even more impressed with its consistent quality.
There is a lot of story to the Potter tale, a lot of characters and magical things to keep straight. At the beginning of Deathly Hollows, having not watched a Potter movie in about two years I had a hard time keeping things such as the secondary characters straight. But as I watched I began to remember more, and became immensely impressed with how everything tied together. Everything that was introduced before seemed to have a point, and in something of a rarity for a blockbuster series like this, the ending was actually worth waiting for.
The first part of Deathly Hollows had only one really good 'action sequence', the one in the Ministry of Magic. Much of the film is spent with Potter and friends in exile, we thusly get some slower moving sequences and a lot of brooding and teen angst, not my favorite part. Part 2 however was just excellent, even amazing in a way, everything it could have been. Voldemort never became a watered down villain, impressive considering how much he'd been built up; and seeing so many of the characters from the previous films making often unexpected semi-cameo reappearances was really rather enjoyable. Also that last battle at Hogwarts had for me more resonance then the famed battle at Minas Tirinth in The Lord of the Rings, you have more of a history with the place and characters in Potter and I thought it was just better (not the The Lord of the Rings isn't impressive). In the end while part I could have been a little stronger, part II was a total pay off.
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows Part I Grade: B+
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows Part II Grade: A+
A kind of thematic follow up to his superior 2007 Boston crime drama Gone Baby Gone, director Ben Afflick's The Town is a solid enough action piece, with somewhat interesting characters, but simply lacking in the sense of grit and pathos of the earlier film. Afflick also plays the lead, the head of a group of masked robbers who have had a pretty successful run of bank and armored car heists (successful enough to have attracted the attention of the FBI and disappointingly dull agent Jon Hamm). During once such robbery a bank manager (Rebecca Hall, I like her) may have gained some unanticipated clues to the identity of one of the robbers (Jeremy Renner). Afflick decides to check on this, strikes up a conversation with the women at a laundry mat, and proceeds to fall in love with her. This complicates things.
The movies fine, though not as deep, reveling or even good as I think it wanted to be. Some good action sequences, but with the exception of Hall and Afflick none of the characters come alive in anything approaching a meaningful way, and even they aren't as affecting as they should have been. That's not to say this isn't a good movie, it's just not a great one.
The Town Grade: B
Based on Lillian Hellman's successful Broadway play, Watch on the Rhine is as boring as heck. Only a half ass effort is given to opening this thing up, still the vast majority of the action occurs in just a couple of rooms. This is the story of a German family involved in the anti-fascist movement, who return to the American wives (Bette Davis) childhood home outside of Washington D.C. (her father had been an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court). The family has one kid who thinks he's real smart and likes to talk all fancy, with the other two children being fairly generic. The father is noble but kind of stiff. In short the play (which premiered in 1940) was meant to bring home to American audiences the importance of the moral fight in Europe, three years later as a movie it just seems redundant. The action as it were mostly consists in trying to deal with a visiting Romanian Count who might inform the local German embassy of the freedom fighting family's presence. Lucile Watson was Oscar nominated, mostly for saying 'they woke us up out of the magnolias' or some such supposedly deep summation. Again this was boring as heck.
Watch on the Rhine Grade: F
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
I would agree with most of your assessments of the Harry Potter series and of the last two movies. I would have given Part 1 a B+, it was obviously just setting up Part 2 but it was necessary to make Part 2 a better movie.
The Town I would disagree with you though. I would give that a B+ or an A-. I thought the film was gripping (your right, not as gripping as Gone Baby Gone) and set up the action sequences very nicely. Some pretty spectacular shoot outs.
Post a Comment