Order off the Menu.

Nothing’s pulling the carriage, Harry. It’s pulling itself, like always…
— Hermione, ORDER OF THE PHOENIX.

HARRY POTTER AND THE ORDER OF THE PHOENIX reminds us of how Jor-El’s warnings to Krypton’s elders went unheeded, and how Krypton paid the price. In PHOENIX, the demon wizard Voldemort is back – but no one believes the people claiming this – Harry Potter and Dumbledore. Even using scientific evidence, Jor-El could not convince Krypton their planet was going to explode; how then do Harry and Dumbledore prove Voldemort’s return with only the amorphous, pointless, rule-less faculty of magic to aid them? I don’t blame the council of old farts for not believing.

ORDER OF THE PHOENIX exhibits the same problems of disjointedness as its predecessors, not because it omits material from J.K. Rowling‘s book of the same name – but because the filmmakers (new screenwriter Michael Goldenberg, and new director David Yates) do not structure their movie as a stand-alone tale. They rely too much on audiences having a priori knowledge of the Harry Potter universe, so the movie just barges along with no thought to setups, exposition, foreshadowing or payoffs.

The two major plot threads in PHOENIX are the return of Voldemort (Ralph Fiennes) to battle Harry Potter (Daniel Radcliffe), and a totalitarian witch (Imelda Staunton) ousting Dumbledore (Michael Gambon) as headmaster and taking over Hogwarts school. When these two plotlines are followed, the story chugs along swimmingly. As soon as movie deviates from these threads for the sake of inserting book material for diehards, it’s like Hermione says, “It’s pulling itself, like always”…

Movie opens very grimly indeed, as Harry and his bullying step-brother Dudley (Harry Melling, replete with goombah gold necklace) are attacked by Dementors. Harry uses magic to deter the beasts and is put on trial for using magic openly. These scenes are dark visually and metaphysically, not least because:

Sky turns from sunny to overcast in mere seconds to reflect the encounter;
A strange woman tells Harry she was sent by Dumbledore to watch over him;
The court of wizards ignores all sanity and reason;
Dumbledore ignores Harry in a disturbing manner, even whilst defending him in court;
Richard Griffiths (Harry’s stepdad) is now so morbidly obese in real life, he looks like he’s gonna die any second – and that’s truly disturbing.

The tone remains pretty dark like this, to the movie’s credit, but it just… meanders sometimes.

At Hogwarts, a new Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher is hired, Dolores Umbridge (Staunton), a Republican absolutist in a vomit pink dress who is institutionally insane. Forget the black-robed special effects, the most terrifying horror of all is the old white woman with the closed mind in the position of power.

With waves of her wand Umbridge battens down on the dress code, on students kissing in public, on the desired distance between them, on a hundred other codes that she posts outside her office. When she punishes Harry by making him write lines, each line he writes is simultaneously inscribed painfully on his hand!

When she tries to arrest Dumbledore to banish him to Azkaban prison, he claps his hands above his head and in a blast of dramatic phoenix-fire, disappears. Which raises the question: How do they apprehend ANYONE to take to Azkaban prison?

Students rebel against Umbridge’s totalitarian regime and gather in a secret room, electing Harry their new magic tutor. Harry (now a true teen, short-cropped hair, voice broken, balls dropped) seems to be the only person at Hogwarts to have achieved anything remotely cinematic – killing the Basilisk, defeating 100 Dementors, etc. – and we gain a perspective on his accomplishments; without him, this motley collection of witches and wizards would be called St. Crispin’s School for the Terminally Mundane. He teaches them that the hardest part of casting spells like “Expeliamus” and “Expecto Patronum” is admitting you’re gay.

With his newfound masculinity, Harry stupidly makes a move on the Asian-American chick (Katie Leung); “stupidly” because Hermione is still in the wings, being ultra-hot, but mitigating that hotness with her lack of understanding on how to grow into her role as a young adult; I’m saying she’s a terrible actor. Harry’s and Katie’s lips actually touch, but the camera makes it a point to pan up their bodies to ensure Republican parents that their bodies do not.

