Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (2001, PG)

I really enjoy the Harry Potter films, but their sheer volume makes them quite an undertaking.  Translation?  If you’re gonna do a rewatch, summer’s your friend.  Expect more Potter reviews in the coming months; today, we’re starting where it all began (besides, you know, the books.)

Is there anyone who still needs a plot summary for this movie?  If you’re out there, this paragraph is for you!  11-year-old Harry Potter, a long-suffering orphan being “raised” by his horrific aunt and uncle who verbally abuse him, treat him like a slave, and frequently keep him in a closet (just your standard British kids’ book, right?) learns of his extraordinary inheritance.  His late parents were in fact a witch and a wizard killed in a wizarding war, and he himself is famous for surviving the last magic murder attempt by series Big Bad Lord Voldemort, who has since been optimistically presumed dead by the wizarding community at large.  Harry is spirited away to Hogwarts, a renowned school of magic, where he starts honing his craft, making friends, making enemies, becoming a wizard sports star, and, oh yeah, foiling an evil plot. 

The Sorcerer’s Stone, and director Chris Columbus, get a lot of flack for being an unremarkable start to the series, and such criticisms aren’t far from the mark.  Even though all the Harry Potter books are long, this film drags more than a little – literally 1/3 of the two-and-a-half hour run-time elapses before Harry’s first day of school.  Some of the tone is a bit precious, some of the humor is a bit juvenile, and some of the acting from the young cast is a bit underdeveloped (that last point mostly gets a nostalgia pass, however, on the grounds of Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, and Emma Watson being so tiny and adorable.)

However, the movie doesn’t get enough credit for all it did to launch the franchise.  The design is mostly terrific – Hogwarts looks fantastic, the big quidditch scene is loads of fun, and all of the characters look basically pitch perfect.  Not to mention, Columbus started off the practice of astounding casting decisions for the series.  Yes, the kids are highly unpolished and some of their line readings are hilarious in the wrong way, but each captures the essence of their character early on, and the chemistry between the main three is everything it should be.  And goodness gracious, the adult cast!  I’m pretty sure Robbie Coltrane, Alan Rickman, and Maggie Smith were born to play Hagrid, Snape, and McGonagall, respectively, and the now-late Richard Harris is a superb Dumbledore (those were the days…)  Smaller parts, like Julie Walters as Molly Weasley, Ian Hart as Quirrell, and the wonderful John Hurt as Ollivander, are similarly spot-on.

And okay, I know I complained about the length, but I do appreciate how this film shows a fair amount of day-to-day Hogwarts stuff.  Even though it doesn’t always know when to move a scene along, it’s nice to get a picture of Harry’s life at school apart from all the foiling-an-evil-plot business.  Some of the later movies are much better at condensing, but most of the little moments tend to get excised completely, so it makes an enjoyable change to see Harry practicing spells in class or learning the finer points of quidditch.  As I gradually work my way through the rest of the films, we’ll see if any hit that sweet spot between bloated and bare bones.

Warnings

Some scary images, light British swearing, and a little crude humor.

Relationship Spotlight: Sarah Manning & Helena (Orphan Black)

Another Orphan Black post, another relationship – this show really knows its way around character interactions.  I’ve already talked about how much I like all of the clones’ relationships with each other, but Sarah and Helena deserve a separate post of their own.  Definitely my favorite clone duo in the whole batch.  (It’s hard not to talk spoilers with this show, and that ratchets up to basically impossible when Helena is involved, so read at your own risk.)

First of all, these two aren’t just clones.  They’re also twins, split from a single egg and carried by the same surrogate mother.  (Specifically, they’re mirror-image twins; Helena is left-handed while Sarah and the other clones are right-handed, and her internal organs are all opposite the usual side.)  The makes them unique from the others, along with the fact that their mother ran away with them before the mad scientists could get their feelers on the girls.  Sarah and Helena are the lost clones, the two who didn’t grow up under Dyad’s surreptitious watchful eye.

