..Gary Dretzka
..Noah Forrest
..Leonard Klady
..RJ Matson
..David Poland
..Douglas Pratt
..Ray Pride
..Michael Wilmington

June 5 , 2004

The Little Prince

In the first two Harry Potter pictures, producer-director Chris Columbus' exhausting storytelling was sketched in the creams and tans of nostalgia (or at least Pepperidge Farm cookies).

But as JK Rowling's scrum of young wizards lurch into adolescence, fresh hand Alfonso Cuaron orchestrates layers of black and grime and gray, as well as leaching color from the frame when he can. (Some of the color desaturation schemes are as striking as in movies like Mike Leigh's Naked or late Tarkovskys like Nostalghia.) Cuaron's empathy with youth has been well demonstrated in The Little Princess and Y tu mama tambien, but it's important to remember he's also a gifted artist who delights in all manner of beauty. There is a lavishness and generosity to the movie's décor and special effects design that are eye-poppingly good.

Someone wholly unaware of Rowling's intricate Potter mythology could tumble into Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (***1/2) and suffer only the slightest disorientation. From the start of this lush and scary treat, Cuaron is himself-how can you not say it?-a wizard. Even dew has a heavy-water gleam-and-slosh, looking as viscous as honey yet also suggesting chill to the bone.

Thirteen-year-old Harry (Daniel Radcliffe), Ron (Rupert Grint) and Hermione (Emma Watson) return to Hogwarts, the school where the royalty of British acting slyboots-Robbie Coltrane, Alan Rickman, David Thewlis, Emma Thompson, Maggie Smith, Julie Walters, and Michael Gambon taking the late Richard Harris' place as headmaster Dumbledore-teach them the particulars of magic, including its very real potential for harm. The Ministry of Magic is involved as well, as there's concern for Harry's safety after the escape from Azkaban Prison of Sirius Black (Gary Oldman), accused of betraying Harry's parents to the man who murdered them, Lord Voldemort. It sounds like gibberish, but instead The Prisoner of Azkaban is restless, dense and full-throttle.

The 14-year-old Radcliffe is playing Harry at 13, but half-grown into striking cheekbones and into a steady, blue-eyed gaze, could pass for an older, angrier, more troubled teen. As his rival for the affections of Hermione, Grint is now a bulkier boy, but it's the transformation of Watson that makes the movie into an equal opportunity case for teen heartthrobs: the handsome, clean-scrubbed Radcliffe is matched by the feistiness characteristics she's growing into. (She's the first young actress I can remember observing that she both throws a good punch and resembles a latter-day Audrey Hepburn.)

Some reviewers have no taste for movies about the not-uncommon teenage self-dramatizing aptitude for anguish: the world's not that dark, the inner world of the adolescent mind is not that tangled. Cuaron remembers. While he does not approach the bruised melancholy of a movie like Donnie Darko, and certainly not the adult confusions of his pre-adult characters in Y tu mama tambien, he does embrace the genre and series conventions that have been handed to him in order to address dark and troubling issues of paternity, legacy and responsibility. Cuaron treats actors like partners, pulp like literature and teenagers like humans in order to suggest the fears and hopes of us all: why does that have to be such a scarce knack? He also slips in all manner of sly, unobtrusive jokes and movie references, including a zoom into a cup of tea leaves that alludes to a shot copied many times, first in a film by Godard, and perhaps best-remembered from Taxi Driver. (Cuaron's use of "iris" fade-outs-the image collapsing into itself as a transition-brings a playful hint of old-fashioned melodrama as well.)

Cuaron mixes advanced computer graphics with classically designed practical effects, with lovely results. The grounds of the school are guarded by "dementors," wisp-rags of ghosts who seem like they would crumple to the touch, yet can inhale away the soul of any transgressor. Robbie Coltrane's giant Hagrid becomes the school's Care of Magical Creatures teacher, and Buckbeak, a half-horse, half-eagle creature in his care, provides some of the movie's sheerest thrills. Harry takes to the sky on Buckbeak, and Cuaron's visual choices are intensely gratifying as they are framed against the moonlit night sky. That's pretty standard kid-takes-flight fantasy material, but when the mythical beast dips down the surface of the Scottish loch and lets its talons playfully skim along the water, The Prisoner of Azkaban deepens its inventive, imaginative splendor. An early scene of Harry's escape from his dreary suburban uncle and aunt's house in the bright purple, magical "Knight Bus" is a marvel of old-fashioned craft, with its hundred-mile-an-hour barreling through London streets, weaving between other vehicles and avoiding pedestrians, was accomplished by having stunt-drivers and stunt-walkers, the bus going thirty miles an hour, the other cars six or eight miles an hour, and pedestrians choreographed to walkkkkkk verrrrry slowwwwwly. The result? You can perceive it's real-world motion, and not crayola-daubs of pixel power.