Evanna Lynch is Luna, a bottle-blond creepy chick who sees dead horses. David Thewlis is back, as is Gary Oldman, both in a secret Order of the Phoenix (mentioned once then forgotten), amassing to do battle with Voldemort. Helena Bonham Carter is a bad witch; in and out of the story for no reason. Emma Thompson has a small cameo as the useless soothsayer. Brendan Gleeson brings his mad eye. And Jason Isaacs as Lucius Malfoy struts around with his hair set on Charlie’s Angel.

It’s lucky that all the stars and B-characters retained their looks and shapes as they aged. None of them turned into fat, ugly people or had limbs replaced or joined a cult and got face tattoos. What are the odds that such a large production could retain so much of its main onscreen cast like this?

Apparently, you can only see those emaciated horse specters “only if you’ve seen death” like Harry and the creepy chick. That’s why Hermione couldn’t see the specter pulling the carriage and thought the carriage was “pulling itself.” Later, all the kids – including Hermione – are fly-riding those horse specters to London. You lost me at Making It Up As You Go Along.

Climax sees massive posedowns between Voldemort and Gary Oldman, Voldemort and Dumbledore, Voldemort and Hansel (he’s so hot right now!) – in the best lightshow a computer can regurgitate, Volde cheesing it up and Dumble matching him pound for pound in Limburger and Swiss. In the end, everything peters out because – magic.

It’s pulling itself, like always…

END

Goblet-de-gook.

HARRY POTTER AND THE GOBLET OF FIRE continues the disjointed adventure of the world’s most famous boy wizard; not so much a feature film as a laundry list of tasks performed by two-dimensional characters, told with no logic, less motivation and lots and lots of not very special effects. It’s Magic! That’s great! Fuck you!

It surely seems like the most rushed movie in the series so far, as we meet Harry (Daniel Radcliffe), Hermione (Emma Watson, growing more legal with each film), Ron Weasley (Rupert Grint) and the Weasley family teleporting to the Quidditch World Cup via an old boot. No characterizations, no introductions, no logic – no surprise. Already I’m fuming over the pointlessness of an old boot in a field being a teleport device. As if hearing my inner monologue on the Riddikulusness of his world, Harry exclaims he “loves magic,” when they walk into their small tent and find it has an interior as capacious as the storyteller’s lack of imagination…

Did I mention the Quidditch World Cup? A game with no rules apparently has an annual meet! Some guys in Klan hoods called Death Eaters (which sounds ominous – until you think about it) attack the festival, and I wonder how anyone could tell it was an external attack and not simply one of the regular rule-less, lethal activities that takes place in every single Quidditch game ever played.

Off to Hogwarts, where two other schools of weirdoes (Beauxbatons and Durmstrang, arriving in a sunken ship and a Pegasus-drawn chariot respectively) visit for a Triwizard Tournament, a competition that can’t make up its mind on whether to be lethal or pointless, in the end choosing both, with a buttload of stupid thrown in. The competitors are chosen from a goblet of fire that spits out their names. No student under 17 can enter. Of course, that doesn’t matter in the least for 14-year-old Harry, whose name is ejaculated by the goblet, the reason given later as Making It Up As It Goes Along. All the adults in the room are cowed by this magical chalice because that’s how religions roll: even if it’s illogical, irrational or lethal to the youngsters, we’re still going to do it because the magical thing told us to. In a world where a man can talk through flaming coals, and where people follow a hologram bouncing ball to sing the school song, why is everyone so surprised that a floating goblet spat out a name that was never entered into it? It’s Magic – that’s great – fuck you.

