Brave (Mark Andrews and Brenda Chapman, 2012)

Brave is at once the most visually distinctive project Pixar has yet made and their most derivative work. Slightly dimmed as if filmed by natural light, the Celtic realm of stone and forest achieve a new level of realism for the studio's animation; even by their standards, I can think of no other Pixar film that invites such pure pleasure merely in scanning the frame for all its absurdly fine detail. Yet with this new peak of visual sophistication comes a story that mines Disney princess tales and blends it with the style and thematic content of Japanese animation maestro Hayao Miyazaki. But if this setup is less fundamentally "original" than, say, Ratatouille or Up, it nonetheless offers an important opportunity to alter and update a classic form of storytelling. After all, from old elements can come wonderful, new things.

For the first act, at least, Brave demonstrates this in spades. Merida (Kelly Macdonald) instantly establishes herself as an entrancing heroine; the daughter of a king who presides over a group of allied Celtic clans (Billy Connolly), Merida is groomed by her mother, Elinor, (Emma Thompson) to behave like a proper lady but above all cherishes a bow given to her by her father. The precocious child grows up to be an adventurous teenager, strong-willed enough to climb a sheer cliff just because it's there and so skilled in archery that various targets she erects around the castle woods might as well be quivers for how many arrows they hold in their bullseyes. When Elinor announces that the day has finally come for Merida to choose a suitor, the young woman's outrage burns so hotly that the flippant faux-independence of some recent Disney princesses looks even more laughable. When she says she doesn't want to marry right now, she damn well means it, and she goes to unexpectedly drastic lengths to defy her mother's wishes.

The Brothers Bloom

It's perfectly possible that The Brothers Bloom, despite its erroneous title -- one of the brothers is named Bloom, and neither seems to have it as a surname -- is a work of top-to-bottom genius. Meticulously crafted and highly stylized, the film is a labyrinth worthy of Escher, twisting and turning until it reaches the end and refolding upon itself to start anew. If the point of a con-man movie is to keep the audience guessing, then I suppose it succeeds wildly.

With only one prior film under his belt, director Rian Johnson certainly hasn't wasted time in establishing a distinctive visual flair: his Brick -- a film I once watched but was too distracted to follow properly -- has a reputation for visual acuity, and those I know who have watched it studiously assure me that its use of pitch-black noir in a high school setting is interesting and engaging. I shall return to it someday (soon, I hope), but for now let us focus on his latest feature, the con caper The Brothers Bloom.

Bloom's titular brothers have been running scams since childhood. Stephen (played in adulthood by Mark Ruffalo), planned the schemes, invented the characters and wrote the scripts, while little brother Bloom (Adrien Brody) did what was asked of him. Before they even hit puberty, they can run advanced cons: Stephen tells their schoolmates of a fairy in a cave and collects $30 from the other kids to reveal the location. When the parents come to collect their children's money, however, the narrator informs us that the real payoff came from the local cleaners who washed all those kids' muddied clothes.

25 years later, Bloom is 35 and at last fed-up with playing second fiddle to his brother's whims. He agrees to help Stephen for, yes, one last job, though he does not do so immediately, presumably just so the crew could visit Montenegro. Stephen's mark is Penelope (Rachel Weisz), a gorgeous heiress isolated from the world due to misdiagnosed allergies in her youth and the burden of caring for dying loved ones in early adulthood.

From here the plot slowly begins to corkscrew. After they ingratiate themselves to Penelope -- albeit not entirely according to plan -- Bloom, Stephen and Stephen's girlfriend/explosives expert Bang Bang (Rinko Kikuchi, who may or may not have a "no speaking" clause in her contracts for Western films) "reveal" themselves to be art smugglers, aware that the reclusive Penelope will be intrigued enough to follow them around.

There's always a danger when you can see actors having fun with their roles; occasionally the sense of fun can add to a film's sense of whimsy, but if we're meant to take the story seriously it can break the audience's connection to the narrative. Despite the lightweight feel of The Brothers Bloom, it's trying to work as a complex caper, yet the glee evident on the actors' faces is a delight. Ruffalo is terrific as the rakish confidence man, almost always unflappable even when plans go so wrong as a miniature diversion inadvertently blows out the wall of a basilica (well, he at least places his face in his palm on that one). Brody is an underrated straight man, and he's the closest thing the film has to a believable character. By far the most interesting, however, is Weisz: Penelope comes alive with the gang, and she proves a capable companion. In the film's best scene, she infiltrates that basilica that accidentally blew up, and when the chief of police captures her on the way out with a stolen book she manages to convince him to let her go (she even keeps the prize). When she discovers the truth of her new friends' intentions, the look of confusion morphing into pain, balanced with a slight willingness to overlook this betrayal to keep her buddies, is heartbreaking.

