Harry Potter

Thanks to the good graces of the grandparents, Margie and I actually got to go on a date Friday night. Woo-hoo!

First off, a visit to an Indian restaurant by the theater which we’ve been meaning to try. Good choice, with excellent food at a reasonable price (and appropriately snappy service).

Then a stroll across the sidewalk to see Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.

Thoughts (and, likely, spoilers) in no particular order:

• The film, just like the first one, and maybe even moreso, felt like a skimming along of the high points of the book, with barely a narrative bridge to keep it together. It was a lot of fun, and the visuals were marvelous (Hogwarts gets a lot more time on-screen, and is practically a co-star of the film), but there was still a feeling of being out of breath by the end, despite the 2:40 length.
• I hate to say it, but Daniel Radcliffe is beginning to look a bit old for the part. What age is Harry in this book? Of course, Tom Riddle didn’t look 16, either.
• Harry vacillates between stultifying nobility and a real sense of ruthlessness. In part, that may be intentional — the conflict that becomes spelled out later in the flick — but it also makes him oddly unlikable.
• I like Hermione. I really do. Were I at Hogwarts as a student, I’d be mooning after her. That said, her role in the movie was a bit too much “let’s explicate what’s going on via a speech by Hermione.”
• Does Ron in the book spend nearly as much time with godawful expressions on his face? I mean, kudos to Rupert Grint for the contortions from terror, disgust, horror, or having a mouth full of slugs, but, jeez, the role was almost one of comic relief.
• Dobbie, aside from being horribly annoying, was spot-on.
• Gilderoy Lockhart was nailed perfectly by Kenneth Branagh. ‘Nuff said. The only question unanswered was why the hell he was hired, kept on, or relied upon for anything, being as obviously incompetent as he is.
• Alan Rickman’s Snape gets far too little screen time, alas, and he looks far too worried the entire film. Watching him deal with Lockhart, though, is quite entertaining.
• Along that line, we see way too much zap-boom-blow-em-through-the-air-style magic. It gets old.
• The big finale with Hagrid never quite pays off. He’s not nearly shaken enough from his time in Azkaban, and the adulation of the students seems unexpectedly forced. Why do they all like him so much? I mean, we can understand it with Harry et al., but only just.
• Harry’s aunt and uncle are even more cartoonish than before, even while their cruelty to Harry shows some of the dark side to the Potter tale. I keep waiting for Uncle Vernon to drop dead of a stroke.
• Richard Harris puts in his farewell performance as Dumbledore, sometimes seeming to barely be alive even then. Dumbledore gets more screen time, and to better effect, than in the first film, but Harris’ performance is too wooden, too lips-barely-moving, too much of the time.
• Why was Harry immune to the gaze of the basilisk? Okay, I suppose it’s because the phoenix conveniently scratched out its eyes, but it still seemed that the mysterious, magical, evil-whispering monster of most of the movie was very quickly turned into just a giant snake at the end — and an easily-dispatched one, at that.
• The Gryfindor sword looked dorky.
• Might have been nice to get a bit more foreshadowing that Ginny was tied up in all this. I don’t recall how the book handled it, but Ginny’s role in the goings-on in the movie really feels like it comes out of left field. I suspect overzealous film editing.
• The Malfoys, junior and senior, were fine, though Lucius’ snapping at the end seemed abrupt and out of character. Draco seemed there simply to act as a foil, and to laugh and goad the protagonists on. The quidditch match in mid-film seemed more an excuse to spray special effects on the screen than anything actually advancing the plot.

Despite the nits above, overall pretty enjoyable. I’d give it a B+.

Also enjoyable were the trailers for coming films, including The Two Towers (which they could have just shown four or five times in a row, as far as I was concerned), the oddly appealing Kangaroo Jack, and two (!) upcoming Bond spoofs (though I’ll go with Frankie Muniz over Rowan Atkinson any day).