(Note: “Pickups” is a new feature collecting quick reactions at the end of the month for films I won’t file a complete post on.)

* Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part One. First film of 2011, seen with a friend & fellow HP fan when I was in BC for the New Year. It still works better than most of the previous ones — except my beloved Azkaban, of course — and I still can’t wait for Part Two in July.

* Blue Valentine. Fantastic performances, particularly from Michelle Williams who very much deserves her Oscar nomination (her & Jennifer Lawrence I approve of; any & all of the other three I would trade in a heartbeat for Carey Mulligan in Never Let Me Go). Great concept of cutting back and forth between time periods in a relationship, but it felt about 20 minutes too long.

* In the Mood for Love. This is often one of my top five favorite films of all time. It depends on my mood; occasionally I’m all about Happy Together. Even with the inevitable technical difficulties of digital it was stunningly beautiful. (I feel an entry on format coming)

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.

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.

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.

There are two things to be discussed about Never Let Me Go. The shorter, non-spoiler points are as follows. It’s a beautiful & devastating film, perfectly cast. The novel is extremely internal, Kathy moving around among her memories of her school days, and selecting Carey Mulligan for the role was inspired. There are many scenes where she has no lines at all, just listens to another character, and of course she’s brilliant.

Having seen & been amazed by Boy A a few years ago, I’m delighted that people are finally starting to notice Andrew Garfield. And maybe now I’ll finally get my act together and watch Red Riding. Sounds like a great way to spend a stormy weekend.

The children were also cast astonishingly well, particularly Isobel Meikle-Small as young Kathy, so perfect that you wondered a bit if the filmmakers had hopped in the TARDIS and recruited Mulligan herself as a child. Of course Charlotte Rampling is worth seeing in anything, & Sally Hawkins is lovely as the teacher who questions the whole thing.

On the whole, it makes more concrete certain aspects of the novel, while preserving enough ambiguity that I’m still turning it over in my head days later. That, to me, is the mark of a great film.

So, there you go. Once you’ve seen it (or if you’ve read the novel, or if you don’t care about vague spoilers) you can carry on.

I suppose I am a particularly credulous reader. I certainly am with film. If a movie is at all working, for example, I am not scrambling to predict where it’s going. I just let it take me there.

In the case of this book, it never occurred to me to ask why the students were not rebelling against the fate society had put forth for them. This is perhaps unusual. It certainly is among the reactions to the film that I have seen, which is a bit surprising, because I feel that in the film there is even less room for the possibility of revolt than there was in the book.

There are, of course, all of the little things affecting their behavior. They wear bracelets that clearly serve as some sort of tracking device, if not actually a way to trace them, at least a method to tell when they have checked in and out of their lodging. They do not know a single person who is not either a future donor or an employee of the program, so they have no support system on the outside. They have no marketable skills, no experience of day to day life or adult responsibilities. The few who are allowed to volunteer as Carers can become a bit more worldly, but even then they live fully supported by the program. It’s a limited amount of freedom, and no independence.

More important to me, though, are the stories they tell. The myths that a population shares police the boundaries of their world, and from the time they were tiny these children had very strong stories about what would happen to them if they stepped even a few feet outside the boundaries of the school. Even if, as you grew older, you started to doubt that you truly would be forced to starve to death if you slipped briefly past the gates, you’d still take the point: outside of this place, you will not survive, and if you try & inevitably fail, you will not be allowed to return.

Of course, there’s the major myth: that students from this particular school are special, that their art shows something about them, that if they are truly in love they can get a deferral. It’s so elegant. The promise isn’t that they can be excused from donating altogether. That is too big of an idea to ever consider. The most they can hope for is a few years of happiness.

When I read the book, I was frustrated by what felt like a lack of worldbuilding. I had just read Unwind, a YA novel set in a world where abortion is outlawed, but unruly teenagers can be sent away to be “unwound”, which means, essentially, donating all of their parts. It’s still a pro-life position, you see, if the kid isn’t dead, just living on in many, many other people. And I had also started Spares, an aspect of which is people who have clones created of themselves, so if they damage any of their own bits, they can harvest from their spare.

After those two experiences, I wanted more from Never Let Me Go. But it wasn’t until the film that I understood that wasn’t the point. We’re walking a curving path through Kathy’s memories, and she’s not questioning or commenting on the wider world. That’s not what she’s interested in. She’s thinking about the trivialities that shaped them and their relationships: Tommy’s blue polo, the art they traded, the cassette she lost and Ruth found and what all of that meant.

Which, obviously, is what we all do. What are the things you bear with a stiff upper lip? What are the choices you make even though they can hurt you? What are the myths we tell each other and ourselves that keep us from dreaming fuller lives, let alone living them? And so on.

That’s the point. We don’t rebel, and neither do they. In the end, we all Complete.

Two better-than-average genre films are opening in Seattle this weekend. Hooray! Though you shouldn’t see either of them until you’ve seen Cell 211. (Unless you can’t do prison violence, which I respect. There’s a bit right at the beginning that made even me cover my eyes. But if you can, it is a hell of a movie.)

Anyway, first up is Buried. Ryan Reynolds plays a contractor working in Iraq in 2006. After an attack on his convoy, he awakens in a wooden box, having been kidnapped and buried alive. He has a few items with him, most notable being a lighter and a cell phone, with which he attempts to assess his situation and phone people to help him, to darkly comic effect.

If you’re at all interested in seeing it, you should make the effort to see it in the theater. The entire film takes place inside the box, with the spirit-of-the-law exceptions of (I believe) two shots pulling away from Reynolds as if down a tunnel. It’s just him, in a box, for 90 minutes, and it is utterly compelling. When it ended I went right outside, took big gulps of air, and thought seriously about if I really needed to return to my apartment. It wouldn’t have had nearly the impact on television, but it totally worked in a room in the dark.

Last night I caught a midnight screening of Let Me In. Now, I am a huge fan of Let the Right One In. I saw it twice in the theaters and read the book, so I did not for the life of me understand what the need was for a remake. I heard great buzz on it out of TIFF, though, and so I wanted to give it a proper chance.

Here’s the thing. It totally works. The cinematography is gorgeous, period details are perfect (it’s set in March 1983), the kids are both great, and there are some particularly interesting directorial decisions. Reeves keeps the pacing gentle and resists the undoubted temptation to kick up the gore & the body count.

I said on Twitter that if I didn’t know the first existed I would have loved this one. But I know it well, so comparisons are inevitable. In the end, Let Me In is an effective exercise, but it doesn’t bring anything new to the story. In fact, it takes away from it, smoothing over ambiguities that brought complexity to the original. I just hope that it brings a new audience to the original adaptation and book, because they both deserve it.