These actors are so interesting, in fact, that they manage to keep up interest long after the plot loses all grasp on self-control. Johnson crams every twist he possibly can into two hours, yet he has a shoddy feel for pacing. The Brothers Bloom moves it fits and spurts, lingering in some areas so Johnson can waste our time with beautiful yet arbitrary and ancillary shots of the surrounding area -- admittedly, one must admire how he visited all these gorgeous locations and kept the budget at $20 million. Then, we he hits upon a section of the story that deserves closer attention, Johnson leaps ahead, preferring to move to the next batch of exposition rather than focus on any emotional impact of all the double crosses. By the time "one last job" becomes a precursor to the real farewell gig which leads to yet another con, whatever technical expertise exists in the script is wholly irrelevant to the sense of ennui even the punchiest script can create when it gives you no sure footing with anything. I'm not asking for a cut-and-dry narrative without surprises, but this gang embarked on more farewell gigs than KISS.

Roger Ebert compared the too-smug feel of the film to Wes Anderson's bloated and listless The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou, a comparison I find rather fitting: both demonstrate visually striking artists whose hip characters and exacting camerawork and set design are let loose without restraint, a soulless display of technique that deceptively flirts with greatness on a surface level but reveals its emptiness upon even a cursory inspection. I confess that I found Brody, Kikuchi, Ruffalo and Weisz so entertaining that I didn't terribly mind that my time had been wasted -- I should also mention the great Robbie Coltrane, who makes the wholly unnecessary character of "The Belgian" a welcome edition with his natural and charmingly overbearing screen presence -- but The Brothers Bloom is clearly the work of an artist who still has some growing to do. If Johnson can put his considerable talents toward a story with some degree of human connection, he might just morph into a formidable force.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

After running through my marathon viewing of the previous five installments of the Harry Potter franchise in the last two days, I've come to a simple realization: as a whole, the series is frustratingly average. For a series set in a magical alternate world tucked away from our weary doldrums, it never conveys any sense of the wonder of J.K. Rowling's mad creation. Even as the series grew darker with each sequel, half the fun of reading them was exploring new places and oddball characters, which gave them an unassailable joyousness no matter how bleak the outcome looked for our heroes.

Not that Harry is feeling particularly cheery at the start of Half-Blood Prince. Now exonerated in the court of public opinion following proof of Voldemort's return, Harry must endure press junkets mere minutes after watching his godfather Sirius die. This devastating moment rarely has any impact on the story at all, however, perhaps because the last film failed to wring much emotion out of it. Dumbledore whisks him away, and soon he plucks Harry from his summer break begin the hunt for their nemesis.

Michael Gambon has been a treat ever since he took over for the late, great Richard Harris in the third film, but he brings his A-game this time, mixing regret, quiet strength and subtle humor effortlessly. He holds the entire film together as he takes Harry on strolls through a magical Memory Lane to trace Voldemort's history.

The first act of the film is perhaps the best stretch of the film series: it captures the darkness of the novel, and Yates' direction is sturdy and evocative. Harry's trips with Dumbledore and the Pensieve scene involving a young Tom Riddle (Hero Fiennes-Tiffin, nephew of Ralph Fiennes, Voldemort himself) are deeply and wonderfully unsettling, and I caught myself tensing up at times. A note, though: when Death Eaters fly through London and destroy a crowded Muggle bridge, the effect is somewhat spoiled when the camera zooms out from people frantically running to see the bridge twisting...without a soul standing on it. That's pretty basic animation, guys.

Then we start following our beloved trio through the school year, and Half-Blood Prince loses its way. Yates and writer Steve Kloves suddenly drop the dark air of the first act in favor of a protracted inspection of the romantic woes of all three. Ron and Hermione's attempts to woo the other only drive them further apart, while Harry apparently has to queue up for a crack at Ron's little sis Ginny (Bonnie Wright). These slightly comical interactions throw off the pacing and greatly distract from the mission at hand. I've read a number of reviews claiming that this movie works because it shows the characters maturing like normal teenagers despite the predicament surrounding them, but Kloves only explores this aging through unfunny comic relief.

