Because the rules of modern love films sternly dictate that both leads hold peculiar jobs and/or interests that will eventually unite them via a heap of silly explanations, Tom (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is a frustrated architect who works as a writer of holiday greeting cards.  During a meeting, one of his co-workers suggested using my birthday to celebrate successful lesbian relationships, which I think is appropriate and am only too happy to sign off on.  Summer (Zooey Deschanel) is described by the film as possessing a “power” over the universe. She can, for example, dramatically increase the sales of Belle & Sebastian simply by quoting their lyrics in her yearbook. This is not altogether inexplicable — I left the film with a strong urge to place her on my coffee table like a precious book, letting dinner guests flip through her hair with jealousy. And so Tom sets about winning her affections over the course of the titular 500 days, which the movie flits through breezily and without regard to chronology.

The film has two terrific setpieces, simple and forlornly realistic, in a whirling trip to IKEA and an emotionally tragic dinner party. These are plainly two of the best scenes ever photographed in a romance film. The film attempts several other showstoppers with a musical number which looks criminally underfunded, and a “big speech” in which Tom quits his job after eating several packets of Twinkies, which might mean that Dan White’s lawyers were onto something.

The film uses its temporal freedom to indulge quite a bit in playful pastiche – when Tom nods off in a movie theater, he briefly imagines himself as a character in The Seventh Seal, and there is also an odd segment wherein secondary characters talk to the director as though it were all a documentary, probably culled from When Harry Met Sally or Reds. Few of these excursions (including explicit nods to seminal love film The Graduate) add anything to the story.

There is a strange trend in pop culture love films of this generation that they are all about people falling in love through pop culture. Think of Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist (2008), where enjoying the same bands was their starry-eyed revelation, or Juno (2007) where it was alt-rock music again, actually, although The Blair Witch Project and tic-tacs were mentioned briefly. Here, Tom’s love is awakened only when he realizes that she shares his love of The Smiths; his visit to the local karaoke bar produces renditions of The Pixies’ “Here Comes Your Man” and “Train In Vain” by The Clash (incidentally, where is this bar? The hippest track I’ve ever seen performed in a karaoke joint was a version of “Anarchy In The U.K.” that was recorded on Casio and didgeridoo in some South Korean basement). He also spends most of the film wearing T-shirts of album covers so conspicuously chosen for their inability to be criticized (London Calling, Doolittle, et. al.) that no other character, equally conspicuously, ever takes note of them.

Trying to attract her attentions a second time, Tom turns up the volume on a Smiths song as she walks past, which is a sad and particular kind of courtship that puts all of the pressure on the other party. Practitioners of this art can be spotted on your local bus line, reading “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” day after day, hoping the perfect woman will strike up a conversation about it. This type of signaling rarely hears a response, though it is uniquely weird and morose to observe – strangers who propose to each other at motorcycle rallies, or Star Trek conventions, and interpret those moments as a perfect confluence of all of their hopes and dreams is a gloomy prospect indeed. (For my own mating calls, I use an exceedingly worn copy of “Booby Traps & Improvised Anti-Personnel Devices.”)

This is the central problem.  Tom, the film’s hero, the person the film is supposed to identify with most strongly, is really a kind of pure-breed terrified loner, which is a fact that Summer has to continually dance around in order to include in the film the full number of situations required for a feature production. One of the most compelling aspects of Brick (also with Joseph Gordon-Levitt, so, easy comparison) was that, by subsuming itself within pop culture completely, by giving its characters iconic types to slip into and stretch in odd directions, it brushed away some strange, firm cobweb in the rafters and let its high-school characters relate to each other more directly than in any other teen film this decade – which is the sort of thing that can keep one up at night. Also the movie’s is totally awesome, but you already knew that.