Pretty much from their first meeting, when Helena is still under the thrall of the proletheans and killing clones for them, there’s something special about their connection.  With Helena’s programming, she has no qualms about murdering her other sisters, but she goes out of her way to avoid killing Sarah.  She senses something different; there’s a bond there that she can’t help but cling to.  And despite Helena’s horrific actions all throughout season 1, the thought of permanently taking her out is massively hard for Sarah.  It’s only after some intensely personal betrayals on Helena’s part that Sarah can even consider it.

Obviously, their relationship has enormous growing pains (attempted kidnapping and point-blank shooting will do that,) but they’ve come tremendously far.  For a long time, Sarah’s the only clone who has any meaningful interactions with Helena.  It means she’s the one who has to rush in and try to contain Helena when she goes off the rails, but it also means she’s the only option when Helena is in trouble.  Against every shred of common sense, Sarah finds she starts to care about Helena, recognizing how she’s been used and lied to, seeing how much she craves someone she can love.  And although they frequently backslide – Helena is so volatile that it’s pretty unavoidable – she sets about trying to convince Helena that they can trust each other.  Sarah’s the one to finally introduce Helena to the others, to convince them that Helena is no longer a threat and to assure Helena that they’re all family.

These two are sort of the “action clones.”  Both women are resourceful, often underhandedly so, and they have a knack for getting through tough situations.  Helena likes to think of Sarah as weaker and incapable, and it’s true that Sarah doesn’t have Helena’s scary prolethean training, but ultimately, they work excellently in tandem.  When they’re both imprisoned by one of the ever-growing number of factions fighting of a piece of the clones, they look out for each other and work together to escape.  (True, Helena gets out and leaves Sarah behind, but 1) volatile, like I said, 2) she’d been told lies about Sarah, as she so often is, and 3) she comes back for her in the end.  Baby steps.)  The Sarah-Helena stuff, by the way, is my favorite part of the entire Castor base storyline, and I absolutely love Sarah’s discovery that Helena has been captured and her determination to find and rescue her.  For much of this season, helping Helena has been Sarah’s main focus, and considering all the incredibly awful crap that went down between them in season 1, that’s really saying something.

Mad Max: Fury Road (2015, R)

I’m so glad this movie is as great as it is.  Even before I heard such encouraging things about it, from both a general film perspective and a geeky feminist perspective, I knew that I desperately wanted to see it.  I was hooked by the time they got to the “What a lovely day!” line in the trailer (and even more so when they flashed the names of the cast and I went, “Holy crap – that’s Nicholas Hoult?!”)  I was prepared to see it as a mindless action guilty pleasure, but I’m very pleased to love it as a gloriously insane spectacle of a stellar movie.

Full admission, this is my first Mad Max film.  Really, my strongest cultural understanding of the franchise is the brief rip-off the kids on Home Movies make.  That said, I think I followed the basic setup all right:  the world is a barren, apocalyptic wasteland (nuclear war + depletion of resources?), what civilizations remain belong to those with access to water, food, and gasoline, and all sorts of crazy tribes have formed in humanity’s brutal, dog-eat-dog efforts to survive.

Max is a loner warrior tortured by the voices of the dead he couldn’t save, but a fairly likeable one.  At the start of the film, he’s captured by the War Boys, the violent, half-dying acolytes of the warlord/cult leader/false god Immortan Joe.  They’ve been indoctrinated to believe that the only glory comes from dying in battle (and thus being born again,) but they’re ravaged by radiation sickness and require frequent blood transfusions among other patchwork, which is where Max comes in.  He’s chained to the hood of a War Boy’s tricked-out motor, serving as a “blood bag,” when he gets embroiled in an epic life-or-death chase.  Furiosa, a warrior in Immortan Joe’s service, has stolen the warlord’s five young wives and aims to take them somewhere green.  Max’s path intertwines with theirs, and he, reluctantly at first, helps them in their escape attempt as the full brunt of Immortan Joe’s war parties stalk them across the desert.

I’ll save the gender stuff for another post – it needs a lot of space, and I still have to rave about the action.  The action sequences are off the hook, exciting and impressive and, best of all, crystal clear.  The desert setting means most scenes are well-lit with great contrast, and an emphasis on practical effects over CGI gives it a sharper, more immediate feel.  It is awesome to watch Furiosa clinging to the underside of the war rig, the War Boys leaping onto of moving cars, and the Pole Cats during their super-cool Pole Cat thing.  It’s the kind of action that makes you feel keyed up when you leave the theater, like you ought to do something crazy and BAMF.