Ron (who has pumped himself up to actually look sexier than Radcliffe in real life) has a bromantic tiff with Harry, which is so badly acted, I thought I was watching a HARRY POTTER film directed by Mike Newell. Regular screenwriter Steve Kloves (piggybacking off author J.K. Rowling‘s childish storytelling) has given Harry a roving eye in this movie, as he makes eyes (and eyes only) at the plainest chicks on campus; while Hermione’s constant whining seems to indicate she’s met Aunt Flow for the first time. Nonetheless, when some Russian guy asks her out, one would think her faithfulness to her constant male pals up to this point would give her pause but no, she bends over quicker than a nun in heat.

(Interesting to note that in press junkets whenever Emma Watson is asked what it was like to kiss her two familiar male leads, she would pass it off “like kissing her brothers” usually followed by qualifications like “yuk”; while Radcliffe and Grint would describe the experience in more effusive terms, “Quite nice actually…” etc. Need I say: typical. The guys all want to do her, while she has relegated all of them to The Friend Zone.)

Brendan Gleeson arrives as the new Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher, Alastor “Mad Eye” Moody. This post has become the revolving door role for the HARRY POTTER series: I guess no one really has a good defense against the dark arts.

Hagrid (Robbie Coltrane) finds romance with a tall visitor to the school who looks like a transvestite.

Sirius Black (who used to be Gary Oldman in the last film, here, an irritating hologram of coals) sends a message via owl to Harry… these “magical” people using owls as messengers, almost as technological as the Pony Express. I could show you something really magical – it’s called e-mail.

Robert Pattinson is Cedric Diggory, also chosen by the goblet, older friend to Harry and not yet Team Edward.

First task is to grab a dragon’s egg. They’re schoolkids and they’re being pitted against an animal that can fry them to ash. Has any student received their parents’ written consent for this? It’s like a Quidditch game: no rules, no logic, and no point.

The school dance, and author J.K. Rowling shows us she hasn’t got the first clue on how to write teen romance. First of all, Harry is a dragon slayer – and he can’t get a date?! And as wingman, Ron should be woiking Harry’s spoils until the wheels fall off! Yet both of them mope around like eunuchs, lamenting chicks. All philandering aside, this is the sequence where everything should revolve around the male and female leads (specifically, Harry and Hermione) and their hidden emotions for one another; instead, Hermione acts like an incognizant whore waiting to be deflowered by Dolph Lundgren, while Ron shoots barbs at her like a jealous lover and Harry stoops nearby like a Just Friend.

And I eventually have to admit to myself: I don’t give an owl’s hoot what happens to Harry Potter! I really don’t care about this loser wanker’s fate any more. He is the titular hero of this series and with every passing film, he is emasculated to the point where we stop caring whether he actually owns a wand and whether he ever intends to use it. It is so obvious this tale is written by a girl because Harry is not spending every moment of every day thinking about the inside of Hermione’s thighs. Like the rest of male-kind. Keep on being a Just Friend, Harry. It’s not your fault; you’re just written that way.

Tween girls swoon over Harry’s puerile, pasty chest as he steps naked into a bath. A bath? Yeah, just trying to wash those last vestiges of penis off his body. A ghost girl visits and he modestly tries to cover himself, scared she’ll see his pierced vagina.

Next task: hold your breath for an hour under a lake and look for a mermaid’s McGuffin. Harry is terrified that he can’t hold his breath for an hour. That’s easy: use MAGIC, idiot! Everyone else will. Better still, use a freakin’ scuba suit! But why does he have to be “told” of gilliweed? I’m sure that if friend Neville didn’t mention it in passing, anyone else on campus might have told him a million different methods to breathe underwater. It’s magic that’s great fuck you.

And then the maze, an almost tense sequence where Team Edward and Team Potter must find something-something. Are they going to use their magic telepathic gifts? Is there a pulse beacon? No, they’re going to use the scientific method of Running Around Blindly trying to find it. Where’s the drama? Where’s the effort? Where’s Waldo? Then they’re teleported to a graveyard where Harry meets —

LORD VOLDEMORT! And all Ralph Fiennes Cheese breaks loose! Suddenly the tone changes to something eerie, mature, thrilling. Everything comes together in this graveyard scene and makes absolutely less sense that it was already not making, as Voldemort proves his power over Harry, who cringes like a girl baby. Taking elocution lessons from the Emperor in RETURN OF THE JEDI, Voldemort sneers, “I’m going to kill you, Harry Potter,” with the same insouciance as the Emperor’s, “And now young Skywalker, you will die.” Then he proceeds to do exactly what the Emperor did to young Skywalker – not kill him.