Tom has a lot of supportive friends who attempt to guide him through the film, including a girl of 11 with dialog that sounds meant for a woman three times her age, and who is probably 11 only to avoid any concerns that the film is headed for one of those endings where the two best friends discover they were in love all along – but Summer herself remains friendless and largely a mystery. She is the dream girl of all the sad-sack romantics like Tom: a girl who’ll plant one on a guy just for listening to her favorite album, and thereafter be perfectly his. The fact that this is a bit loopy cunningly escapes most of the characters, though the young girl muses to Tom that “you were crazy to think it was all destiny just because you like the same dumb stuff.” That’s a hard pill to swallow for a lot of people, and the film duly backs away from it with an ending that confirms all of the silly superstitions it had seemed to be deliberately picking apart.

But it wouldn’t surprise me at all if ten or twenty years from now, this film is still quite popular, and seen as emblematic of this particular time and place – with the rise of social networking, likes and dislikes are the only indicators we have to sort through people, and it makes relationships long, painful, intensely flawed, and tough to get off the ground. But we’ll only remember the good parts.

Anyway, you’re all still invited to my next birthday party down at “Cattyshack,” where I’ll be performing renditions of “Pink Triangle” and “All the Things She Said” done entirely on synthesizer. Bring lesbians.

4 out of 5 stars

Q: What’s the best book to be seen reading if you want to attract the perfect woman?

A: Try to be reading something intellectual, girls love a smart man. Try “A Brief History of Time.”

However, to that effect, it doesn’t seem full.  It keeps up a steady stream of jokes, all of which have the shameless abandon and commitment they need, but only some of which have the cleverness—a lot feels a bit easy, like yelling “dick” in a crowded theater.  And though it celebrates immaturity with energy, unlike the best R-rated comedies of late (Superbad, Wedding Crashers, The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Borat) it doesn’t make that immaturity feel fresh, brash, surprising, liberating, or filthily witty.  When the jokes don’t land—though they often do—otherwise irrelevant non-comic issues become noticeable: the plotting lags; the sweetness at the end feels token (the most potentially heartfelt moments are given to characters with little screen time); and it’s hard to shake the feeling that Bradley Cooper’s character isn’t a lovable asshole but a garden variety one.  Plus, in the age of Judd Apatow and raunch-meets-sensitive, I do find it problematic when women appear only as emasculating shrews and re-masculating hotties.

But as a caper, it twists and turns nicely, and a lot of scenes/performances work well (an implausibly trashed hotel room!  Rob Riggle!).  There are enough nice touches filled in around the edge, while the credit sequence ends the film on a high note.  And any movie that gives talented lesser-known comics like Ed Helms and Zach Galifianakis a chance to let loose in leading roles is alright.

3 out of 5 stars.

In an older age of blockbusters, Jeff Goldblum offered this wisdom: “What you call progress, I call the rape of the natural world.” Moments later he was clocked on the head by the roof of an imploding restroom – a cogent point on the ineffectiveness of criticizing darker, natural forces, marauding behemoths who slumber and destroy. Picture an inverted Washington Monument finding its purchase in some sunny, sacred meadow.  I approach the future with a concealed stiletto.

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is totally beyond the ongoing cycle of tiresome fucking summers and the angry crowds and the all-inclusive promotional convergence and 60-year-old tastemakers interpreting what amounts to shifting wallpaper for an hour or two in sticky air-conditioned rooms.  It is more primal and unsettling than that. It has come slowly to this last, flailing beast, this massive hemorrhage in our collective unconscious, this loathsome, lumbering, mewling, intolerable ogre to be cornered, corralled, and perforated with pitchforks. Birds frolic in their filthy baths – babies scream like bleeding dogs. Grim times are upon us.

And so the time is at hand for reflections of a fundamental nature, in the way that hobos are led to ponder youth and possibility in the throes of malts and vermin. Let us all remember the sobering power of such moments, and talk quietly and without hyperbole.

When did we allow what comes to a commercial for tits and a 30-year-old line of plastic dolls to cost more than 200 million dollars? No rational human can justify that number in comparison with the costs associated with the conceptual elements of this film: breasts, for example, are a very cheap commodity, and I’m sure that Hasbro’s fine line of Transformers dolls retail for about $7 apiece. So then surely a superior, yet comparable, film could be made by squeezing that toy robot between a woman’s heaving bosoms while a parade of animated gorillas stormed past, shouting incomprehensibly.

