Writing about Harry Potter movies gets harder each time. On top of everything else, this one bears the particular pain of being the middle film of a trilogy.

But wait, you cry. It’s the seventh book! Yes, that’s true. But the final three movies were written together, something I tried to keep in mind when I saw Half-Blood Prince. Pacing for three movies is different from the pacing for two novels. Blah blah blah.

Also, I’m a fankid. I first read The Deathly Hallows in the middle of the night in a college in London, surrounded by Harry Potter conventioneers. Do I get a little bit of a pass if I point out that I only attended the convention that day, for the reading experience & then the chance to talk about it with other people who finished it as ridiculously quickly as I did? And that really the high point of that weekend was probably my solo trip to the Maritime museum? Because OMG. The Maritime museum was *amazing*.

But really, I don’t want a pass. That is the truth of how I read it: in a room full of fans, with snacks & drinks & tissues, wearing headphones so I wouldn’t hear anyone further ahead than me reacting to anything. Listening, in fact, to the Master & Commander soundtrack on repeat.

And as we roll ever closer to the end of everything, when people complain about the mere existence of the films, taking an absolutist view because obviously no one can care about Harry Potter *and* the State of the World, nor can anyone enjoy the books and also consume challenging adult literature, when reviewers take pride in not knowing anything about the series, when bloggers claim that no one with taste has any interest at all in the films, well. Perhaps no one with taste does. But I am not going to sit here and pretend that I’m not a fan. They are books & characters & a world & a fandom that means something to me, and there are far worse things in the world than shared reading & film experiences.

I mean, come on. I’m an English major, a librarian, and a film blogger. It could be argued that to me, there is little in this life that is *more* important than shared reading & film experiences.

So it goes. I saw Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part One at the sold-out midnight opening at the Cinerama theater. I was far from the only person wearing fannish garb. I thought the kissing scene was ridiculous and looked like bad fanart. I thought that the animation for the Tale of the Three Brothers was *gorgeous*. I thought that Remus was beautiful and tired and sad, that Ron’s Splinching was surprisingly hard to watch, and that it was a relief to finally see Domhnall Gleeson as a Weasley. I want to rewatch Half Blood Prince & then see this one again. And I can’t wait til July to see it all end. I wish they’d run a trailer for it after. Spoiler alert: I particularly can’t wait to see Neville kick ass.

If the worst thing you can say about me is that I’m enthusiastic about a series of seven children’s books where friendship & loyalty triumph over prejudice and where love really is the greatest weapon, or that I get excited about a series of eight films which, among other things, made Emma Watson into a star & fashion icon for playing a bookish, know-it-all *nerd*?

That’s fine. Mischief managed.

Based in part on the book Hard Sell: The Evolution of a Viagra Salesman, Love and Other Drugs is a smarter than average romantic comedy, with refreshingly frank sexuality for a mainstream film. I’ve seen it compared to Up in the Air, which I completely disagree with & which misses the point of UitA altogether. And, as we’ve already established, I think 127 Hours is this year’s Up in the Air.

But *anyway*. Love and Other Drugs is a late 90s period piece (hee), centered on Jamie Randall (Jake Gyllenhaal), a charming salesman type (hence the UitA comparisons) who begins working for Pfizer just before the dawn of Viagra. He is partnered with Oliver Platt (*heart*), and they sell Zoloft etc in a lower-rung Midwest market, hoping to work up to Chicago. Which ain’t never gonna happen, as long as they’re up against Prozac, but we all know Viagra will. Um. Yes.

So, against the background of these men and their sales, Jamie has a meet-cute-borderline-sexual-harassment with Maggie (Anne Hathaway), a woman with stage one Parkinson’s. They have a one-night stand that develops into a relationship, whether they want it to or not. She in particular does not want, which is always a nice change, and he has enjoyed screwing his way into doctor’s offices up until this point, so he’s not too keen on an emotional connection either.

