Harry Potter Seven And Three Quarters.

So, finally, the inevitable has happened, and the series drags itself over the finish line, is wrapped in a foil blanket and given a complementary bottle of Lucozade Sport for its trouble. It's been a long hard slog, and there was an alarming dip in pace towards the end, resulting in eight films out of seven books, but now it's all over bar the shouting and the special edition Blu-Ray boxed sets.

Obviously, any attempt to review the plot is futile. I don't think the book surprised anyone when it came out, much less the film of the most read book in the world. It is what it always is, well made, slavishly faithful to the text, with a few abridgements and practically no deviation. The performances are what they've always been; everyone by now very comfortable in their roles, and obviously aware, in-character and out, that this is the final act. In the last film (HP7a: Harry On Camping), it was very much a three hander between Harry, Ron and Hermione, and you'd have thought this would be rather different. But actually, much as it's possible to be alone in a crowd, despite basically everyone in the franchise coming back for their curtain call, this leads to very few scenes of any depth at all between Harry and anyone other than Ron and Hermione. In fact, I'd even go so far as to say Ron gets a bit short changed; Hermione stands revealed as the real support that Harry needs to prevail. Everyone else seems more or less to just say a few pleasantries and words of encouragement to Harry before he moves on, like he's having a big birthday party, and in having to talk to everyone, he hardly gets to talk to anyone. And in a way, that's how it should be. For all that he's got the greatest supporting cast in literary history (I think it's fair to say), ultimately, Harry is almost a man alone.

As to the film, well, I have my doubts. It's not that you can sit there and actually criticise it, call any of it rubbish, because it's not. It's well directed, and well acted, but ultimately, it's two hours of things that must dutifully be done before the end; a real sense of putting the chairs up on the tables, sweeping the floors, and turning the lights out before locking up. I think of the films of my own childhood that stand out, your Back To The Futures, and your Top Guns, and I can't see, much as it should be, that this is a film that will have that kind of impact as the backdrop to the lives of today's kids.

I couldn't help comparing the film to other films, to classics, because this is a would-be classic. The first half hour or so of this film is essentially a bank heist. And while the bank gets heisted because the plot demands it, this is no Ocean's Eleven. The meat of the film is essentially a siege; but this fails to convey either the doomed tenacity of the soldiers at Rourke's Drift in Zulu, or the shock and awe of the Imperial assault on Hoth in Empire Strikes Back. It's too inevitable now. Is anyone really going to be taking Voldemort up on his offer to leave them be if they hand over Harry? Even consider it in their darkest moments? No. Everybody, characters and audience alike, knows how this ends, Harry and Voldemort, to the death, for better or worse. The inevitability of it, for me, saps the tension right out of it. We finally have it explained to us the precise nature of the relationship between Harry and Voldemort, but this is no "Luke, I Am Your Father" moment.

This is as much a fault of the structure of the book; and you can hardly fault a book for not being structured like a film either. So there we have it, a sometimes time-consuming, but not unenjoyable chore is finally put to bed. I feel much as you might when you've just finished the washing up; basically quite pleased that all the dishes are now clean and put away in the cupboard.

Bridesmaids

So, the set up. Kristen Wiig is Annie, whose life is falling apart. Until recently, she had her own bakery, a nice (she thinks) boyfriend and looks set. The bakery gets hit by the recession, her boyfriend leaves her, and she's left working in a jewellery store selling engagement rings while labouring under the impression that love cannot ever last.

Her best friend friend Lillian (Maya Rudolph) however, announces that she is getting married, and that she wants Annie to be the Maid of Honour, which pretty much leaves arranging stuff like the hen night and the bridal shower to her. At which point she's introduced to Helen, a relative of the husband to be, apparently wealthy and perfect, and seemingly Lillian's would-be new best friend. And so a neurotic game of one-up-manship ensues.

Now, on the face of it, this is The Hangover, With Ladies. And this is certainly something which I think people who haven't seen either film say, in mutual condemnation of both films. However, The Hangover was a lot better than the sum of its parts, and so is this. Because what's important about The Hangover is that it's about how men are around other men, and this is a film about women's relationships with each other. One thing I'd point out is, while there are significant male characters in the film, the husband to be is not one of them; I don't think he gets a line, and if he does, it's hardly significant.

What this film is about, and where its heart is, is how you deal with the fact that as you get older, your life will go in quite different directions than your oldest friends, and how you can adapt to that. The core relationship in this film is Annie and Lillian, not Lillian and Whatever-His-Name-Was-It-Matters-Not.