Muse for a moment on your own bank account, look a paragraph upward, and at the sheer scale of that price tag in comparison. Films made by men and women of modest means used to occasionally enjoy a theatrical run – Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, as far as I can tell, exists for no other purpose than to bully that era out of existence, to declare that summer films have become as jealous Gods, trampling the idolatrous and answering to no man. Cue thunderclaps and megaphone sermonizing. And given the U.S. Military’s involvement with the whole project – consigning personnel to act as extras, providing land to simulate the whooping obliteration of Egyptian relics, etc. – were I an intolerant  man given to paranoia, I might find it kind of despicable that someone in our government apparently has no problem financially assisting projects like Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, which preach classic American values like the synthetic sexuality of women, or the destruction of monuments as aphrodesiac, or the effortless humor of uneducated blacks, and requires an inordinate amount of slick American Machinery, built for the defense of God’s chosen, to be gleefully smashed like a Arkansas teenager hucking florescent lights at concrete.

A moment of silence while we reflect on the fact that the government is now subsidizing the year’s most democratically popular piece of art. I imagine China is jealous.

There will be no discussion of plot, of acting, of cinematography or editing — the film itself acknowledges these as entirely beside the point. Only questions remain: why did I see this movie?  Why did anyone?  Right now I am eating a packet of M&M’s emblazoned with the Transformers brand – each bite is potently metaphoric and tastes like strawberries and acid rain. I am left with the vague hope that someday, a more active man might lead a company of men – strong, thick men, able to say no to abjuratory chocolates – to wall off these studios, these scrofulous hamlets, hurling in sick animals and scriptwriters with a mighty trebuchet. And as night fell we would sing (I would show up after the bit with the trebuchet, for legal reasons), we would sing new hymns of a new era, of a time and place where art invigorates and entertains and, above all, isn’t willfully cretinous. The nadir of junk culture has been reached, and an empty void has consumed the bottom. Apparently Steven Spielberg thinks this movie is “awesome.” The man made Jurassic Park, and so the world is insane.

I refuse to believe that I am alone on this.

0 out of 5 stars

Q: Michael Bay has more films in the Criterion Collection than Martin Scorsese – does this mean that Bay is a more important filmmaker?

A: No necessarily more important, but with the success of this “Transformers” movies, he is very good!

–Duncan

PARADOXICAL DOUBLE FEATURE, Pt. 2: Cartoon Humans

For those benighted souls who are as yet uninitiated, Spider-Man director Sam Raimi began his career with a trilogy of improbably bloody, increasingly comical horror movies known as the Evil Dead.  Moving from a deserted cabin in the woods to the middle ages, Evil Dead combined zombies, the Three Stooges, Bruce Campbell’s chin cleft, and some incredibly inventive low-budget camerawork for a distinct brand of cartoon horror. After going straight, Raimi returns to the genre that gave him his start with Drag Me to Hell.  More than a move towards Raimi’s origins, Drag is billed in trailers everywhere as “the return of true horror”: in the era of saws, hostels, and zombified grit, Raimi is going back to candlelit séances, gravestones that look like Styrofoam, and things that go bump in the night.  The movie even begins with the 1980s Universal logo—a kind of nostalgic traditionalism for anyone raised in the VHS era.

The center of Drag Me to Hell is Christine Brown (Allison Lohman), a kind, vulnerable, but determined young woman with a sweet boyfriend (Justin Long), a job at a bank, and dreams of upward mobility.  While she has her eye on a new promotion—one that requires “tough decisions”—Christine is visited by an old gypsy woman looking for an extension on her mortgage (a bit of timeliness on the movie’s part).  Despite her sympathy, she says no, and the gypsy woman–as fictional gypsies are wont to do–puts a curse on Christine: for three days, she’ll be tormented by the Lamia, a shadowy goat demon from the great beyond (any sarcasm is uncalled for and unnecessary).  When the three days are up, the Lamia will drag Christine to hell “to burn forever” (as hell is wont to do).  Haunted by the Lamia and running out of time, Christine frantically searches for a way to shed the curse.