Harry escapes, and later tells Dumbledore, “Professor, at one point in the graveyard, Voldemort’s wand and mine touched!” That’s called docking, I think. Or just “touch-tips.”

GOBLET OF FIRE then ends on a sigh of defeat, as Hermione, Ron and Harry walk away talking about nothing; placing them together here at the end only highlighting the fact that they are farther apart than ever. And we hardly care.

It’s magic

that’s great

fuck you

END

Azkabana-fo-fana.

Harry Potter’s getting on to “that age.” At the opening of HARRY POTTER AND THE PRISONER OF AZKABAN, we meet him in bed under the blankets, playing with his wand.

And Hermione is – how shall I say this without sounding as perverse as the rest of you who deny you’re looking? – budding…

And Ron is still a mourning-faced creature.

But you know what this movie needs? More Gary please!

The great Gary Oldman almost stars in HARRY POTTER AND THE PRISONER OF AZKABAN as Sirius Black, a wizard escaped from Azkaban prison, on his way to kill wizard prince Harry Potter (Daniel Radcliffe). “Almost” because the whole movie is spent talking about him or seeing his face on a Wanted poster; and when we do meet him in the bedlam third act, his only meaty interaction with the other characters involves shouting action lines and being a werewolf half the time, so it’s a tragedy for us – and for the movie. We can see he’s been taking “oily” lessons from Guy Pearce, and he hasn’t bathed since he was Beethoven.

Expecto a batho.

Still, the HARRY POTTER franchise lifts itself slightly with this third installment (following CHAMBER OF SECRETS), helmed by dark lord Alfonso Cuarón (Y TU MAMA TAMBIEN), instead of milky waif Chris Columbus. As the three child stars are older, the rating has moved from G to PG-13, so even as Sirius Black tracks Harry, we are afforded more sinister scares with the ominous specters called Dementors tracking Black.

Also, Lord Voldemort has re-entered the Potter tale, as a menacing presence in the background, whom Black is allegedly courting by killing Harry.

So the film is more mature than its predecessors, yet PRISONER OF AZKABAN retains a confused and contradictory forced tapestry of characters and motivations that I’m sure their demographic are too young to apprehend. Throw in a time-travel denouement and this confounded tale buckles under its own weight. As the emperor said in AMADEUS: Too many notes…

Film once again opens in the home that Harry shares with his unloving step-parents, where Harry is goaded into expanding his annoying aunt into a zeppelin that floats out the window. Thankfully, like the Hulk, her knickers stay on. Harry should apparently be penalized by the Wizard Assemblage Neon Knights of English Royal Society (W.A.N.K.E.R.S for short), but is spared the humiliation, and given special dispensation by the Accidental Magic Reversal Department (yeah, and that one I didn’t make up).

He runs away from home, and is picked up by a magic bus, which seems to be a part of the real traffic environment, yet can alter itself to circumvent the environment, as when it needs to squeeze through traffic. Again, no rules, ergo, no tension. How does inertia keep affecting it when Harry is thrown forward as it brakes hard? Why steer?

I hate magic.

Harry is dropped off at an inn where he meets Ron (Rupert Grint) and Hermione (Emma Watson). Is author J.K. Rowling making this up as she goes along? Why are Ron and Hermione at this inn? It’s not like everyone ran away from home and needs a transitory shelter before heading back to Hogwarts. Halfway through the first act and you’ve already lost my emotional investment. Even with chest buds.

On the way to Hogwarts, a Dementor attacks the train. It’s looking for Sirius Black but it’ll kill anyone for being black and nearby. Kinda like cops: we’re looking for criminals, but we’ll use violent force on anybody during business hours.