There is one moment, when Hermione sits dejected as Ron snogs a clingy devotee and asks how Harry feels when he sees other boys with Ginny. As Ron walks past with his facesucking buddy in tow, Harry nearly whispers, "It feels like that." That one line is achingly beautiful, and more lines like that would have made the distraction from the Voldemort story because it genuinely would have fleshed these characters out. But no, that line is sadly just a fluke. Why Yates decided to stick with these subplots at the expense of the excellent Voldemort history lesson is beyond me.

Furthermore, the final battle in Hogwarts has been drastically altered and excised, and Yates took the emotional weight of the scene along with it. When the identity of the Half-Blood Prince is revealed, it's already been softened by a scene cut and pasted from the seventh book that openly hints at the true nature behind the final tragedy. And for all the planning the Death Eaters put into breaking into Hogwarts, they seem to stroll out as quickly as they enter, leaving only a single vandalized room in their wake. Imagine if Robert De Niro's character spent all of Heat planning, only to walk into the bank at the end and make a deposit.

On the positive side, the acting is up to the usual standards. Radcliffe may never be convincing as a reluctant, angsty leader (or even one of the three), and Watson still over-pronounces each line, but the others are great. Poor Rupert Grint has always made the best of a bad situation with the under-written Ron -- heck, when the fame-whore Slughorn (Jim Broadbent) never remembers his name, I felt he did so not because the Weasleys are ordinary wizards but because even I know nothing about him at this point of the film franchise -- but he gets some big laughs with his dopey grin and his constant bemusement. Both Fiennes-Tiffin and Frank Dillane (who plays the teen Riddle) are pitch-perfect in their roles, and Dillane in particular makes me wish far more of the film had been devoted to him working his icy charm on unsuspecting adults.

However, it's Tom Felton, the best of the child actors since the first film, who steals the show as the hardened yet tortured Draco. He's always had that haughty sneer down pat, but we see another side of him in this film, and he outperforms even the adults. If only Yates had stopped replaying the scene of him ripping the curtain off of a magic cabinet over and over and used that time to let Felton do something else, because I believed every choice Draco made in this movie, even more so than I did in he books.

All in all, Half-Blood Prince, like all of its predecessors save Prisoner of Azkaban, has excellent moments but fails to add up into a cohesive whole. Its omissions and alterations result in an enjoyable movie, but one that builds to a climax that never comes. As with "Order of the Phoenix," it takes an emotionally charged ending and mishandles it to the point of tedium. And for the love of God, will they give Alan Rickman something to do before this series ends?

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

After Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets solved some of the issues of the first film while further entrenching many of its other weaknesses, Chris Columbus at last parted ways with the franchise as the producers decided to extend the shooting length for the rest of the films to ensure they weren't rushed. After fantasy maestro Guillermo Del Toro declined the offer to direct, the mantle passed to one of his compatriots, Alfonso Cuaròn.

That must have seemed a bit odd to those old enough to know who Alfonso Cuaròn was: his previous film, y tu mamá también, remains one of the most critically lauded films of the decade, but you'd hardly hand the keys of a fantasy franchise to the director for it. The closest he'd even come to fantasy was A Little Princess, which is based on children's literature but not more about a child who believes in magic than a world in which it truly exists. After the first two movies triumphed at the box office, perhaps the producers felt they could do no wrong and found themselves willing to experiment. Even so, it was a gamble.

One that paid off magnificently, I might add. Steve Kloves, still, unfortunately, the writer, apparently read some critiques of the other two films which singled out his devotion to the narrative and mystery of the books and not the character. A curious fixation, as surely the legions of Potter fans already knew what was going to happen, so the emphasis on mystery made little sense.

That's not to say that there's no mysterious air to the film; far from it, it's the only one of the film series yet to actually make you wonder what you'll see next. We know that Sirius Black (Gary Oldman) escapes from the wizard prison Azkaban, and that it somehow makes life for Harry more dangerous, but Cuaròn so streamlines the film (down a healthy 20 minutes from the previous installment) that details are left vague. We never really learn how he escaped, and even the explanation of his crime goes no further than some mumblings of betrayal and of his relationship to Harry. The overwhelming majority of those who have seen or will watch the movie in the future will know all about Sirius, but enough of him is concealed in darkness and Oldman plays him with enough of a manic edge that the character works better than he ever did on the page.

Black's story seems all the more unsettling with Cuaròn's direction. Where the first two films had too much of a glossed-over look, even in the darkness of the Chamber of Secrets, Azkaban borders on the Expressionist in its superb use of shadow and mise-en-scène. Hogwarts now appears more cluttered, more angular, and its sweeping majesty carries a bit of an edge to it. The soul-sucking dementors are not as scary as they perhaps should be, yet the effect of them moving through the scenes are (pardon the pun) chilling. The lone shot of a flower wilting and freezing to herald their advance is more captivating than anything in the first two movies.