If I had to sum up the movie—and its success—with two words, I would say “ghoulish enthusiasm.”  Raimi, clearly having more fun with curses and goat demons than 49-year-old men are supposed to, plays with light, shadow, and set pieces with energy and style.  Dividing scenes of exposition with scenes of horror, the scares are wildly imaginative, with no refuge in the laws of reality.  But it’s also offbeat: embracing the ridiculousness of horror fantasy, Raimi’s jolts can make you jump but leave a smile on your face.  Raimi, as Spider-Man shows, excels at creating live-action cartoons without rendering them stiff or losing personality.  Drag Me to Hell would feel at home in the frames of a dark comic book, both in spirit and sentiment.  And in that regard, it’s incredibly successful: both scary and fun, full of macabre wit, taking and sharing a not-so-serious joy in the many mortal threats to men (and kittens).

Before the movie came out, there was a bit of internet outrage when it was announced that Drag Me to Hell would be, horror of horrors, rated a mere PG-13, thus ruling out geysers of fake blood and making it accessible to middle school slumber parties.  But if anything, the rating shows that times have changed since the last Evil Dead movie.  The PG-13, I would assume, is largely a matter of its tone, which is less grisly than most horror these days–but any fears that Raimi toned it down should be quelled sometime around the housefly nightmare, long before the anvil scene, and maybe even by the time Allison Lohman fights off the old crone with a stapler.  Far less fake blood is spilled, but Drag Me to Hell easily rivals Army of Darkness in terms of perversely engaging crimes against nature.  It’s perhaps not quite as horrific as Evil Dead 2, but certainly as grotesque.  In fact, Drag is willfully, well, grosser. Raimi goes for the stomach—things will go into/out of a person’s mouth in this movie that I’m sure you’ve never seen go into/out of a person’s mouth in a movie before—so it often hits the gag reflex more than it raises the pulse. I don’t hesitate at all to say that this is the hardest PG-13 I can think of.

But it should also be noted that the movie succeeds, beyond imaginative scares, because it is also one of the more cohesive, realized, and just plain well-told stories to come out of Hollywood lately. I’m not, perhaps, the movie’s target audience.  I don’t like horror movies as a general rule, and I’m not really fond of gross-out gags (if, as the theory goes, cinema is pleasurable because the act of watching carries some sort of psychoanalytic joy, I doubt that watching an old woman vomit worms onto Allison Lohman is what they had in mind).  But the story easily pulled me in: it’s wonderfully paced and structured, characters are established and engaging.  Even the non-horror scenes—the bank, the psychic, the parents—are well-written, quite funny, and relatably human, with a more horror-oriented version of the gee-whiz heart and soul that powered Spider-Man.

I find the ending interesting and worthy of discussion, but spoilers will be involved.  For thoughts on the ending, anyone who’s seen the movie and doesn’t mind can direct their attention to the spoiler zone below.  But I can leave off here for now and say that, to my non-horror-loving self, I found the movie just short of a total, transcendent cinematic experience: a mostly-full recommendation.  Feel free to add another star if horror is your bag…

4 out of 5 stars.

***SPOILERS BELOW******SPOILERS BELOW******SPOILERS BELOW***
***SPOILERS BELOW******SPOILERS BELOW******SPOILERS BELOW***

At the end of the film, Christine sheds the curse, or so she thinks.  She meets her boyfriend, the aforementioned Justin Long, to celebrate the shedding of the curse.  They hug.  In his arms, she confesses to denying the mortgage, and he says that she has a good heart.  The sun is shining, and for the first time there’s not a trace of anything ominous in the air.  And then, due to a mix-up, the earth opens up, and Christine is, well, dragged to hell.  Cut to a tear on Justin Long’s face, smash cut to the ending title card.

And I find it curious.

The ending is well set up and executed, and its bluntness is certainly to be admired.  But at the same time, it also felt bluntly pointless, with little moral or thematic resonance. Christine, it seemed to me, had learned her lesson, if she ever needed to in the first place (I don’t buy any argument that she deserved it).  In that case, the story is a tragedy: punishment for someone who deserves the opposite.  Except the movie barely reflects on it as such.  It hangs for that moment on Justin Long’s tears, but ultimately, it somehow hints at reflection while discouraging it at the same time.