If the film has a weakness, and you might not think that it is, is that the tone is all over the place. There's scenes between Annie and Lillian which are honest and truthful, and up there with the likes of films like The Kids Are Alright. And then ten minutes later, we're in the midst of a massively broad and crude extended vomit and diarrhea gag. And I guess it's really up to the audience whether they feel that makes the film an incoherent mess, or whether it's a case of a film with a pretty broad palette of where it'll go for its laughs. Myself, I enjoyed being caught off guard, as it wasn't entirely clear at any time which direction it would go next.

Bad Teacher

Let's look at the trailer first... So, it looks like Cameron Diaz is a appalling, couldn't-give-a-fuck teacher, whose only reason for being in teaching is to keep herself in money until she can snare a rich husband. The new teacher in school (Justin Timberlake) has family money, and she sets her sights on him, deciding she needs a boob job in order to get his interest. And thus sets about getting the requisite money in the most thoroughly morally reprehensible ways she can. Meanwhile a thoroughly good, through and through teacher decides to expose her as the menace to children everywhere that she is.

Aaaaand yeah, that's the joke, that's the film. I'm not saying that there's no other laughs at all in the film, but they're all variations on that; Cameron Diaz acting like the worst human on earth, and mostly getting away with it. If they'd taken the time to do a 15 second cut of the end of the film, stuck it on the end of the trailer, that'd be the film precised in as much detail as you'd need.

So, it's pretty shallow. So really if it's going to save itself, this film needs to tell that joke in a lot of funny variations. And to an extent, it does. Bad Teacher does bad things, then worse things, then even worse things, and Good Teacher basically drives herself mad attempting to expose same. And there's actually a pretty decent frisson of dark amusement as you realise that the film isn't even slightly interested in letting the good guy win. And that is the only thing that elevates this above being a pretty dumb average Hollywood comedy.

The Hangover: Part II

Do we recall The Hangover? Well, they did it again.

In what is such a rerun of a sequel that it's practically a remake, we follow the same bunch of idiots who get so blotto on a stag night that they wake in the morning with no idea what happened last night, and with one of their number missing. A few details are changed; a different one of them is getting married, the stag night is in Bangkok not Vegas, and the missing person is the bride's brother, not the groom. All else is the same. And that's not absolutely the wrong thing to do; in Die Hard 2, John McClane couldn't believe the same kind of crap could happen to him twice, and he had a point. With this, if you give the same bunch of idiots alcohol, it's not inconceivable that they'll wake up in dire straits again. It's a repeatable experiment.

Not quite the same, of course. In that this movie is out to trump its earlier incarnation in many respects. So, the humour is broader, blacker, crasser, and more insensitive. Which might sound like a criticism, and if you've no tolerance of that kind of mularkey, it is a criticism. However, if you're interested in a film about three idiots going off the rails on a stag night, Crass Up or Go Home, I say. The only way to make it funny twice is to push it harder.

Taking a look at my portable laughometer, which I take with me to all films*, I can see that I laughed about 75%-80% as often as I did with The Hangover, that on average, these laughs were only about 10% less hard than the laughs for the original, but analysis of the timbre of the laughs suggests that the laughs were about 10-15% more evil this time.

In an odd way, I am minded of the film Saw, and its sequels. The original was a grisly bit of torture porn, but mostly held up as a movie that normal people could like, because of the interesting gameplaying proposition play scenario. The sequel, however, was less broad ranging in appeal, and appeals mostly to those who were fans of the first, and attempts to give them more. And of course, by film six of the franchise, we're reduced to just the sick fucks who like watching mutilations. Well, I imagine the Hangover franchise like that. The first has a broad appeal as a buddy movie, for all it's black slapstick, the second will appear more to people who specifically enjoy black slapstick. If it goes any further along these lines, it really will only appeal to fans of Dirty Sanchez, but we're still early enough in the sequence to appeal to people with only borderline personality disorders**.




* - lie
** - that is, me.

Green Lantern

The Basics. One of the oldest civilisations in the galaxy is a bunch of blue dudes who call themselves The Guardians of the Universe. Seriously, that's what they call themselves. They live on a planet called Oa near the center of the Universe, from where they essentially dictate that there must be law and order in the universe. Essentially, they're Time Lords, only they specialise in Weapons of Mass Destruction rather than time travel.