The movie holds up in the IMAX-conformed version, with only a few special effects seeming less convincing in the blowup. The wall of sound is impressive, with every thrown-away aside coming across much clearer than in the 35mm version. (Premium prices of up to $14 are being charged for Prisoner of Azkaban and later this summer, Catwoman.)

And Through the Woods

With Strayed (***) (originally Les egares, or The Lost Ones) French master director André Téchiné returns to the sort of precise yet ambiguous exploration of the heart that he made his own in 1990s movies like Wild Reeds and Ma saison preferee (My Favorite Season). A shallow comparison could be made to The Pianist, another World War II-set story about refugees in hiding who cannot see, only hear, the violence exploding around them. Rather than being confined to an urban area, however, widowed schoolteacher Odile (Emmanuelle Beart) and her 12-year-old son and 7-year-old daughter are escaping Paris as the Germans invade. With the help of the chisel-featured teenager Ivan (Gaspard Ulliel), a kind of wild child who is illiterate but knows all the necessary survival techniques, Odile and her brood fall into the enchanted French countryside, occupying a country house abandoned by a Jewish musician and his family. Tranquility and domesticity evolve. The 12-year-old discovers Oedipal anger. Odile rediscovers longing and passion. Each moment functions as fairytale and as romantic realism. Ivan loses his virginity and his many secrets. (The climax of the long-smoldering sexual attraction between Ivan and Odile has a very revealing element, suggesting he may have spent a chunk of his youth in prison.) In hardly longer than ninety minutes, Téchiné, with the accomplished cinematography of Agnes Godard (Beau travail, Vendredi soir), creates a short-lived vision of worlds being created, of an idyll both erotic and familial, and ultimately, of hopes being quietly dashed. The acting is superb all the way around; Téchiné prompts a performance from Beart that evokes an intense primness as well as volatile emotion.

Love Me If You Dare

While the title of Yann Samuell's lush and mean Love Me If You Dare (** 1/2) was changed for American release from Jeux des enfants, or Child's Play, to avoid association with a certain small and murderous doll, there's more than enough mischief on screen to make either title ironic. Amelie with a stone in its pocket and meanness in its heart, the debut feature by the career animator illustrator-he did drawings for a French edition of "The Lord of the Rings"-is a perverse joy. Julien (Guillaume Canet) and Sophie (Marion Cotillard) tease each other from the age of 8, daring one another to greater and greater pranks, becoming closer while staying apart, into their middle and later years. There's a relentlessness to Samuell's eagerness to please that both startles and grates, like a lover who lives as a relentless supplicant, who oozes too-muchness (a gift, an insight, an aspirin, a gaze, here's flattery, my hand, flowers, "do you want a drink," "I like your sweater"). You begin to wonder whether it's you of the movie wanting a moment's aloneness, a breath's length of not being perceived. Still, it's memorably jaunty.

Carandiru

Brazilian-born director Hector (Pixote) Babenco's first feature in years after a difficult battle against cancer, Carandiru, (** 1/2)  is a loud crowd-pleaser about a well-meaning doctor's struggle to improve conditions in the overcrowded Sao Paulo House of Detention after the arrival of AIDS. Based on "Carandiru Station," a book by his friend, the doctor Drauzio Varella, it's raucous, brutal, comic, and almost suffocating at times in its overcrowded, overstuffed form (there are dozens of characters teeming for screen time). Yet, shot in the actual prison where the fact-based story is set, Babenco's sincerity and eagerness to illustrate love and violence in myriad forms keeps it all alive, especially the savage, sustained prison massacre that is the movie's centerpiece. Its ratings explanation pretty much sums it up: "Strong, bloody violence/carnage, language, sexuality, and drug use."