Of course, ending on a surprise downer note is nothing new for Raimi, as anyone who sought out Evil Dead 2 or the Army of Darkness director’s cut knows well.  But differences are crucial.  Unlike Evil Dead’s Ash, who was more of a cartoon punching bag, Christine is vulnerable and empathetically human—Raimi gives us an unusually vested interested in her turning out ok.  Also, Ash ended up in an arguably worse situation, but one that conceivably had a way out.  Christine’s fate, on the other hand, has finality to it, and the way the movie handles that finality struck me as odd.  Raimi’s affection for his characters is generally strong, but as it jumps for the final “boo!”, Drag doesn’t seem particularly concerned that a good-hearted person spending an eternity in hell might spoil the movie’s fun.  It didn’t spoil mine—don’t get me wrong—but it makes me interested in what that says.

The feeling I get about horror movies is that the director and the audience are (usually) in league against the characters on screen.  To that effect, the ending raises the question of whether we were supposed to root for Christine, as a person, or get our own ghoulish thrills and chills as she hung in the balance.  If we are supposed to care, do people see the movie as a downer?  The almost certain explanation is that it’s not supposed to be taken that seriously.  But if so, does it build up its characters only to cheapen them?  The macabre joy of an unhappy fate is hardly new—just resurrect and ask Hitchcock—but if you make the character too innocent, does it work?

I suppose that’s a question for horror movie theorists.  I’ll just say that it’s a well-told story and a fantastically fun ride: like a carnival haunted house, no lingering horror, but plenty of memorable kicks and screams.

–Duncan

PARADOXICAL DOUBLE FEATURE, Pt. 1: Human Cartoons

If pressed to sum up the zeitgeist now for children’s animated films, I would say it’s largely made up of the following: ironic genre spoofs; pop culture references; top-billed celebrity voices (more so than ever); jokes about weight, odor, and bodily gasses; and other staples of the postmodern entertainment age, god bless it.  All of which, of course, can be fun for inner- and outer-children and have powered DreamWorks Animation as a box office contender.

But then you have Pixar, which doesn’t really emphasize any of those things, but has instead branded itself with a consistent track record of more artful and imaginative modern fairytales (Cars, their only average movie, notwithstanding).  At its best, Pixar’s animation tends to focus more on wonder, graceful humor, and a beating digital heart.  And irony?  Pixar movies are often painfully sincere—their cartoon characters seem more human than most actual humans at the multiplex.  And it does it all without losing a whit of accessibility or enjoyment.  More than anyone else, they’ve proved that a cartoon can escape the slight connotations of the term.

Lately, I’ve had to admire some of their more counterintuitive decisions, from an allegorical fable about a culinary rat to a nearly silent robot love story (both of which, apparently, presented a challenge to marketers). And now, with Up, they have perhaps picked their most counterintuitive children’s movie hero yet: a lonely old man.

For the first time, Pixar’s hero is a perfectly ordinary human being: Carl Fredrickson (voiced by Ed Asner), who’s led a simple life selling balloons and living with his wife, Ellie.  After she dies, he decides to finally fulfill their lifelong dream of going off to South America for an adventure.  And so, bereft of money and with the modern world sprouting up around him, he attaches hundreds of balloons to his house and takes off in it like a blimp, not realizing that Russell, a young Wilderness Explorer (read: Boy Scout), is stuck on his porch and along for the ride. The house flies over a monochromatic city—a whimsical escape from modernity if there ever was one—and it’s easy to see why Up fits in as the first animated film to ever open the Cannes Film Festival.  Jacques Tati would be proud.

And yet, as it goes on, Up left me conflicted.  Pixar has always made movies that aim for both children and adults–not to mention adolescents embracing their inner child en masse–but rarely have the kid parts and adult parts felt so clearly delineated.