This being a sort of rom-com, they’ll get it together in the end, no surprise there, but you’re rooting for them both the whole time. They’re both adorable, they have great chemistry, and Hathaway is so good she’s almost in a different movie. Her Parkinson’s is treated with respect, the broken American health care system is treated with frankness, and the film hits all the genre markers. It’s not trying to be anything more than what it is, and I was along for the ride.

The one gigantic problem I had with the movie was Jamie’s brother, played by Josh Gad, a boorish fellow good for nothing but aggravating the hell out of Jamie and audience. If it were up to me, I would remove his entire presence from the film, and I firmly believe not a thing would be lost, and if anything, a bit of class would be regained.

…or, apparently, Neo-Burlesque. Hey, that’s what the IMDb said.

Narrowing it down to a top five is pretty much impossible. Am I more confused about the age gap between Cher & Kristen Bell, and how they were meant in some way to be rivals and also pseudo business partners? Or am I more confused about the alleged involvement of the Squirrel Nut Zippers *Orchestra*? Or why we never got to meet the cute Asian bartender and instead only interacted with the tool wannabe composer bartender?

I have so many questions! It’s hard even to say flat-out that it’s a terrible movie, because is it really a movie when it doesn’t have a plot? At least it has musical numbers, which means that more happens in it than happened in Hereafter, but they are all bizarre! They are definitely not burlesque. I am from Seattle. I saw the world premiere of A Wink and a Smile. I know from burlesque. One dance with a fan does not a burlesque club make. Or even a neo-burlesque club.

Musical numbers involving the chairs & stripey knee socks do imply a bit of slight burlesque effort (and, when you add the bartenders and their bowler hats, plus the opening Welcome number, suggests an extreme devotion to Bob Fosse), but most don’t even pretend. Christina Aguilera does a torch song while wearing a green dress, and I was truly concerned she was going to clutch at her chest one too many times and pull the damn thing off altogether.

The most transparently stuck-on musical scene comes from Cher. Her character is leaving the club and the sound guy calls down: “Hey, I found the music. Do you want to run through that number?” She’s a trooper. Of *course* she’ll run through it, an anvilicious song called “Last Of Me”. As in “You Ain’t Seen The”.

But how does Christina get to the stage in the first place? She flees to LA from Iowa (in a strangely ominous sequence, but don’t worry, the folks in her past are never heard from again), and then she wanders all over the city looking for a job as a dancer or a backup singer or whatever. She pauses outside a burlesque club where a cute dancer in stripey knee socks winks at her, at which point I get all excited thinking this might be a queer lady movie hooray!

Once inside the club, she looks longingly at the stage. She spends a lot of time wearing the exact same expression of longing, but unfortunately, she’s dreaming of being on stage herself, not of getting down with one of the lovely dancer ladies. This is TRAGIC. Instead there is Romance and possibly a Love Triangle involving the Tool Bartender and a Tool Real Estate Agent. What a waste of ladies in knee socks I tell you what.

The movie also wastes the beautiful and talented Dianna Agron, who we see about long enough for the audience to recognize her from “Glee”, and who we are supposed to dislike because she’s Christina’s rival for Tool Bartender. Except I’m totally not buying that she’s done anything wrong. From what I can see, she got engaged to a jerk who wouldn’t move with her to NYC when she got a job, and then he did a totally half-assed job of breaking up with her over the phone. Really, if he thinks he broke the engagement in the call we see in the movie, I have news for him: he didn’t. Which makes him a cowardly Tool Bartender.

Basically, I didn’t care about any of the people the movie seemed to want me to. I wanted to know the cute sound guy’s story, and I want to know SO MUCH MORE about Stanley Tucci because I am pretty sure he is the perfect man, and his relationship with Cher was adorable. And I’d like more Alan Cumming just on principle, and maybe a bit more Peter Gallagher because his eyebrows are a life form unto themselves.

Let’s be honest: I’d just like all of those people in a different movie. One with, perhaps, a plot. And less weird music. And where practicing dance routines involves a little more work than twitching around the club while waitressing, or doing this flippy thing with your wrist when bopping down the street.

