Of course, there was no waiting a week or two to see this one. Warner Brothers has The Official Harry Potter Website, with online games and such, and IMDB (which is part of Amazon.com, actually) has the more informative site. Good movie, lots of great effects, and the three kids who star as Harry, Ron, and Hermoine do a super job carrying this film. Certainly worth seeing and you can see the trailer online if you want.

Director Chris Columbus (Mrs. Doubtfire, Home Alone, Bicentennial Man) and screenwriter Steve Kloves (Wonder Boys, The Fabulous Baker Boys–how did he get this assignment?) put a solid story up on the screen, you can see where the $125 million was gloriously spent. They had a tough time choosing which 20% of the novel to include in the movie and did a mostly good job–although novelist J.K. Rowling was noted as having substantial input– but I think we needed more on the Harry/Draco Malfoy animosity and the same on Professor Snape (Alan Rickman does a smart job in the role). Along with Rickman, Columbus will be providing significant numbers of older English actors with employment as this and the other six Potter movies are made, including John Cleese, John Hurt, Richard Harris, Robbie Coltrane, Richard Griffiths, Fiona Shaw, Maggie Smith, Julie Walters, and Richard Bremmer.

recommended

Considering how anxious I was to see it, I’m as surprised as anyone that it took me two weeks to get to it. But Jet and his buddies at the Multi-Verse Authorities were worth the wait, this flick is far superior to the last two movies I saw. Others (friends, critics) weren’t too impressed but I sure was. Li plays the hero and the villain this time out and he really creates two separate, very different characters–this is the first I’ve ever seen him play a baddie and he’s a nasty boy! Writing/producing/directing team James Wong and Glen Morgan found a way to take cool concept right out of today’s physics journals (the multiverse) and make a tense action movie out of it. Okay, they went a little too far with the central conceit that drives the bad Li but you have to give them a little slack. This is 90 minutes that keeps moving and moving until a titanic confrontation and a conclusion that leaves both Li’s happy, sort of.

Wong and Morgan came together as a team writing for The X-Files in its early years, went out on their own with the underrated and sorely missed Space: Above and Beyond, worked again with X-Files creator Chris Carter on the darkly serious TV series Millenium, made their feature film debut with last year’s Final Destination.

Carla Guigino plays her character in two of the universes, also as different as the two versions of Li, with few pitfalls. Delroy Lindo shows up here with hair! Morgan and Wong bring some of their regulars in here to good effect, especially James Morrison and Tucker Smallwood who played starring roles on Space: A&B.

definitely recommended

This must be the year for aging stars to make not quite good enough crime flicks. In August we got DeNiro and The Score, with Marlon Brando impersonating a beached whale. Now, in a better movie with really strange dialog, is Gene Hackman in Heist. Writer-director David Mamet makes an interesting but not $9 a ticket interesting no honor among thieves movie that has Danny Devito somehow in a position to take down Hackman and Delroy Lindo, as if that’s believable. Mamet previously gave us gems like Glengarry Glen Ross, Wag the Dog, and The Postman Always Rings Twice but his last few films have been such stinkers as State and Main (although Alec Baldwin was totally believable as a jackass in that) and The Edge (Baldwin again).

sucks

In the Farrelly Brother’s latest low-class comedy, Jack Black (so great in High Fidelity) plays Shallow Hal. Transformed by self-help guru Tony Robbins (playing himself), lifelong supermodel junkie Hal Larsen is only able to see people by their inner beauty. Accordingly, he sees Rosemary (Gwyneth Paltrow) as a sexy, svelte blonde (Gwyneth Paltrow without much makeup) while others, most significantly best friend Mauricio (Jayson Alexander), see her as the 300 pounder she truly is. Hal is baffled by others’ reactions to her and when he finally is confronted with the truth, we find out if he is a real human being or as shallow as the movie title suggests. While overall I don’t think this film reaches the same level of hilarity as the Farrelly’s There’s Something About Mary, it does have it’s moments. And I have to give screenwriter Sean Moynihan and the brothers credit for making effective use of the supporting characters as mirrors, but then take most of it away for just not giving us a decent third act.

The filmmakers have set up an amusing secondary website, MasterPlayers, to let Mauricio help you out with those young superhotties.

recommended

We scare because we care. And how true and sweet that saying really is coming from the mouths of John Goodman and Bill Crystal. You can read plenty of reviews of Monsters, Inc., so I won’t go into it here except to say that this movie is the first must see film in months. I read Friday that one of the reasons Pixar movies are so consistently good is because the actual production is so demanding and lengthy that the script has to be great to justify the effort. As an extra treat, Pixar has posted several short films to the site, definitely worth watching.

Update: Lots of people agreed with my assessment as this film took in $63.5 million in its opening weekend, setting a new record for animated films (blowing past Toy Story 2’s 1999 $57M bow) and reaching #6 for all films. Toy Story 2 ended up with a $485 million box office total and Disney execs are rubbing themselves silly with such an unexpected result. Jet Li’s The One took second with $20M and I am going to disregard some friend’s less-than-stellar reviews and see it anyway.

recommended

One of the most important and painful battles in World War II was the Nazi assault on Stalingrad. The Nazis had won essentially every land battle up to that point but ran into the monster Russian winter and the ability of the Soviets to throw almost unlimited number of solder/cannon fodder at them. In Enemy at the Gates, we see a small part of that story as good comrade Jude Law matches his farm-bred sniper skills against Nazi master marksman Ed Harris. Throw in a love triangle with Law up against Communist Party political office Joespeh Fiennes for Rachel Weisz that ties in to the main plot. The end is predictable if you remember your history, but since we are so focused on the characters, well written and directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud, that their individual fates keep us involved right up until the hokey epilog.

recommended