The first half hour or so of Up is nothing less than one of the most beautiful animated films I have ever seen.  Pixar, tackling their most mature subject matter to date, sketches Carl’s adult life in a touching sequence.  He lives small, stays in love, saves up, and never quite gets ahead.  Ellie can’t have children, and fate conspires to keep their savings small. Slowly, as he and Ellie grow old, there’s a powerful sense of melancholy, of dreams that have slipped out of reach. The animation is graceful, wordless, and musical. By the time Ellie’s health starts to fail, I had a lump in my throat.  Staring at the screen, I had to wonder if it was a put-on: after all, the movie had just premiered at number 1 with $68 million.  Did Pixar really just slip a subdued art film about old age into the top of  box office?

The answer, as it turns out, is both yes and no, as the film reaches a point where it shifts.  Before you know it, Carl has arrived in South America, and the movie abandons much of the themes and concerns of the beginning in favor of a more typical children’s movie.  In short, it goes for adventure, which is not inherently a bad way to go.  It juxtaposes adult concerns and childlike fantasy, and it allows Carl to see what he was missing and realize that, though his adult life didn’t fulfill his childhood dreams, it was hardly a waste.

But as adventure stories go, the one in Up—concerning a rare bird, a mad explorer, and a hundred talking dogs—feels almost out of place, offering moment to moment pleasures but not satisfying momentum.  The conflict and the villain are thinly sketched rather than fleshed out, which is unusual for Pixar, and the action can’t help but feel trivial placed alongside the weight and beauty of the early scenes. The plot and character arc start to feel stalled.  And as the hobbling old man from the beginning races through the jungle in chase sequences that have only one real possible ending, what once felt like flesh and blood starts to feel more like pixels. Perhaps due to the short running time, certain elements, like Russell’s estrangement from his own father, are mentioned but largely sidelined.  Up’s pathos returns near the end, as heartbreaking and sweet as ever, but in between it’s largely content to be, well, a cartoon—not a bad one at all, but unsurprising, and nowhere near the spectacular heights of the beginning.  My thoughts on the film are summed up by a telling line from Russell.  Perhaps delivering a message from the filmmakers to the children in the audience, who may one day see Up in a new light, Russell recounts an old memory and says, “I know it may sound boring, but the boring parts are the parts I remember the most.”

Of course, criticizing a kid’s movie for catering to children is the first step down a long lonely path that ends with me becoming Rex Reed, and I hope to avoid that however possible. To that effect, it’s worth noting that even when it dips into the ordinary, Pixar is far too skilled with animation, little details, and visual gags for it to ever dip too far.  And even in the moments when it more clearly aims for children, it has a cartoon classicism to it, separating itself through whimsy even if it doesn’t carry the weight of Pixar’s best work.  Plus, it’s hard to feel too suspicious of compromises when it contains some of their most daring material.

In the end, there are two ways to look at Up: either it retreats from its weightier themes and doesn’t fully capitalize on its promise, or it takes a children’s adventure and manages to slip in a beautiful meditation on old age.  Either way, Up is another winner.  And it’s a testament to the strength of Pixar’s track record and the promise of the beginning that Up can, on the whole, feel both underachieving and remarkably beautiful.

4 out of 5 stars.

The Harry Potter film franchise and I have a tradition. Ever since Sorcerer’s Stone, every time one comes out, I vow I’m not going to bother seeing it in theaters. And every time I do anyway.

I absolutely loved the books, which, like so many other young people, I awaited and devoured. I think they’re a model of how to create and expand an imaginary universe, how to power an epic with keen characterization on all scales, and—most importantly—how to make an archetypal story feel new and vital.  And as the books progressed, Rowling introduced a new level of thoughtful themes: sympathetic antagonists, a shallow news media, an Orwellian government, and a (timely) mood of life during wartime, as young people grow up to face an increasingly less secure world.

My problem with the movies is not a question of aesthetics or infidelity (or casting, for that matter, which is mostly as perfect as it gets).  My problem is that the movies often feel less like free-standing narratives and more like theme park rides, where animatronic reenactments skim along the highlights of an already beloved universe. Not to slag them—theme park rides are popular for a reason, but they don’t often enough take on a life of their own.  If anything, the movies reveal how Potter is, at its core, just another dark-lord-vs.-prophesied-hero fantasy.  My favorite film so far was Prisoner of Azkaban, if only because it seemed the most adapted, brought the most charm of its own. But that’s more or less how I felt about movies 1, 2, 4, and 5.