Maybe I just want to see an entirely different bad movie.

My favorite thing about this particular bad dance movie, though, is that so many of the characters had realistically terrible tattoos. 30 seconds on Google suggests at least one of them is real, which is kind of perfect. My second favorite thing is when Kristen Bell’s character refers to Christina as having “mutant lungs”.

The girl can sing like nobody’s business, it’s true. But that does not a movie make.

* Paulista, a Brazilian film about a collection of folks living in the same building in São Paulo never really clicked for me. It was fine. I gave it a 3 out of 5 at the time, but I can’t remember anything about it less than a month later. So it goes.

* Eyes Wide Open is the film I was probably most excited about seeing, and was definitely the best film I saw at the festival. In an ultra-Orthodox Jewish neighborhood of Jerusalem, butcher Aaron extends a kindness to newcomer Ezri, giving him a job and a place to stay. This being the film festival it is, there’s no question where their relationship will end up, of course, but it makes its way there truthfully. A beautiful, internal film from director Haim Tabakman (first feature) and first time screenwriter Merav Doster, it conveys the pain of not fitting into such a restrictive community while still respecting the desire for the benefits of such a society. I look forward to future projects from them both.

* Rufus Wainwright: Prima Donna describes the creation and production of Wainwright’s first opera in the standard documentary format, but was satisfying all the same. It’s worth seeing for fans of Wainwright, of course, but also for anyone interested in music, opera, or the creative process in general. It’s always a joy to see people with a passion for their task at work.

* The Purple Sea suffered unfairly in presentation: there were problems with the sound (that kept resolving themselves just as I resolved to go out and speak to someone, only to return later), and the audience was ridiculous, in particular several people playing with phones throughout drove me crazy. Cut that shit out, people! The film itself is an Italian melodrama, beautiful ladies in love in a town full of dark secrets. It’s a throwback sort of lesbian story in a lot of ways, with the twist that eventually one of the ladies is declared to be male. The way that the new gender presentation plays out both in the town and within the relationship made it worth watching.

* I volunteered at the closing night film, The Secret Diaries of Miss Anne Lister, and was lucky enough to be able to see it. I regret not being able to see The Real Anne Lister earlier in the week. It was a documentary on Lister and her diaries, both on cracking the code of them and also on the content, and would I think have enriched the experience of the film.

The Secret Diaries was a BBC television costume drama rather than a theatrical film, but it was still absorbing watching a character so full of certainty as to who she was and what she wanted. She had no doubt as to the life she deserved, and was lucky enough to be in a financial position to make it happen for herself. Lister was a Yorkshire heiress in the early 19th century, and the film focuses largely on her unhappy early relationship with the married Marianne. I would have liked to know more about her later relationship, her travels, and her business, so now I definitely need to seek out the documentary.

The final week before the film festival, SIFF Cinema ran a series of films written by Stewart Stern, best known for writing Rebel Without a Cause. He’s definitely a Seattle treasure. Just as with book readings, special guests at films can go either way, but Stern is a fantastic storyteller.

Of course, it helps that he has marvelous stories to tell, like about traveling in East Asia with Marlon Brando, or how John F Kennedy was directly responsible for The Ugly American being made, or about how terrified Paul Newman was of shooting his first film. He’s a charmer, though, for sure, and it was a treat to hear him interviewed at length by fellow screenwriter Christopher McQuarrie before The Ugly American, and also a shorter introduction a few days later before Rachel, Rachel.

The experience of seeing The Ugly American was much more satisfying coming off of the introduction. It gave context for the politics of the situation, and brought home the bravery of the film, in particular its powerful ending.

The film, starring Marlon Brando, is a critique of American interference in southeast Asia. It’s set in the fictional country of Sarkan, but there’s never any doubt that this is a solid (though simplified) story about American cultural incompetency on a grand scale.

Rachel Rachel had a strong effect on me emotionally. Joanne Woodward is fantastic as a spinster schoolteacher, trapped by small town expectations in general and her mother in particular.  It’s a powerful adaptation of what I understand was an extremely internal novel.

