Or, You-Know-Who and the Bird Bunch. I have to confess right away that I’m really not a Harry Potter fan. The more hype the books got, the more determined I was never to read them. And I still haven’t, though from what I hear, that’s just as well here. The books keep getting thicker, but this movie is the shortest yet — though at two hours, eighteen minutes, ‘short’ is purely relative. The point is, I don’t really know the whole Hogwart’s mythos, and could never survive a Harry Potter trivia contest. I’m just trying to look at these as movies, without the hype.
That can’t be done, of course. It’s all hype. It isn’t such a bad movie in spite of that, though. Strangely, the effects are iffy in places — with all the money they have to throw at this film, everything should look more real than the person sitting in the next row, but sometimes it doesn’t. And I can’t figure out why they bother to have Ralph Fiennes as Voldemort — with all that makeup on him, it could be nearly anyone playing the part, and the poor guy’s just wasted. Maybe they should have hired someone cheaper and spent that extra money on effects.
Anyway, the kids have grown, and the problems are darker. Voldemort is alive and up to no good, but the Ministry of Magic (led by Robert Hardy as Cornelius Fudge — Robert always seems to end up as bad guys these days) is doing its best to hide the truth and make sure no one believes poor Harry. Imelda Staunton, as the scenery-chewing Dolores Umbridge (Rowling should have just given in and spelled it ‘umbrage’) is sent to crack down on Dumbledore’s treasonous scheme to take over said Ministry by instituting a series of ‘reforms’ at Hogwart’s to keep the kids in line. One of them states that boys and girls can’t ever be within eight inches of each other, which you know was a bad move. If anything’s going to make teenagers rebel, it’s a rule like that.
And rebel they do. Harry, Hermione, and Ron have learned about the grownups organization, the Order of the Phoenix, and now they’ve formed their own — a (co-ed) group of students learning all the magics that Umbridge has tried to suppress, and incidentally getting a lot closer than eight inches in the process. This secret school part is pretty cool, actually.
Speaking of cool, though, I think I’ve figured out the secret of the Harry Potter success, at least when it comes to the movies. I think a big part of the reason why I liked this movie as much as I did is because it reminded me so much of other movies. Not other HP movies, just movies in general, and a few books for good measure.
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| Pink = Evil |
Umbridge, for instance, is a classic Stepford Wife. She’s always wearing pink and smiling even when she’s doing something terrible, and looks like a moving waxwork doll up until the end when she finally gets dirty and rumpled. (It should, by the way, be a crime to use as much pink as she does. Painting the stone walls of a castle pink is just wrong.) The Ministry’s whole disinformation campaign is completely 1984. The repressive school? Pink Floyd’s The Wall. Early on, as Harry and Mr. Weasley take a surreal little trip through the Ministry building, it seems a lot like a Monty Python sketch, right down to random bursts of flame. They even go a little Matrix-y, which was kind of a shock. I’m not kidding. There’s this hallway covered with black, shiny marble-like tiles, and they have a huge battle there that’s a lot like the huge gun battle in The Matrix that gave me one of the worst headaches I’ve ever had. Only with magic instead of bullets, of course.
So how can it not be popular? There’s something for everyone! I just can’t decide if they meant to imitate all this stuff, if it was all accidental, or if I’m reading too much into it. It also helps that so many popular actors are back, too, of course — Emma Thompson is there, Robbie Coltrane, Helena Bonham-Carter, Alan Rickman, David Thewlis, Gary Oldman, Maggie Smith, Michael Gambon, and now I have to stop before I get carpal tunnel. You’ll recognize nearly everyone, that’s the point.
Of course the three kids are all back. Daniel Radcliffe is turning into a pretty good actor, and so is Rupert Grint. I never really liked Ron before, but he’s starting to grow on me. Emma Watson… not such a good actor in this one, I thought, but not too bad. She did the lighter stuff fine, the scenes where it’s camaraderie among the friends, but she seemed very stiff on the more serious lines. And the films are definitely getting more serious. The fights are scarier, the monsters are nastier, and Helena Bonham-Carter totally channels her performance in Corpse Bride to look really creepy. The giant spiders are still the creepiest — I forget what movie that was, because they’ve all blurred together — but this one has its moments. They borrow a little from The Mummy, too, with the bad guys turning into whirlwinds of sand. Wow, maybe I am reading too much into this…
Okay, no more parallels, just a ranking: three and a half idols. Not suitable for the younger crowd, and please don’t announce the names of all characters and creatures as they appear, like the woman behind me did. The important thing is that it’s safe for the non-rabid-Potter-fans like me, and entertaining even if you don’t know the name of Dumbledore’s best friend’s second cousin’s neighbor, who once invented a really cool spell.