I’ll mention Charlize Theron’s Furiosa first, since it really is her movie.  She’s full-on stunning – driven, bad-ass, protective, and soulful, and she can work wonders even without dialogue.  As Max, Tom Hardy’s job is more to hold everything together than to draw focus, and he does it well.  I like his gradual move from self-preservation mode to becoming an ally of Furiosa and the wives.  And Nicholas Hoult, playing War Boy Nux, is wonderfully eye-catching.  Admittedly, his is a more eye-catching part, manic and otherworldly, but he delivers on the character’s potential and then some.  There are moments when it just physically does not compute that this is the same kid who played Tony on Skins.

Warnings

Lots of violence (not much gore,) sexual references, thematic elements, and disturbing images.

Top Five Performances: 2015 Tony Awards

Because honestly, I enjoy the hosts’ gags and my favorites giving acceptance speeches (Michael Cerveris!,) but seeing the performance numbers is about 80% of the reason I watch the Tonys.

Something Rotten

This made-of-meta performance seems like a pretty good representation of its show.  I really enjoyed some of the stranger aspects of musicals that are predicted and puzzled over by the Elizabethan characters.  Though I love it, Les Mis is always ripe for a good dig, and they have a great point – what is it about a kick line that’s so fabulous?

The King and I

Pretty nice medley here, giving us two good looks at Kelli O’Hara’s Anna, a nice feature for supporting actress victor Ruthie Ann Miles, and a glimpse of Ken Watanabe’s king of Siam.  Overall, it looks to be what you’d expect from a King and I revival, but it appears a well-rendered one, and the Rodgers and Hammerstein tunes are of course classy/lovely.

On the Town

One of several performances with the same general setting and music style, but this was my favorite of the bunch.  With a trio of likeable actors in great voice brimming with energy, this short medley makes the most of its brief time, popping congenially.

Fun Home

Bar none, my favorite.  The greedy part of me would’ve liked to hear Michael Cerveris singing something, too, but really, the performance is perfect just the way it is, with a bit of narration and dialogue followed by a showcase for the young actress playing Alison.  The song, in which Alison is bowled over by the sudden sense of kinship that seizes her when she sees her first butch woman, is beautifully written and performed.  The lyrics are so resonant, especially, “I thought it was supposed to be wrong, / But you seem okay with being strong. / I want… / You’re so… / It’s probably conceited to say, / But I think we’re alike in a certain way.”  The sentiment here is just so true – it reminds me a lot of my feelings the first time I lurked on an asexuality message board.  After a lot of production numbers, this performance makes me feel like I’m actually seeing something happen.  Sydney Lucas’s bewildered, elated facial expressions are golden, and I love the shot of the adult Alison standing in the background of the scene, watching her younger self as she experiences this revelation.  Just stunning.

The Visit

Okay, so after seeing this performance, I still have basically no idea what The Visit is about, but it’s kind of amazing, anyway.  Chita Rivera is always a good thing, I love Kander and Ebb music, and more importantly, it’s just so bizarre.  I mean, seriously – what is up with the gaggle guys in suits painted up like ghouls and jazz-handing around Chita?  Points for sheer originality.

2015 Tony Awards

Today’s write-up is coming to you a day late so as not to disrupt Buster Monday.  This year’s Broadway’s Biggest Night was a bit of a mixed bag for me, but there was plenty of good and amazing mixed in with the tepid and unremarkable, so I won’t be too grouchy.

In the hosting seat, gone were the Jackmans and the NPHs.  Instead, the emcee duties went, appropriately, to an Alan Cumming/Kristin Chenoweth tag-team.  Obviously, it’s hard to compete with Neil Patrick Harris as an awards show host, but overall, I enjoyed our hosting duo.  They had some fun bits and jokes but never overwhelmed the telecast.  Their opening medley was nice, if lacking in fireworks, and I laughed out loud when they both ran onstage and glommed onto Tommy Tune.  Ah, Broadway…  (On a side note, I love that Alan Cumming’s presence ensured lots of queer inclusion, but what’s up with people laughing at his greeting of “Ladies, gentlemen, and those who don’t identify as either” – why is that inherently comical?)  My one critique of our dynamic cohosts was that, put together, they felt just a bit too “stagey” to me.  A lot of their stuff felt noticeably performed.