I was also impressed with it as Paul Newman’s directorial debut. There’s one scene in particular that I loved: in one of the flashbacks to Rachel’s childhood we see her father embracing her in a moment that defines love for her in her adulthood, and much later in the movie we learn what happened just before the embrace, which casts an entirely different perspective on everything we’ve seen before.

It is also notable for the inclusion of a sympathetic queer character, Rachel’s teacher friend Calla. Though her advances are refused, the friendship is not destroyed, and she is neither punished nor portrayed as deserving of punishment, which is notable only a few years after The Children’s Hour.

Yes. 127 Hours is the movie where James Franco cuts off his arm. Let’s talk about that in these first two paragraphs and get it out of the way. It was horrible. I thought I was going to pass out. I couldn’t watch most of it, but even the audio was enough to make me lightheaded and break out in chills. I cannot remember physically reacting to a graphic scene in any way close to that before, though granted, I don’t see the Eli Roth-esque torture porn movies that the rest of America seems to be nuts for. So it goes.

The only explanation I have for my reaction is that I knew that this was what Aron Ralston had actually gone through. Not only that, but rather than the two minutes the amputation takes on screen (and it certainly felt longer, even just listening), it took him an hour. The film has so firmly put you in his position, feeling the despair & isolation that drove him to this ultimate act of survival, that you can’t help but go through it with him in this very small way of cinema.

Anyway. That two minutes is not the point of the film. On Twitter I made the comparison to Up in the Air, which on the surface appears to be a ridiculous link, but stay with me here. Both films are about guys who use their apartments as little more than launch pads before taking off on their next adventure. They have perfectly nice, average families, at least insofar as we can see, but they resist connections to them. In fact, though they’re well-liked on a surface level, they both avoid closer relationships with people, and certainly deny any semblance of need.

The point of it all is that when you’ve built up a world where you are wholly self-reliant, where you either have no one to check in with or where you opt out of doing so, the biggest step you can take is asking for help. It’s why, instead of wanting to cheer at the end, like the crowd we were told of in New Jersey, I wanted to go off somewhere and have a good cry.

As far as the Real Review sorts of things go, the direction is constantly interesting, with active cuts and occasional triptych framing. I had wondered *how* the core time trapped in the canyon would be handled, but having recently seen Buried I was perhaps less concerned if it *could* be done. In contrast to Buried, which keeps us in the box for the entire film, 127 Hours grants us the same brief reprieves Ralston had: memories, dreams, and fantasies of escape. Within the canyon, there is room for a greater variety of angles than one might expect, and Ralston’s video messages shot by Franco also change things up in a great way.

Franco, by the way, is fantastic. Danny Boyle did a Q&A at our screening, and said that Pineapple Express is what sold him on the casting, which delights me to no end. It’s because in addition to the obvious drama, the role needed someone comic, who could be a charming person alone on camera for the majority of the film, providing brief moments of relief for the audience.

On a final and random note, I was pleasantly surprised by the lack of references to faith in the script. Ralston talks to himself, to his mother via the camera, and to the boulder, but not to any sort of a god. I don’t know what the real Ralston believes, but as an atheist I feel a stronger connection to a guy who says “please” and not “please, god.”

It’s Kind of a Funny Story is latest feature from the directors of Half Nelson & Sugar, both of which were solid small films, and the same is basically true of this. One morning sixteen year old Craig, overwhelmed by life and suicidal, bicycles to the ER and finds himself admitted to the psych floor for a minimum of five days. Which is impressive on its own; it’s harder than one might think to believe you deserve help.

Due to a plot device, he’s sent to the adult floor rather than the youth one, and low-key hijinks ensue, including a pretty amazing fantasy glam rock music video sequence. If you’ve ever wanted to see Zack Galifianakis with glitter in his beard — and who among us hasn’t? — here is your opportunity.

It’s a light little movie, Emma Roberts is charming, and Galifianakis was strong as the true heart of the film, which was a pleasant surprise. It does bother me in a low-key sort of way, romanticizing mental illness & glossing over barriers to accessing services, but that is probably just me being humorless as per usual.