Also joining the cast alongside Oldman are Timothy Spall as the sniveling Peter Pettigrew, rat-faced even when he's not turning himself into an animal, and David Thewlis, whose Remus Lupin looks just as dishelved as his Johnny from Naked, only with an air of warmth and soft, encouraging wit. Rounding out the new additions is Michael Gambon as Dumbledore, replacing the late Richard Harris. Gambon thankfully does not attempt to ape Harris' portrayal and instead moves the character somewhat closer to his original personality: in one great bit, he absent-mindedly taps Ron on his broken leg as Ron winces in agony. Emma Thompson's loopy Trewlaney, however, is simply too over-the-top for her own good, and she fails to elicit more than a chuckle or two.

In place of the cluttered narrative of the first two films, Prisoner of Azkaban takes the time to follow its leads, who have matured along with their characters. Ron seems doomed to never move outside of comic relief, but Grint pulls it off nicely, and his burgeoning romantic scenes with Hermione -- more explicitly stated than in the book -- have a sweet, unforced charm to them. Radcliffe, who's never really gotten the angsty aspect of the character down, does a fine job of it here: when he announces his intention to find and kill Sirius Black, he conveys some dark nuance. But it's Watson, normally the weakest link of the trio, who walks away with the entire movie, even outpacing the adults. Hermione's put up with a lot throughout the series, and that one punch she lands on Malfoy still makes me want to stand and cheer.

Unfortunately, Kloves' noble attempt to inject character moments reveal his weaknesses as a writer. Without the safety net of simple recreation to help him, we see his inability to coax nuance out of the story, and the mystery of the film comes from omissions and Cuaròn's framing. Indeed, the director's rapport with the kids garners their best work yet, and the older actors are made a real part of the story and not simply plot devices for the first time. It also helps the film greatly that John Williams backs off the insufferable loudness of his previous scores, and actually this ranks as one of his finest scores and one of his most wonderfully nuanced.

That soundtrack aids the visual poetry of Cuaròn's direction, and combined with the interesting, if muddled, story makes for a major leap forward in the franchise's quality. The director's deft hand with a bigger scale set the stage for Children of Men, the perfect mix of his intimate detail and this newly found epic sweep, and reflects a clear influence of his friend Guillermo Del Toro. This dark, vaguely Expressionist fairy tale is the first of the Harry Potter films to really grab your excitement, and it's a dam good fantasy film in its own right.

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

All right, then. Now that I've gotten all the background for my feelings on the Harry Potter franchise out in my previous review -- hey, it's almost like an allegory for the film itself! -- I can now fully concentrate on the film at hand, hopefully wasting less of your time with fewer words. Let's see how long I can go until I shatter that promise, shall we?

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone nearly bored me to tears; its endless exposition and world building left it without an emotional core, thanks in no small part to the amateurish acting of it three leads (who, to be completely fair, were indeed amateurs). Having not watched either it or this second installment since before the fourth film hit theaters, I found myself dreading the prospect of revisiting the other Columbus adaptation. After all, the first film was downright cloying in its faithfulness, and I didn't remember this deviating too much, either. So, I at last resigned myself to inevitable defeat, comforted slightly by the realization that soon I could move on to the third and fourth installments.

Happily, the film was a noticeable improvement all around. The Chamber of Secrets, working in the same world established in the first novel, freed Rowling to actually explore her characters a bit and, alongside the rambling Order of the Phoenix, contains some of the least plot of the series. Ergo, when Chris Columbus and Steve Kloves treat this book with the same adoring care they did the first, they can, in theory, spend more time with the characters.

Amazingly, Chamber of Secrets is a good 10 minutes longer than the previous movie, though its pace has noticeably quickened. Harry languishes in the Dursleys' home for the summer, kept away from his new friends, who curiously don't even send him any post. One night he's visited by a self-tormenting house-elf named Dobby who plays like a poor man's Gollum (basically, he's all Sméagol, yet he stil fights wth himself). Dobby begs this kind and powerful boy not to return to Hogwarts, lest unspeakable danger befall him. To ensure this, he causes a ruckus which the Dursleys blame on the lad. The Weasleys break him out, though, and soon Ron and Harry are off for another year of adventure.