It was a very old-fashioned Tony Awards this year.  An American in Paris and revivals of On the Town, On the Twentieth Century, and Gigi all hit the same vintage-showtune mark, and since they were a good chunk of the performing musicals, it made the evening’s numbers feel less differentiated.  And then, there was a revival of The King and I (delighted about Kelli O’Hara’s lead actress win – I’ve loved her since The Light in the Piazza) and Chita Rivera in The Visit, the latest “last” Kander & Ebb show.  I mean, seriously, we’ve had Curtains, The Scottsboro Boys, and now The Visit.  Is Fred Ebb not actually dead?  Are they still writing somewhere; is that it?  And Something Rotten, the one completely original new musical, offered up an Elizabethan setting, a Producers-esque sensibility, and copious self-referential musical-theatre jokes.

I’m beyond thrilled that Fun Home took home the big four awards (best musical, direction, score, and book,) plus Michael Cerveris for lead actor.  Going into the night, it was the show I was most curious about, and it was also the performance that I loved the most.  Honestly, I bet I’ve watched their song at least ten times since Sunday.  Just incredible!  I’m usually a sucker for unconventional off-Broadway transfers, anyway – for further reference, see RENT, In the Heights, and Next to Normal – and Fun Home seems like a stellar addition to the list.  I can’t wait to dig more into it.

In other awards news, I was glad to see Christian Borle win supporting actor for Something Rotten, and I loved The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time winning in so many of the play categories, including the top honor.  Assuming it’s much the same as the West End production, its wins for direction, lighting, and set design were well-deserved.  (Also, I love that it was up for best choreography.  It was one of the most strikingly-choreographed plays I’ve ever seen, and even though it didn’t win, it really earned its place alongside the nominated musicals.)

On a final note – ending on Jersey Boys?  That’s it?  One, that show has been trotted out so many times at the Tonys, it’s simply ridiculous.  Two, it was completely lackluster way to finish off the telecast, and worst of all, if they were going to do “Oh, What a Night,” they could’ve at least changed the lyrics to reference the events of the evening.  Come on, Tonys – you can do better.

Bluffton (2013)

Welcome to Buster Monday book club – I’ve read a few Buster-related books, and each is valuable in its own way.  Each is peppered with wonderful humor, each brings its own slant to the table, and most of all, each is an utter labor of love.  This beautifully-illustrated take on Buster’s boyhood is a delight, and it seems fitting to write about it in the first week of summer.

I don’t know if I’d go so far as to say this is a graphic novel, but at more than 200 pages, we’re definitely beyond picture books.  Either way, the book, written and illustrated by Matt Phelan, has a youthful bent.  It mines all of the best young-Buster anecdotes and introduces them to its readers – and its invented protagonist, Henry – on the shores of Muskegon Lake, where the Keatons and a number of other vaudeville families would summer in the off-season.

Henry has been quietly subsisting in the sleepy Michigan town, dreary days that bleed into one another.  In 1908, however, the nearby neighborhood of Bluffton is set upon by vaudevillians, showbiz nomads who live boarding house to boarding house and don’t have anywhere to wile away their holiday months.  In a flash, Bluffton houses are snatched up by hoofers, jugglers, and tumblers, an Actors’ Colony clubhouse is christened, and the joyous, irreverent atmosphere of the stage come to Muskegon.  They’ve brought their music, their jokes, their routines, their attitude, and their elephants along with them, and Henry is fascinated by a world he’s never seen before.

Along with them comes 13-year-old Buster Keaton:  the human mop, the pintsized stone face, and the star of the Three Keatons.  Henry is immediately drawn to the young vaudeville star’s whirlwind life.  He lives for the exciting and outrageous stories of Buster’s career – the family act, the backstage mishaps, and the attempts to keep the Gerry Society from pinning them with child labor charges.  For Buster’s part, his summers in Bluffton the only times he gets to be a kid with a house, a gaggle of neighborhood friends, and days stretching endlessly before him, so many of the stories are told by his Actors’ Colony friends.  He doesn’t dwell on his fame or his stage experience.  Of course, he can’t help tumbling and satirizing everywhere he goes – Buster will be Buster – but he doesn’t approach quaint little Bluffton as some podunk town he’s stuck in until he can get back to performing.  Instead, he attacks his days, playing and joking and pranking (oh, the pranking!) like he’s trying to fit as much summer as he can into every single hour.