Anyhoo, after a brief, disastrous flirtation with imposing order on the cosmos with an army of android killing machines (not mentioned in the film, but they totally did it. The Guardians are a bunch of reckless assholes, for all of their sitting on big rocks pretending to be Yoda), they came to realise that it was maybe a better idea to allow the peoples of the universe to police themselves, maybe. So they split the universe into 3600 sectors and appointed one suitable individual from each sector to police that sector. These individuals are given Power Rings, which are weapons of immense power and versatility, capable of interstellar flight, firing big bolts of energy, and creating constructs of green energy. All this stuff is powered by the combined willpower of the universe, channeled by the willpower of the user. So if you can think it, you can create it, and the harder you can think it, the more powerful it is.

These guys have nice green uniforms, are called Green Lanterns, and form the Green Lantern Corps. They're this weird combination of 60's optimism, the corps consisting of the most multicultural mix of aliens conceivable (including a sentient planet, a sentient virus, and a sentient mathematical equation), but also a pretty authoritarian stance (the Guardians impose their chosen Lantern on a sector, and you don't get a vote. At least one Lantern in the past has been discovered imposing order on his sector through fascist dictatorship, and this went on for years without the Guardians taking an interest.)

Anyway, the Lantern for our sector, Abin Sur, a purple humanoid bloke, is fatally wounded fighting a being of pure Fear called Parallax, and crash lands on Earth. He instructs the ring to go find a suitable candidate, and it finds Hal Jordan (Ryan Reynolds), a hotshot test pilot, who at least initially is not as full of willpower and lacking in fear as a Green Lantern ought to be. However, the fear creature thing is about to devour the Earth, so it behooves him to become so pretty quick.

As a film, it's really quite good, I thought. I had very low expectations, having heard some dreadful reviews, but I don't think they're all that fair. It's pretty much your standard Joseph Campbell "Hero with a Thousand Faces" monomyth, and in not deviating much from that template, it's a pretty satisfying structure, if not the most original. I've seen some criticism of the film lacking a proper bad guy, the big conflict being against an amorphous cloud of fear and evil. In my view, though, this is where Green Lantern should be. The Green Lantern ring is practically an Ultimate Weapon. If a Lantern isn't up against a big World Eating Monstrosity, then it's a bit overkill. It's all about scale, and scale is delivered.

I would say, however, the film suffers in comparison with Thor. In that the two characters have a similar sort of storyline, and power level, but Thor just being quite a bit better and more fun. Overall, though, not a bad superhero flick, and so what if you're the season's Second Best Superhero movie?

Senna

I wouldn't normally be too worried about posting spoilers about a documentary. One does not spoiler The World At War by telling people that the Nazis lose and Hitler dies in the end. However, this is a different kettle of fish, because this feels much more like a movie. Imagine you yourself were to plan a film of your life. You would weave a narrative including all you greatest achievements and most crushing defeats, and you'd then have to work out how to film those scenes, because, of course, when they happened to you, nobody was filming. However, in Ayrton Senna's case, that's simply not true. Everything he's famous for was captured on film, either by race cameras, TV sports cameras, or the voracious lens of the TV interview after the fact. At least on the sporting side of his life, it seems like his life could scarcely be better documented, and there's some sense that as he lived for the sport, no other side is necessary.

So, as the footage is actually available, the director Asif Kapadia has seemingly taken on the task of sifting through the - probably in total - years of film of Senna's life, and assembled two hours of it into a narrative. There's not a moment on screen that's not film from the time that's being portrayed - no modern returns to old scenes, no talking head interviews, with much of the voice over being taken from contemporary interviews and commentary. Hence, it's very "in the moment", and I was at times catapulted into the nostalgia of my youth, and the cigarette branded cars, Marlboros racing against John Player Specials.

Once we get into the main body of the film, the real story is the rivalry between Alain Prost and Senna. I'm not sure how fairly this is portrayed; Senna's this paragon of pure racing for the sake of racing, whereas Prost is this conniving, calculating prick who does what he has to do to win, like some moustache twirling Dick Dastardly, only with a healthy slathering of French arrogance on top. I don't think that was fair at all, as the whole Renault Williams episode shows. Prost starts driving for Renault Williams, who are pioneering traction control, which seemingly makes Prost unbeatable, and then there's this interview with Senna complaining about how all this electronics is unfair and any idiot could win in that car. Yet, when Prost retires, who's driving for Renault Williams the following year? Mmmm-hmm...

And if this was a documentary, pure and simple, I'd be booing and throwing eggs at such plainly partisan filmmaking. However, it's not, It's Only A Movie, and as such, we've picked our hero and our villain, and judicious editing shows them in that light. I'd be surprised if Prost isn't at least a little peeved by the final cut.