…and which I like less the more I think about them.

* Conviction is the true story of the Waters siblings: Kenny, who was wrongfully sentenced to life for murder, and Betty Anne, who became a lawyer (including finally getting her undergraduate degree) so she could represent him. The cast is excellent, of course: Hilary Swank and Sam Rockwell as the sister and brother, and Minnie Driver as Betty Anne’s friend in law school (their relationship being the best part of the movie), several notable supporting roles (Juliette Lewis, Melissa Leo). The child actors were strong as well, particularly Conor Donovan who first impressed me in Twelve and Holding.

However. The film is oddly paced and the story tension is basically nonexistent. Betty Anne has to get her GED & then suddenly she’s in law school, her husband is there and then he’s gone, and though I expect in real life money was an issue, there was no mention of it in the film. We know how the story ends, and there’s only about a half a second when we ever doubt it’ll get there. Basically, it’s a TV movie with an Oscar cast.

* Hereafter is essentially three stories, dully told, and pulled together by a third-act coincidence that exceeded my ability to suspend disbelief. It’s particularly disappointing coming from usually-excellent screenwriter Peter Morgan (Tony Blair trilogy, of which The Queen is the best known feature, also Frost/Nixon & The Last King of Scotland). A French woman has a near death experience, a boy in London suffers the death of his brother, & Matt Damon decides he’d like to stop talking to dead people and start taking cooking classes. They all meander in the direction of a plot, never really arriving anywhere, and there are a few strange technical things: lighting choices, disparate senses of time between the stories.

A gentleman in my row kept falling asleep. He had my sympathies.

I don’t know if this is happening in other places, or if Seattle is just particularly crazy for Potter this fall, but our local IMAX is showing films 3 through 6 for a week each leading up to the release of HP7 Part 1 (so named because no one can remember the title of the seventh book.)

I was pretty excited to have the chance to see my favorite Potter film, The Prisoner of Azkaban, in the theater again. I love it for a lot of fangirl sorts of reasons, which I will spare you, but also because it was a game-changer in terms of the look and feel of the Potter films.

The previous two, The Philosopher’s Stone and The Chamber of Secrets, presented audiences with a very candy-colored magical world, a place where magic was a thing to be showcased: we must all stop and be aware that Magic Is Happening. It was Hogwarts as a Disneyland ride.

Cuarón changed all that with Azkaban, working from a more muted palette, with handheld cameras, and letting magic just happen in the background. The magical world is overgrown and dusty and lived-in, moving pictures are not surprising, and housekeeping spells are done with a wave of the hand and hardly a thought. Which is as it should be. Plus, added moments of everyday life at the castle are fantastic: Harry & Seamus complaining about the Fat Lady’s singing, all the Gryffindor boys hanging out in the dormitory eating magical candy, and Ron’s spidery dream when Harry is investigating the map in the middle of the night. This is a Hogwarts people actually live and play and study and work in. This is a Hogwarts where students paint their faces and carry homemade signs at Quidditch matches and where the Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher incorporates swing music into lessons. It’s fabulous.

Finally, a bit of heresy in the Potterverse: I firmly believe that Michael Gambon is the superior Dumbledore. There, I said it. He’s darker and more interesting than Richard Harris, and I don’t think that’s solely the result of the directorial change. He’s more restrained, less flippant, and far more in keeping with the Dumbledore of the books.

The five best things about RED*

1) The Bruce-Willis-getting-out-of-the-spinning car stunt. Sure, it’s in the trailer, but it is still deeply satisfying on screen.

2) Helen Mirren with a machine gun. I want an action figure.

3) Bruce Willis & Mary-Louise Parker holding hands for pretty much the entire movie.

4) Helen Mirren’s shoes.

5) John Malkovich. Just on principle, but also for his campy presence every single time he’s in the background of a shot.

* as decided by me, who typically only enjoys action films in English if they star Matt Damon. Or are about war, but that’s different.