Harry Potter and the Order of the PhoenixDirector: David Yates. Screenplay: Michael Goldenberg, based on J.K. Rowling’s novel. Cinematography: Slawomir Idziak. Film editing: Mark Day. Production design: Stuart Craig. Music: Nicholas Hooper. Producers: David Barron, David Heyman. With: Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson, Rupert Grint, Jason Boyd, Rich-ard Macklin, Harry Melling, Kathryn Hunter, Miles Jupp, Fiona Shaw, Richard Griffiths, Adrian Rawlins, Geraldine Somerville, Robert Pattinson, Ralph Fiennes, Natalia Tena, Brendan Gleeson, George Harris, Peter Cartwright, Bridgette Millar, Gary Oldman, Mark Williams, David Thewlis, Maggie Smith, Julie Walters, Timo-thy Bateson, James Phelps, Oliver Phelps, Bonnie Wright, Jamie Wolpert, Nicho-las Blane, Robert Hardy, Jason Isaacs, Chris Rankin, Michael Gambon, Imelda Staunton, Sian Thomas, Tom Felton, Jamie Waylett, Josh Herdman, Katie Leung, Matthre Lewis, Evanna Lynch, David Bradley, Devon Murray, William Melling, Apple Brook, Alan Rickman, Emma Thompson, Alfie Enoch, Afshan Azad, She-fali Chowdhury, Warwick Davis, Nick Shim, Sam Beazley, John Atterbury, He-lena Bonham Carter, Robbie Coltrane, Richard Leaf, Tony Maudsley, Alec Hop-kins, Robbie Jarvis, James Walters, Charles Hughes, James Utechin. UK/USA. 138 min. 2007.
By Jeremy Sterritt
How much does it suck to be Harry Potter? Let me count the ways:
1. You're an orphan with a home life worse than anything Dickens could come up with.
2. Far from a place of whimsy and enchantment, your school is a sadistic fun-house that is more likely than not going to kill you. It, too, is worse than anything Dickens could come up with. Or Clive Barker. Or that Book of Revelation guy. You keep going there anyway, perhaps in hope of learning to read things, like brochures.
3. A term there, as at many a British public school, is enough to screw most people up for life; moreover, the place is clearly built on an Indian burial ground that was itself built on an Indian burial ground. But again and again you have to return to this game show of psychological torture, which is after all your quote-unquote home.
4. After summer vacation in a Skinner box, moreover, your months at school in the castle of insanity--where at least one new, highly suspicious teacher joins the existing faculty each year in singling you out for special, secret-prison-style treatment--are recalled as, and possibly are, the best days of your life. Most people who have been to prison or summer camp seem to end up going back, but Harry Potter is creepily more like that “Deer Hunter” guy.
5. No matter what sick, twisted blood sport is in vogue this season, you will inevitably be participating in it. You're a shoo-in homecoming king at Hogwarts’s end-of-term prom substitute: the annual student-on-student death race.
6. Each year you get cuter and closer to legal age, which helps sell movie tickets, but does you no good because the only two friends you have in the world do just the opposite, growing homelier all the time.
7. Possibly because of your increasing ability to run with the in-crowd of Hogwarts hotties, you treat your dumpy friends with disdain. This might have worked in “Heathers,” but it backfires in your movie as your arrogance and smug superiority make the cool kids treat you worse and worse ... and your loser friends glom on even closer.
8. Your parents are dead.
9. Your stand-in dad is a convicted murderer, but not a rapper, despite being called Serious Black.
10. Serious Black ends up dead, just like your real parents, which can't make you feel good. Plus, in his last words to you, he can't remember your name.
Yes, the Harry Potter saga continues with another dark summer blockbuster. The film series is still some distance away from the consummation of young Mr. Potter's determined adventures in not getting kicked off the island, or in his case, kicked out of school; but we know things will work out in the end, even though no one gets the girl, everything is far too sinister for sound sleep, and another someone close to Harry will end up dead.
It is with this most recent installment, “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix,” that the chronicles of Potter take a step down in this reviewer's estimation. For some years--years dominated by summer sequel upon summer sequel--the Harry Potter ones have been the best of the bunch. And it's not hard to figure out why. The first batch were fun, first-act romps, with Harry and company discovering the delights and more-or-less harmless pitfalls of leaving home for something grander. Or just different, since any change would be welcomed by the ticking time bomb that was Harry Potter before his acceptance to Sorcery U. For a few years at least, we could trust in the Potter pictures to send us from the theater smiling and with a light heart.
Then came last year's chapter, or maybe it was the one before that, when things started to change. Instead of those-were-the-days larks like mistaking the evil professor for an evil professor and just barely winning the Quidditch world cup, a death toll began to mount. And tellingly, young Mr Potter, like any adolescent but with far better reason, became taciturn, moody, and scared. Unlike the geography and math tests that make school so easy, Harry began facing spooky tests, existential tests, tests where snorting all the crushed-up Ritalin in the world won't help.
These tests, these films, mark the second act in the protracted Potter yarn. Second acts are sometimes the best (think “Empire Strikes Back”) but are very often the worst (think “Matrix: Reloaded”) and are always, by definition, about one thing: conflict. Second-act conflict usually has little to do with anything outside the head of the hero, however, which is why Shakespeare, always on the money, found a way to get us inside the heads of his sullen, foot-dragging, self-pitying heroes. In “The Empire Strikes Back,” George Lucas uses the obvious yet too-seldom-employed device of simply abandoning the hero to sulk and brood, choosing instead to follow some real action with Han and Leah, Boba Fett and Lando Calrissian. The idea is compellingly simple: By the time the butterfly leaves its self-involved chrysalis of introspection and doubt, ready for some third-act fireworks, all that's required is that said butterfly show up where the action is and not be a buzzkill.
Unfortunately, when a story is spread out over a long series of milk-'em-for-what-they're-worth children's books, this approach just doesn't work. You try to keep things engaging and fun, but let's face it: The inner-turmoil-type perils of Potter are only going to be fun for those who are truly engaged. And that counts me out. I don't want Dumbledore to die, but while I'm not evil, I couldn’t care less if he does; in fact, I'm not really sure what his dead/alive status is at the moment. Simply put, I'm not a devotee of the books, and that's making it increasingly hard to be a fan of the movies each summer.
The good news is that nine out of ten people on five continents are devotees of the Harry Potter books, do know if Dumbledore is alive or not, and will be transported into ecstasies of joy by any and all Harry Potter mousepads, coffee mugs, tee-shirts, golf tees, breakfast cereals, Saturday-morning cartoons, and Halloween costumes--let alone the continued live-action installments of better-than-average (if increasingly dour and somber) summer movies that the H. Potter franchise brings us each year.
How certain am I that we can expect more authorized Harry Potter movies, and maybe even books? Let me count the ways:
1. Ka-ching!
2. Ka-ching!
3. After a decade or so, J.K. Rowling will hear the following whispered, as in a dream: ka-ching!
4. Forget ka-ching; you're center square or you're nothing.
5. Won't somebody please think of the children!
Jeremy Sterritt is proprietor and film critic of RadioOpticon - am1020 whdd - robinhoodradio.com.