At Hogwarts, there’s a new Dumbledore (Michael Gambon) because sadly, Richard Harris went to that great wizard party in the sky. Dumble warns the children that Dementors are patrolling the school grounds, on the lookout for Sirius. Does anybody else think Dumbledore exhibited unbounded irresponsibility in allowing Dementors on school grounds; beings that he admits are so incognizant they cannot or will not discern between Sirius and a passing school kid? Someone call Child Services on this senile goat!

David Thewlis commands the best role in this film. As new Professor Lupin of Dark Arts, he doesn’t seem stunt cast – like Branagh in the last film, or Emma Thompson in this film, as eccentric soothsayer Sybil – he seems born to be a wizard, like Alan Rickman (Snape) or Gambon. A well-rounded character that is a boon to Harry, ready with knowledge and a helping hand when needed. And a Patronum, whatever the hell that is.

We can safely say this movie is where all the Expecto Patronum started. Expecto Patronum! Jeez, can you make me feel any dirtier? Lupin also teaches the kids the Riddikulus charm; I’m biting not only my lip but my whole face: a spell that you use when confronted with a terrifying thing, to turn it into something comical. Oh my god, there’s not enough soap in my grocery store to wash off this dirtiness I’m feeling right now…

Hagrid (Robbie Coltrane) introduces his class to a winged eagle-horse called a hippogriff (which is an appropriate name, as hippo means horse in Latin, and griff means that big dumb galoot from BACK TO THE FUTURE II.)

Sybil teaches the kids how to read tea leaves and finds a “grim” in Harry’s cup, wolf-shaped leaves that presage his death. Royt… the fact that he lives through five more films is irrelevant – prophesy is always right, right?

During the Quidditch game, Dementors attack Harry, because again, so dumb they can’t tell a wizard’s elbow from his arsehole. Since Quidditch has no rules anyway, and anyone can do anything at any time for any reason, no one figured the Dementors shouldn’t have been on the field of play – not that they were on the field of play, because there is no defined field of play in Quidditch; and no one could tell they were sucking out Harry’s soul because every Tom, Dick and Draco tries to do that during every Quidditch game anyway. Only when Harry falls off his vaginal broom does Dumbledore stand and gesture, “Arresto momentum!” He didn’t really just say that, did he? By now, I’ve sunk so low in my seat out of embarrassment, it looks empty. Or should I say it looks Evacuo Chairo.

Harry’s broomstick breaks in the fall. Lupin: “I’m sorry to hear about your broomstick. Is there no chance of fixing it?” Harry says no [needle scratch]– Are you kidding me? You’ve just been thigh-humping this broomstick like a personal jetpack against all the laws of physics, Dumbledore just arrestoed your fall from 1000 feet; a supernatural wraith tried to suck out your life essence – and THERE’S NO WAY TO FIX YOUR VAGINA-HUGGING BROOMSTICK? Have you tried Elmer’s Glue and some frickin’ nails?

Harry uses his cloak of invisibility – but if it’s not to spy on Hermione, then I don’t really care.

The twist is that Sirius is not really trying to kill Harry but shout a few action lines and pick up a paycheck. Harry saves Sirius’s life saying Expecto Patronum so many times that *I* almost disappeared in embarrassment. Then a white stag appears and chases away the dark specters. Yay. For no reason. Even when we discover how the white stag appeared, it still has no reason to be a white stag. Unless, of course, there’s a deeper phallic meaning, or a cry for help from Harry over how Rowling is slowly making him too douchey for words…  I love reading all the apologists debating over why a white stag, why a Patronus, why a time loop, why no girls will touch them…

Over and above all the expecto boolshitus adventures, there’s Hermione’s time traveling/shark jumping. Woven into the story like an OCEAN’S TWELVE post-exposition, only the nerds care whether her chrono anomalies jigsaw into the body of the tale; everyone else is just happy to see Hermione in that jumper and those jeans –cough, chestbuds–