Newcomers in the film include Jason Isaacs as a note-perfect Lucius Malfoy, who out-sneers even Tom Felton's Draco when he condescends to Harry and the entire Weasley clan. But it's Kenneth Branagh's Gilderoy Lockhart who steals the show. The foppish oaf with a winning smile (literally) takes up the vacant position for Defense Against the Dark Arts, but he quickly reveals himself to be nothing more than a charlatan and a buffoon. Such a role easily calls for some scenery chewing, but Branagh is just restrained enough to make Lockhart work as both comic relief and infuriating sub-villain.

But the main enemy this time is not the Dark Arts teacher but an unknown assailant attacking students with Muggle blood. A message is written in blood: "The Chamber of Secrets has been opened. Enemies of the Heir, beware." Soon, Harry's ability to speak with snakes is revealed, and he becomes the prime suspect. At some point, he stumbles upon a magic diary that can converse with him and even show him memories from the last time that the Chamber was opened.

These events start the ball rolling toward the darker tone of later installments in the series, but Columbus still attempts to create an air of whimsy about the picture, something he couldn't even do when the tone of the novel fit the approach. I mean, Harry and co. have to interview the ghost of a girl who was killed in the previous attack spree, yet that never feels as disturbing as it really is.

When Harry at last descends into the Chamber, though, things pick up considerably. The animation of the basilisk looks nice, but it never blends into the backgrounds convincingly, and Columbus' stabs at action shots lapse into absurdity -- a POV shot of the snake lunging for Harry is particularly laughable. I also picked up on one line, when Tom Riddle, the man in the diary and the basilisk's master, shouts: "The basilisk may be blinded, but it can still hear you!" A problem: snakes don't have ears. Now, it can pick up vibrations, sure, but even a giant snake that can kill with a stare is sill a snake.

On the plus side, the acting gets a bit of a boost this time around. Rickman still has little to do (indeed he is tragically under-used throughout the series) and Harris, though authoritative, fails to capture either Dumbledore's loopy essence or his hardened core. He instead seems more like an English Mr. Miyagi, offering faintly witty nuggets of advice and encouragement. Radcliffe, however, delivers his lines with more conviction, and Grint works as great comic relief if not a strong lead in his own right. Watson too has improved her approach, still capturing Hermione's nerdiness but backing off the more annoying deliveries. Even as new cast members such as Branagh and Isaacs steal their scenes, these kids can finally hold their own, though it helps that the rest of the vets are still either phoning it in or limited by the script.

The entire film's quality in relation to the previous film can be summed up in its score: John Williams' soundtrack for the first film was a garish, clanking affair that fully displayed the composer's worst traits -- overly boisterous blasts of brass and strings that signal triumph even before the battle's been won. And the Diagon Alley music sounded like a lame carnival. Here, he's more subdued, but barely. He still chucks himself in the middle of scenes and robs them of their power, but just not quite as often. That's Chamber of Secrets in a nutshell: still a weak, too-literal movie, but the signs of a positive growth are certainly exhibited.

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone

With the release of the sixth Harry Potter installment upon us, I decided to revisit the other five films for the first time in ages, to chart the series's progression on celluloid but also because nostalgia is a dangerous, dangerous thing and I seek to undermine it where possible. Then again, I don't recall ever going crazy for any of the actual films; it was the book series that, like countless others of my generation, gripped me. It didn't make me want to read -- I was always an avid reader, though I've shamefully fallen off the wagon since leaving for college -- but the series always kept me entertained.

Until I tried to re-read them, that is. About two years ago, before the final book hit shelves, I had a marathon reading session over a few weeks, most of which felt like arduous labor the writing had so soured on me. I actually gave up on the first two books altogether because I found their styles to be so simplistic, while the fifth was so cumbersome and tangential I wondered if they just published her first draft by mistake. But films tend to cut stories down to their barest essences, and they allow the director and adapting writers to explore their own themes. "So why not give 'em a go?" I wondered.

Sometimes I wish I didn't just go with every thought that pops into my head. As with the first book, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone -- I will never understand why American publishers changed the title from the original Philosopher's -- churns out all the mythology-establishing exposition needed to launch a franchise, and it gets so bogged down in telling us about this incredible alternate world that it never bothers to take advantage of the properties of film and actually show us.

Oh, there is Computer-Generated Imagery aplenty, but too often characters describe Hogwarts' splendor as they quickly whisk through the scene, as if to outrun budget limitations. Then again, $125 million should have gone a long way since epic action pieces don't really enter the series until the fourth book, so they really could have fleshed things out a bit if only they just cut the sodding thing down some.

