MOVIE REVIEW: Harry Potter and the Profit of Cash
I just came out of a screening of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, the fifth installment of the series, and before I go spouting off my likes and dislikes, I wanted to forewarn anybody reading this review that my expertise is vastly limited in the world of J.K Rowling. While I’ve never read the books, and it’s not due to a disliking or laziness, I just find the concept of visual storytelling much more effective than having me conjure up images from the deep and dark recesses of my imagination.
With that said, I want readers to understand that I’m reviewing this film as just that, a film, and not so much a visual appendage of the book. So please keep the hate mail that starts off with “You ignorant twit…” to a minimum.
Now that that is out of the way, I loved the film. It had all of the visual aspects and plot maturity that the previous films were leading up to, and I know we are only going upwards from here. The last film left us with the big reveal of nose-less Ralph Fiennes as our quintessential baddie Lord Voldemort, and Harry taking his first step of many into adulthood. There lies my biggest problem with the film, but we’ll take it slow, as per usual.
Putting our best foot forward, the visual effects never cease to amaze me in each of these films. Each director (in this case, BBC veteran David Yates) has brought a different look and feel to the film they were charged with, and gave the film an entirely fresh feel, without diverting too far from the original text. In this film, we get more special effects than any of its previous predecessors. Between CG’d giants, to CG’d fireworks, even to Ralph Fiennes CG’d lack of a nose, there is certainly more computer graphics in this film than you can wave a stick at. Though through all of this, not once was I taken out of the mythos by a lack of belief, all thanks to the superior visual effects.
By far my favorite aspect of the film to talk about, and probably the one that will get me in the most trouble, is the undertone used throughout the first and second act. That undertone being the same thing that has fueled some of the most important science fiction and fantasy films of our era, and probably before that. This message of course is essentially “Damn the Man!”
CHILI PALMER: You know how to write one of these?
In keeping with the upcoming movie The Dark Knight, the next Superman movie will be titled Man of Steel. The villain…? Aww, you guessed it.
It’s said that there are only a few established art and entertainment forms that America can truly call its own — baseball, jazz music and comic books. It’s a bit of a hubristic statement, not surprising coming from a country as relatively young yet as vast as our own. It almost sounds as if we’re trying to convince ourselves of our own cultural relevance — even more so because we realize that each of these things has its roots elsewhere. But hey, so do most of us. And just as this "nation of immigrants" has brought disparate peoples into a "melting pot" atmosphere wherein their contributions have mixed to form a melange all its own, so have jazz, comics and baseball taken previously existing elements and turned them into something new and unique.
Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist Doug Marlette, creator of the newspaper strip Kudzu, was killed in a car accident this morning in Mississippi.