As we’ve already discovered, all these kids are at “that age”; gearing up to be swatted flat with hormonal discharges enough to knock over an elephant. Inevitably the question of “romance” will arise in this episode – in the most surprising, offhanded manner. I think everyone in the world took it for granted Hermione and Harry would be an item. How shocking then, during a traumatic moment, when Hermione instinctively embraces RON WEASLEY instead of Harry! Harry moves up behind Hermione like a third wheel and tries to… uh, uh, spoon her meaningfully, but the moment has been lost and it is forced and embarrassing. It is staged in this way on purpose; to set up Ron’s future relationship with this world’s greatest spinner. In one small move, Harry has been emasculated and excised from the emotional loop. You might think this intimate move is nothing consequential, but a move like this is always consequential. To paraphrase Vincent Vega in PULP FICTION, “We act like it don’t mean somethin’ – and that’s what’s so cool about it – but it always means somethin’!”

This ruins the franchise. Our hearts are just not in it anymore. By 2014, even Rowling would regret not bowing to convention and simply pairing the two leads; at the very least, she might have created sexual tension between them until they were of legal age. Now everything that comes after that hug looks obtuse and pointless. When Harry and Hermione ride that wild, frothing beast from BACK TO THE FUTURE and Harry makes a comment to Hermione, no matter what he says, he’s stuck in the Friend Zone now, never to return, so nothing he says can be taken seriously anymore.

Is this what Sybil actually meant when she predicted the death of Harry Potter in the tea leaves? Is this the hidden meaning behind Harry unable to fix his broom?

Coitus Patronum Interruptus, Harry! Even the Accidental Magic Reversal Department can’t save you from this one…

END

The Chamber of Feebness.

The sequel to HARRY POTTER AND THE SORCERER’S STONE, HARRY POTTER AND THE CHAMBER OF SECRETS, continues the richly-layered story of young wizard Harry Potter and his friends in their second year at Hogwarts, the school for enunciating British kids. A monster awaits in a chamber of secrets and only Harry can defeat it using numerous deus ex machinae.

At his step-parents’ home in London, we catch up with Harry (Daniel Radcliffe) meeting the bastard son of Gollum and Yoda EPISODE II – Dobby (voiced by Toby Jones), a self-flagellating, sado-masochist house elf, who warns him not to go back to Hogwarts. Harry is determined to find a way back though, and Dobby, for some reason, frames Harry with some mischief that, in any sane person’s house, would guarantee Harry would be kicked out of the house and back to boarding school. I’m missing the boat on the motivations of Harry’s step-parents; instead of getting rid of this boy they hate with a vengeance, they exile him to his room. Though how can mere bars on a window stop a magical person from escaping?

Ron Weasley (Rupert Grint) and his ginger bros break Harry out in a flying car– Stop right there – a thousand questions: Is the CAR flying? Or is it their WILL that is making the car fly? Why bother steering? It’s got no ailerons, stabilizers, rudders; does it run on gas?–

The overpopulated Weasley clan is introduced to Harry and they all teleport via green flame to Diegone Alley. Though instructed to speak clearly for the chant, Harry, who up to this point has spoken like an English professor on Branagh Juice, decides to pronounce it “dia-gon-ally” and gets transported diagonally into someone’s arsehole, we presume. No matter, for in this wretched place he meets Hermione (Emma Watson) – and the film at last becomes watchable.

What? Yes, I’ve noticed she’s grown, but I’m not looking there. Glorious. That aquiline nose, those waterfall locks… She repairs his glasses, “Oculis Repairos” (can you make me feel a little dirtier with those dumb spells, please?); you’d think he’d learn that spell himself, being a glasses-wearer. But maybe that’s his way of cultivating her little wizmuff.