The film itself is thus a little odd to watch. In that if you watch it as a movie, you occasionally have to remind yourself that this is real contemporary footage, and thus there were no retakes, and no reshoots if the film quality was a bit poor. There are moments, however, that I think no action movie can remotely approach for thrills. In particular, we get car camera footage from Senna's drive in the 1984 Monaco Grand Prix, and watching that, I swear that he must have been superhuman or insane. Pod Racing in Phantom Menace is a game for five year olds in comparison.

So, is this a good documentary? No. It's too partisan. Is this the most hair raising racing movie ever made? Certainly. Especially when you consider the stakes involved.

X-Men - First Class*

* - not a review

I expect we've all been waiting for a film which establishes why Professor X and Magneto are at odds with each other, despite once have been friends. No? Oh, you were quite happy to accept the few lines of exposition, and self-evident conflict of ideas between the two men? So you feel this movie's a bit superfluous then? Oh well. Here it is anyway. Seemingly unable to break away from the formula of the Superhero Origin Movie, this is the prequel origin movie to the original X-Men origin movie, which establishes the origins of Professor X, Magneto, Mystique, and a few others who don't actually appear in the subsequent continuity, and Beast, who is missing for two of the movies then pops up in the third without so much as a sicknote to explain his absence from the previous two.

So, the setup. We saw Erik Lehnsherr, who's going to be Magneto some day, in the first X-Men movie use his magnetic powers to attempt to open the gates of a concentration camp, until he was subdued by guards. It seems that this was witnessed by Sebastian Shaw, a mutant who was then working with the Nazis in a Mengele-like capacity, with his own agenda of creating a mutant master race. He takes young Erik as a protege/experimental subject, and attempts to unlock his powers by essentially inflicting physical and emotional pain on him. We then cut to twenty years later, the war is over, and Erik Lehnsherr has become an absolutely kick-ass Nazi hunter, obsessed with hunting Shaw down.

Shaw himself has been busy in the interim, forming a group of mutants called the Hellfire Club, with whom he is attempting to influence the US and Russian militaries regarding strategic placement of nuclear missiles. The CIA are interested in him, and he's being investigated by CIA Agent Moira McTaggart, who discovers he's some kind of genetic mutant thing, and so seeks the advice of world expert on the subject, the newly qualified Prof. Charles Xavier of Oxford University.

This leads to the formation of a mutant group under CIA auspices to hunt down Shaw, and soon they cross paths with, and recruit Erik. Together they recruit more mutants, with Charles' idealist and Erik's suspicion of authority working well to moderate each other. And the hunt for Shaw is on in earnest.

Now, despite my reservations that this is an origin movie, it's actually a pretty good one. Significant liberties are taken with the Marvel Comics continuity, but that's all to the good in my eyes. In the comics, the Hellfire Club were a bunch of self-sabotaging pillocks who dressed in fake 18th Century costumes, and who were basically a ripoff of that one episode of The Avengers than Chris Claremont saw once. Here, instead, we have Sebastian Shaw (Kevin Bacon) as a properly psycho Bond villain with all the trappings; secret base under a go-go-dancing nightclub, big yacht which doubles as a submarine, he's got the lot. His Hellfire club, then, rather than the bunch of squabbling doofuses you find in the comics, are a more or less random assortment of mutant henchmen, most of whom have the sense to shut the fuck up and let Shaw do the talking. The only bit of miscasting there, and I think of it as Near-Miss casting is January Jones from Mad Men as Emma Frost. Now fair enough, she looks the part, and should have no more trouble inspiring the kind of nocturnal tributes from comic geeks than previous versions of Emma Frost, but she's also supposed to be really witty and urbane, which isn't working here. However, had they just looked one name further in the Mad Men cast list, they'd have seen Christina Hendricks, who would have been perfect. Ah well, near miss.

The will-be X-Men are pretty good. Michael Fassbender's awesome as Erik, playing him as a basically decent man who's never going to put up with the slightest oppression from anyone, ever again. McAvoy's good, playing Xavier as a naive idealist whose cushy background causes him to have an almost condescending misunderstanding of the situations other mutants have found themselves on. There's excellent support from Nicolas Hoult as Beast, and Jennifer Lawrence as Mystique; a pair of really classy performances which really fill the movie out, and prevent it being all about the headlining characters.

Ultimately, though, the script prevents this being a really good film, as it's no more than the usual tick-box list of plot points that prequels have to establish before the end, and that doesn't actually amount to a story.