The illustrations are lovely, soft colors and simple, uncluttered backdrops.  It’s a nice medium for a book like this, because the visual aspect lets it focus on the motion, which is obviously a major consideration where Buster’s concerned.  Entire pages go by without dialogue, just panel after panel of Buster flipping and flying through the air because that’s simply what he does.  His assorted handmade contraptions, like the collapsing outhouse, are similarly well-rendered.  If I have one gripe with the illustrations, it’s with the likeness of Buster himself, specifically his eyes.  I know the eyes for all the characters are pretty deemphasized – Henry, by and large, gets by with just two black dots – but Buster’s enormous, heavy-lidded eyes are such a prominent feature of his iconic face, and it seems weird not to depict them.

Favorite Characters: Amy Pond (Doctor Who)

I’ll admit – this one was on the cusp between a Favorite Characters and Character Highlight post, but the pendulum ultimately swung in Amy’s favor.  She’s hampered by some unfortunate plotting and some haphazard characterization that’s especially thin in her first season; despite it, though, Amy has some great moments, and Karen Gillan’s performance is generally strong enough to carry her through the rocky patches.  (Some Amy-related spoilers.)

Amy’s backstory isn’t a first for Who (or for Moffat in particular, since he wrote “The Girl in the Fireplace,”) but she’s a first for a companion, meeting the Doctor at a very young age and not traveling with him until years later.  A newly regenerated Doctor and a malfunctioning TARDIS conspire against her, and what was supposed to be a five-minute wait turns into twelve years – and after that, two more years go by before she sees inside the TARDIS!  Throw in a time Crack on her bedroom wall that eats her loved ones and her memories of them, and you have plenty of dramatic fodder to work with.

Unfortunately, the show never quite takes advantage of either of these threads as it ought to.  It mentions both of them often enough, to be sure, but neither is really used to differentiate her from your standard companion.  On the girl-who-waited front, it would’ve been nice to see her distrusting the TARDIS’s ability to get her home, have fanciful ideas about the Doctor that she fanwanked in the intervening years, or be hyper-sensitive to people not believing what she says.  And as for the Crack, there is no discernable difference between series 5 Amy, every trace of whose parents had been removed from time, and the post-universe-reboot Amy who grew up with a family.  Even if Amy’s time-energy-marinated mind can remember both lives, the change should still affect her; if anything, knowing both ways should affect her more.  Plus, keeping the lost-parents reveal a secret until the end of season 5 left us with an Amy who seems vaguely unfinished without knowing why.  All in all, a lot of potential is tossed out.

Now that I’ve mourned the Amy we could have had, how about the Amy we get?  It took a great deal of inner resolve to keep faith in the Doctor, in his very existence and the idea of him coming back someday, so we meet a grown-up Amy who’s pretty steely.  The show calls her The Girl Who Waited, but a more accurate title might be The Girl/Woman Who Lost Everyone.  In light of this she tends to pretend her feelings aren’t nearly as strong as they actually are.  She often hides the depth of her investment from those she cares about, even from herself, but when the next crisis hits and pulls someone important away from her, her loss absolutely overwhelms her.

As a companion, she brings a Swiss army knife of qualities to the table.  She has heaps of bravery and a fair dose of common sense, and she’s a lot more insightful than her feigned indifference would suggest.  A few times, she saves the day simply because she recognizes a truth about someone that leads her to what they need.  She fights and investigates, she finds the Doctor fallible without losing her faith in him, and she’s pretty good at getting a lid on her terror in some astonishingly panic-inducing situations.  Unfortunately, it seems like she’s especially prone to getting captured and needing rescue, but on the occasions when she’s allowed to contribute to her own escape, she usually does well for herself.  And while her guarded emotions can make her seem aloof with her loved ones, she always shows how much she cares when they really need it.