The HARRY POTTER movies are well-made films (this sequel also directed by Chris Columbus), exquisite detail lavished on every scene, with excellent acting and production values. Yet I keep losing interest at regular intervals. Reason: magic. The Potterheads scream in my face, “But LORD OF THE RINGS (this series’ most obvious competition) has magic too!” Yes it does, but wields it in a more sensible manner. Every time the POTTER series uses arbitrary magic with no payoff or purpose, I roll my eyes and go, “Expecto Wankforus!” For example: Why are they changing animals into wine goblets? Is there any point to this at all? Any application in the real world? Any reason for it in the wizarding world? Is there any payoff? Harry breaks his arm and it’s immediately fixed by magic. That’s nice. Why write that it broke in the first place if the fix was so easy? And Dobby can make objects float, teleport, shoot fire out of his fingers – I mean, how does such a powerful creature become a slave in the first place?

When something is called “magical” it means it resembles magic (which is irrational, illogical and follows no laws of physics). It’s almost an insult. So you can’t call a HARRY POTTER film “magical” because it’s not like magic – it IS magic. It is irrational, illogical and follows no laws; the world of Harry Potter is unpredictable in the worst of ways. Any scientist will tell you that if the real world was as devoid of physics laws as this series of movies, everything in the Universe would be dead or in a state of chronic chaos.

The main cast all return, with an addition: Kenneth Branagh is new professor Gilderoy Lockhart, comic relief for the sinister Snape (Alan Rickman), and the one shining light in this movie (besides Hermione). In a fantastically cheesy performance, he’s the Defense Against Dark Arts teacher, more involved with his own legend than teaching, five-time winner of the Most Charming Smile award.

We are also introduced to Jason Isaacs as Lucius Malfoy, Draco’s (Tom Felton) dad, as glamorously fey with that long white hair, creating a red herring as the bad guy, but he’s only a bad guy to Dobby, who finger-fries him later anyway. A pointless subplot.

The House of Slytherin (who are regarded as tacit “bad guys” in the school pecking order) built the chamber of secrets, to unleash a horrible monster and purge the school of all who were unworthy to study magic. It’s all very scary until we realize it makes no sense; that the chamber is somewhere under the girl’s bathroom, and that the monster is just a big snake that is easily defeated by Harry because of a magic hat, a magic sword, a magic phoenix and a screenwriter (Steve Kloves) who puts them all together because author J.K. Rowling ran out of ideas.

Look at these two idiots hugging EACH OTHER!

With Weasley’s worried face working overtime, he and Harry drink a potion to turn them into two other guys. It’s FACE/OFF for nerdists! The same potion turns Hermione into a cat! Don’t even ask– but are you trying to make me commit statutory master stroking? She says in horror, “Look at my face!” Weasley (in one of his few smiling moments – or should that be ‘leering’) replies, “Look at your tail!” Oooh, I am, I am. You’re already thinking about it, aren’t you, Ronnie?

As the filmmakers stole Dobby from LOTR, now they steal the spider sequence from the same Peter Jackson series. Hundreds of giant spiders surround Ron and Harry –cough, Shelob!– their magic flying car saves them in the nick of plagiarism. (So the car does have a will of its own – or were one of them mind-controlling it? And if it can think for itself as it rescues them, why bother steering and gearing?… Oh, it’s “flight gear” is jammed, so it can’t fly? A physical lever to control a metaphysical action? You lost me at Making It Up As You Go Along…)

And then – Boredom, thy name is Quidditch. One of the balls chases after Harry. It’s obviously “tampered with,” but does the game stop? No. Draco keeps bashing into Harry maliciously in full view of all spectators. But does the game stop? No. Rules like World Championship Wrestling. When Harry breaks his arm, in a school full of magic professors, they let the comic relief Gilderoy fix it.

Christian Coulson is Tom Riddle, who gives us a Bond exposition to pad the film’s climax, and to give Dumbledore’s phoenix time to fly down into the catacombs and drop off a hat to Harry, in which materializes a magic sword to– ah, forget it!… Then smartypants Riddle mouths off that his spirit is in the magic book lying right next to Harry. Geez, Harry, spirit in book, basilisk tooth in hand; how about stabbing the tooth into the book to stop it from yapping and telling everyone how to stop it?