Oh my God, now I know why I liked this as a 12-year-old back in November 2001: they didn't leave out a goddamn scene. There's a false perception among the fans of any piece of literature on its way to the big screen that the movie's quality is directly proportionate to how rigidly it follows every scene, every line even, of the book. This is, of course, utter hogwash: where some films work wondrously for adhering to the author's vision (No Country for Old Men, which is almost certain to go down as the best film of the decade), many of the best deviate notably from the narrative and even themes of the source to explore new territory (The Shining, Ran). Director Chris Columbus and screenwriter Steve Kloves are too afraid of angering children to take any chances.

I mean, I'm so confident that people are aware enough of the phenomenon that was Harry Potter that I haven't even gotten down to the plot yet; do you really need me to? Harry (Daniel Radcliffe), an orphaned lad sent to live with his aunt and uncle after surviving an attack by the dreaded Lord Voldemort, is abused and mistreated by his guardians. On his 11th birthday, a giant, Hagrid (Robbie Coltrane) finds him and reveals that Harry is a wizard and shall attend Hogwarts, the finest magical institution in the world. Soon, we discover that Harry is the biggest celebrity in the magic world, simply for surviving Voldemort's attack.

On the way to his new school and life, he befriends Ron Weasley (Rupert Grint), the second youngest member of a seemingly endless family, and Hermione Granger (Emma Watson), a book-smart Muggle-born who knows more about magic in her first year than is mentally possible. None of these kids really has a grasp on the characters yet, what with Radcliffe's inability to convey any sense of rage, or pain or anything other than a dopey grin, really. And that's nothing compared to Watson delivering every line like she just got done running three miles, or her distracting emphasis on any word starting with an 'h.' They lack charisma at this juncture, which is an unfair thing to criticize in a child, but they're meant to carry the film.

To take the weight off of them, Columbus assembled a cast comprising some of the finest British actors in the biz, from Maggie Smith (Gryffindor professor McGonagall) to the aforementioned Coltrane to Richard Harris (Albus Dumbledore). Such a team could carry just about any movie, but Columbus never features any of them prominently enough to let them pick up the slack. Alan Rickman is a good choice for the venomous Severus Snape, but it will be a few films before he pours into the role with the oily bitterness it requires. Ian Hart's role as villain Professor Quirrell is, by nature of the novel, so underwritten that he cannot make an impression, and the final reveal of his "better half" is undone by some dodgy CG.

That weak animation also hurts some of the better sequences of the film, chiefly the Quidditch match. Quidditch rapidly became such an annoying distraction in the books that Rowling relegated it to the background starting with the fourth book, but it once was a fun break from stories that were light enough to support the aside. Here, it's the most exhilarating moment of the film, which reflects on the tepid direction of the final gauntlet of challenges protecting the Philosopher's Stone and Columbus' inability to fill them with any sense of tension or even excitement. So, it's up to the Quidditch game, but the animation is choppy and you can practically see the green screen behind the actors on their broomsticks. Still, it carries a bit of dramatic heft to it, and I actually found myself caring about the outcome even though a) I knew what would happen and b) I don't even care about real sports.

Elsewhere, though, the script is so concerned with just throwing every single narrative event of the novel on the screen, only to leave out what minimal character growth existed. I understand that the novel was all about setting up the sandbox in which these characters played, but as that's the case, the film hardly needs to be 2-1/2 hours long. It almost feels like five episodes of the first season of Harry Potter: The Series than a proper film, making the whole thing more of a chore than an escapist fantasy.

That dogmatic adherence to Rowling's writing means that the same contrivances of the book now appear on-screen: Harry, who must wear glasses because of weak eyesight, becomes "the youngest player in a century," and as the Seeker no less. How can someone who needs corrective lenses somehow see a tiny, darting ball that becomes entirely invisible if it moves more than six feet away from your face? For that matter, is there not a spell that has a similar effect to eye surgery? A number of older wizards wear spectacles as well; this is a bigger logic gap than Captain Picard's baldness in the future of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Furthermore, McGonagall actually buys Harry the finest broom on the market so he can bring home the Cup? Isn't that kind of like a football coach bribing his star players?

These are nitpicks, of course, more about the book than the film, and it's not like Columbus could alter Harry's already iconic look. But it's the director's responsibility to shift my focus away from the minutiae and contrivances, especially in a light-hearted romp such as this. Starting with the third installment, the series took a firm left into young adult literature from of children's books, but the first two are all about the spectacle. What a shame that Columbus and Kloves so utterly fail to convey any of it.