And yet, with movie 6, I found myself enjoying it more than any Potter film since Prisoner of Azkaban. It’s smooth and fast without feeling (too) rushed, and it slows down (enough) for character interaction.  Its effects are employed with creativity.  Even the camerawork often feels imaginative, alternately playful and somber, courtesy of director David Yates. Perhaps it’s because the book is a transition and not a self-contained adventure, but the script at times (at least until the end) actually feels adapted: themes are illustrated, a climax is built up to. In its best moments, Potter 6, while not a masterpiece, is surprisingly effective.

The typically complicated plot of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, as anyone who’s read the book can tell you, finds even darker times descending on Rowling’s magical boarding school. An evil lord is on an open rampage, faith in Dumbledore—the comforting authority figure of the wizard world—has started to waver, and Harry is coming to the frightening realization that adults aren’t any more equipped to handle the problem than he is.  And then there’s a new professor, a series of divulging flashbacks, a mysterious textbook, an assassination conspiracy, and really, if you don’t know, it’s easier to just read the books.  7 books, several thousand pages…once you get going, it should take about 2 weeks at most.

Not everything in the movie works, but what does work, works well: a fight in the bathroom, Harry and Dumbledore in the cave, the added slow-building framing device of Draco fixing the cabinet (hooray for adapting!), and several other moments that feel as well-realized as one could hope.  Ditto the performances. Daniel Radcliffe is fast maturing into a charismatic leading man (even if his film character is just an archetype). Rupert Grint’s Ron gets more to do than be a token sidekick, the excellent Michael Gambon adds a shade of vulnerability, and Jim Broadbent, as the new addition, keeps up the every-famous-British-actor-ever pedigree. But Tom Felton’s Draco Malfoy, in particular, is a surprise stand out: sniveling entitlement (EVIL sniveling entitlement) gives way to overwhelmed fear, and Felton, his character given room, evokes the right mix of enmity and sympathy. All of which doesn’t mention crowd-pleaser bit performances by Evanna Lynch and Helena Bonham Carter, whose ultimate goth girl villainess seems unable to say anything unless she’s shrieking or whispering sultrily.  If nothing else, the movie puts on a good show.

The most noticeable adapting decision is, of course, the focus on teen romance, which the film spends a lot of time (mostly successfully) mining for laughs. It is, I admit, a strange angle to choose: arguably the darkest of the books here becomes the movie that errs closest to a romantic comedy. As far as humorous soap operatics go, it works, but in retrospect it seems odd considering the wealth of material they could have focused on instead: the villain’s past, the titular Half-Blood Prince, the reign of terror inflicted on the outside world, and the set-up for the next movie, all of which are largely put aside.  Much of the middle, then, is a snogging melodrama powered by charismatic actors. I can’t decide what that says about the film franchise’s purpose, but between the action sequences, soap operas, and lush F/X, it’s hard to shake the feeling that it’s still skimming, still missing the full narrative potency.  When Snape reveals at the end, in dramatic close-up, “I am the Half-Blood Prince,” it hardly seems to matter—it’s just a moment from the book, weightlessly visualized.  And when the film departs from the novel to ditch a fight scene, or set fire to the Weasley’s house, or blow the whole “is Snape evil?” question by having him appear next to Harry, I wasn’t sure I cared.  The books are still the franchise flagship, this is still ancillary.

So ultimately I’m not sure where I land. In the theater, I enjoyed it for the smooth ride and lively show that it is, so much so it surprised me. But “enjoy,” perhaps, is still faint praise for a book series that made fans out of (most of) a generation.  The pleasures of Harry Potter should be a bit more lasting; here, most evaporate when the lights come up. My hope remains that in 30 years or so, when the Potter book series has gone from a millennial sensation to a stone-cold classic, someone who grew up on the novels will remake the movies. But for two and a half hours at the multiplex, it shoots off enough sparks and doesn’t disengage.

3 out of 5 stars.