Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 1

There’s no wonder left in the Harry Potter universe.  We’ve grown used to apparations and apparitions.  We’ve run out of people to meet.  Things are falling apart.  Thus Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part I, all out of delight, consoles itself with running and fighting and late-adolescent sexual tension.

That isn’t, ipso facto, a bad thing.  The film manages its running and fighting and late-adolescent sexual tension perfectly well.  It’s just that it isn’t much fun.

Nevertheless, the film works, but mostly because we’ve invested in these characters over the years.  Since the picture doesn’t bother to establish its people independently, I can’t imagine a newcomer to the Harry Potter universe getting much out of it. 

Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps

Up yours, Oliver Stone.  No really.  You turn Bud Fox, the hero of Wall Street, into an incorrigible jerk and a profound fraud, and then you turn Gordon Freaking Gekko into a hero?

This may seem a minor point.  After all, Fox only turns up in passing, running across Gekko at a charity dinner and making brief conversation.  But Stone reveals Fox to have been evil all along, waiting for the heat to cool on the events from the first film to flip the beloved airline that served as Wall Street’s MacGuffin so he could sell out his father and live like a self-centered jackass for the rest of his existence.

This, of course, guts Wall Street.  Since Fox’s moral journey had been fraudulent, the audience surrogate got no real lessons.  The means there’s no story at all – the hero didn’t change

Yeah, I know they’re your characters you can do whatever you want with them.  Get bent anyway.  You killed Wall Street when you made Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps.  I’m done with both of them.

The Expendables

The Expendables should be a good time at the movies.  You know the hook: bring together many of the biggest action stars of the ‘80s, ‘90s, and today and set ‘em up on a “men on a mission” picture.  But it’s a joyless picture, with no sense of fun and an editing style that robs the audience of pleasure.

Here’s an example: Jet Li and Dolph Lundgren fight.  Now, you could market a whole film entitled simply Jet Li and Dolph Lundgren Fight.  These guys are respected martial artists and legitimate stuntmen: all you need to do is put them in a gym with a choreographer for a few days, let them put something together, and roll the film.  We, the audience, want to see these men’s expertise in action.  But director Sylvester Stallone and editors Ken Blackwell and Paul Harb (This picture’s Stallone’s baby though, so I’m assuming he wielded significant control over the editing process) don’t trust us to pay attention to a long take, or even a series of mid-length takes.  They quick-cut from shot to shot so quickly that it looks like they’re trying to hide the incompetence of pretty actors, not showcase two of the most respected stunt fighters in the business.  In the end, I had only a fragmented impression of two guys fighting.  The film gave me no artistry to enjoy.

Here’s another example: at the end, there’s huge climax with lots of gunfire and ‘splosions.  I’m the target audience for this kind of thing, but the editing created such discontinuities that I had no idea of geography of the battle.  I knew the good guys were killing the bad guys, but I had no sense of how each bullet fired or objective taken got the good guys closer to winning.  All I knew was that stuff was blowing up real good, but even that gets boring if I don’t know why it’s getting blown up.

Look, I didn’t go into The Expendables expecting Hamlet.  But I did have a minimum expectation of being able to enjoy an hour and a half of good stunt fighting and practical stunt work, not to mention being able to keep track of who was shooting whom and why.  The Expendables failed to deliver on these reasonable expectations.  This film is a failure.

The Other Guys

The Other Guys is laugh out loud funny from beginning to end.  I loved it.

Samuel L. Jackson and Dwayne Jackson play The Guys – the hero cops who crash the cars, collar the perps, and get the girls.  Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg play The Other Guys – the guys who fetch coffee and get stuck with the paperwork.  Wahlberg was a rising star on the NYPD until he made a critical mistake and got shuffled to a lousy division and a lousy partner in Ferrell, and Ferrell’s just a schmuck who’d rather work boring building permit violations in front of his computer than get out there and blow stuff up.  Wahlberg hates Ferrell and the complacent mediocrity he represents.  Ferrell, well, he’s a happy schmuck.

So it’s an odd couple comedy, and Wahlberg and Ferrell make it work.  They pair shares perfect comic timing, and the writing pops (With extra credit for a Yojimbo joke!  I mean, really, who writes Yojimbo jokes into their mass-market comedies?).  The setups and payoffs work just right, and even the jokes we see coming twist and turn in different ways.  Add a villain who’s just villainous enough for the story yet still goofy enough for a comedy; a big third act action finale with first rate practical stunts and seamless CGI integration; and great supporting work from the likes of Michael Keaton, Eva Mendez, and Ron Riggle; and you have the recipe for a first-rate action comedy.

What a treat.

The American

George Clooney is Alain Delon in The American.

Yes, his character’s name is Mr. Butterfly and his character is, well, American.  But this doesn’t feel like an American film.  It feels like a French or Italian film, a Le Samourai or Rififi.  And Clooney feels like an older Delon in it.  He has the looks, talent, and charisma of a bona fide movie star, and he’s finally getting old enough to be interesting.

The film is set in rural Italy, a small town called Castelvecchio where Clooney, a killer and a very bad man, hides after a job gone wrong.  It’s adapted from a book entitled A Very Private Gentleman; and Clooney is private, indeed.  He walks alone.  He dines alone.  He even screws alone, flatly declaring to his prostitute of choice that he’s there for his pleasure, not hers.  But the local priest takes an interest in him.  The prostitute takes an interest in him.  Soon, he’s not so private any more.  This can’t end well.

But enough of the plot teaser.  What you really need to know is that The American is a pleasure and a delight.  It is so wonderful to see a film that’s pitched toward adults for a change.  Yes, The American underlines things for an American audience that, perhaps, an Italian neorealist crime drama or a French noir might leave implied.  Nevertheless, here’s a film about grownups who react in grownup ways to grownup situations.  When the priest looks into Mr. Butterfly’s eyes and tells him that’s he’s empty, that he has nothing, we look into Clooney’s eyes and we see it.  When the spark of a soul begins to glow in those eyes, we see that too and the actor doesn’t need to sing in the rain to show it to us.

Yes, The American is for Americans.  There are chases and gunfights and nudity that I’d call superfluous if the actress under discussion wasn’t so statuesque that she could’ve made And God Created Woman.  But it isn’t all chases and gunfights and nudity.  Much of it concerns itself with the slow reawakening of a damned soul.  It’s fabulous, classic stuff.  Alain Delon would have been proud to star in it.