White and Black

Jim Jarmusch has been shooting his black-and-white sketches about his two favorite power drugs (as well as simmering passive-aggressive behaviors) since 1986, and eleven of them together live up to his reputation as one of our shaggiest shaggy-dog storytellers. Highlights of the sketches in Coffee and Cigarettes, which have real-life actors or musicians playing zonked-out editions of themselves, include the just-right all-wrong expressions of Jack and Meg White comparing notes on Jack's Tesla Coil; Cate Blanchett as a precious film star and her own downmarket cousin; and Wu-Tang Clan's RZA and GZA coming upon Bill Murray ("Bill Murray!" as they repeatedly call him) hiding under a grill man's paper hat in a late-night diner. Perhaps the best written and most alarming is Alfred Molina and Steve Coogan as a pair of actors having tea in L.A. with two different agendas. It's savage stuff. But what lingers for me is the last bit, with ancient, weary, smiling Lower East Side stalwart and Andy Warhol acolyte Taylor Mead, toasting "New York in the 70s-the late 70s!" while the music of the spheres investigates his fading mind. With Iggy Pop, Tom Waits, Steven Wright, Cinque Lee, Joie Lee, Steve Buscemi, Isaach de Bankole and others.

Tabloid Altman

Amos Gitai is Israel's most prolific director, and his Alila (Storyline) (**), which he's posed as "a day in the life of Israel," is almost like several movies, an Altmanesque slab of sociology following ten characters in half-a-dozen stories set at an apartment complex on the outskirts of a rundown part of Tel Aviv. "Complex" also applies to the many issues that the characters must face. Gitai, a veteran of the Yom Kippur War, offers characters who are blunt embodiments of pressing concerns-a Filipina emigrant tends to an aged Holocaust survivor; a soldier considers deserting-and his instincts veer from quiet neorealistic urges to in-your-face theatricality. He's a meaty director.  As shot by Renato Berta, a veteran cinematographer for directors like Alain Tanner, Manoel de Oliveira, Claude Chabrol, as well as on Gitai's own Kadosh, extends the splendidly choreographed chaos of long, unbroken takes exhibited in his contribution to the 11'09'01 anthology.

Where's Jeff Goldblum when you need him?

Godzilla was better.

The end of end-of-the-world movies as we know them, The Day After Tomorrow (* 1/2 for a handful of tasty SFX bits)  is a jaw-droppingly perfect example of the sort of machine-tooled crud that prompts an early and lasting lather. The lather's necessary in order to try to make a few clean points without drawing too much unnecessary blood about why Roland Emmerich's latest minor apocalypse-which reflects a studio-bound, relative economy of budget-is in and of itself a disaster.

Still, a raft of friends ran out to see the damn thing opening weekend and enjoyed it. "It was nuts! It was terrible! I loved it!" Bad reviews only whetted their appetite for more of Emmerich's familiar mediocrity.

"Paleoclimatologist" Dennis Quaid tells an international gathering that global warming will cause terrible damage within decades or centuries. After being pooh-poohed by the U. S. Vice President, a Dick Cheney lookalike who is later seen bossing the Preside around, Quaid returns to his secondary trade of being a neglectful father to smartass son Jake Gyllenhaal. "What are you doing wearing that stupid B-movie actor suit?" you have to wonder of our Donnie Darko.

Weather starts going haywire around the planet, and the movie lurches forward like a choice bit of Weather Channel weather-porn (and notably the Weather Channel is among the broadcasters inserted to provide the cheap movie reality of cheap televised reality). Or maybe just a greatest-hit compilation of plain old porn money shots.

While we're offered some lovingly decadent tableaux of Los Angeles under siege by inland tsunamis, it's all building up to a prolonged bunch of nonsense with Gyllenhaal and a tribe of fellow academic nerds and homeless people holing up inside the New York Public Library. (Later, a Russian tanker will tool up Fifth Avenue so the characters can loot it for penicillin and get attacked by a pack of wild wolves.)

What does bad dad Dennis do? He trucks, treks, hotfoots and snowshoes his way from DC to the NYPL in order to show Jakie he loves him. Oh, plus loving Mom, a doctor played by Sela Ward, stays by the side of a hairless little boy cancer patient named Peter who's obsessed with Peter Pan. There's more, and there's less, and the Cheney-alike even makes an unlikely apology to the nation after becoming president and most of the nation relocates to Mexico and "what used to be known as the Third World."

- Email Ray Pride