Phoenix drips tears on Harry’s wound. He heals like Wolverine. Magic. Love it. Anything goes.

Hagrid (Robbie Coltrane) arrives back from Azkaban prison. We never even knew he left. As the school cheers him like the star of the show, we are left wondering whose bitch he was.

END

Hogwild at Hogwarts.

You know that one obstinate guy in the world who hasn’t read any of the Harry Potter books? I’m that cucumber.

Confession over, Movie Maniacs. Let’s see what this Harry Potter movie is all about…

In HARRY POTTER AND THE SORCERER’S STONE, we meet young British boy-wizard Harry Potter (Daniel Radcliffe), and tag along as his eyes are opened to the wizarding world via the school of magic called Hogwarts. Through his wand-shaking and friend-making, he is dogged by an event in his past that brought him simultaneous fame and mortal danger – he was the only person ever spared from death by a killer wizard named Lord Voldemort, who cursed him with a scar on his forehead that looks like a backwards ‘S’ on the KISS logo.

Though the movie is fresh and honest, brilliantly made by director Chris Columbus, and well-performed by the British cast, with lead actor Radcliffe embodying Harry perfectly in looks, intelligence, charm and wit, the story itself (by J.K. Rowling, transferred to the screen by Steve Kloves) is like a farm where plot holes are bred.

An old wizard appears in a London street and uses an unnecessarily contrived method of putting out the street lamps. You’re losing me already. It’s the late, great Richard Harris as Dumbledore (okay, I’ll let the stupid name slide). An old woman appears as a cat (Maggie Smith as Minerva). Another wizard, Hagrid (Robbie Coltrane), turns up on a flying motorbike. (Which raises the question: Is it the bike that is flying or is it his concentration that makes it fly? And if it’s his concentration, why does he need the bike? And if the bike is flying, well, why is it shaped like a motorbike? Why not like a comfy chair? A motorbike is shaped like a motorbike to aerodynamically maneuver down streets; it doesn’t need to be shaped like that if it can move in three planes. Do you pump that flight juice into the tank? And if it’s just “magic,” well– what’s the point in continuing this speculation?)

Hagrid delivers unto Dumbledore and Minerva the baby Harry Potter. Before they leave him on the doorstep of a suburban home, Minerva says, “This boy will be famous. There won’t be a child in our world who doesn’t know his name.” And she was right…

We catch up with Harry 11 years later, being mistreated by his adopted family of Muggles (which is the wizard term for humans): Richard Griffiths as Uncle Vernon Dursley, Fiona Shaw as Aunt Petunia, and Harry Melling as spoiled, fat Dudley Dursley.

Characters are all drawn quite prosaically: good is good, bad is bad. The first thing that jars us is how “evil” Uncle Vernon is, for no good reason. Why does he mistreat Harry? Does he know that Harry is a wizard? He keeps stopping an owl from delivering letters to Harry, until a backlog of millions of letters fills the air. Harry runs away to a lighthouse where Hagrid meets him. He learns that a wizard named Voldemort killed his parents and let him live. Again, no compelling reason is given. Harry buys a wand from John Hurt, is bequeathed a limitless amount of money from Goblin’s Bank, and gets a white owl slave. No wonder every kid wants to be him.

On the station platform 9-and-three-quarters, Harry catches a magic train to Hogwarts and meets Ron Weasley (Rupert Grint) and Hermione (Emma Watson, who would cause statutory thoughts in grown men the world over, from then to now). They were all cute little children back then; it’s a little sad looking back at this film and seeing the cast so young. Except for Richard Harris (RIP 1930-2002), every cast member would reprise their roles in all upcoming sequels.

The kids arrive at Hogwarts where a magic hat that looks like Ooga Booga from THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS chooses their “houses” for them – their school teams. Harry and his friends are placed in Gryffindor. We meet the troublemaking Draco Malfoy (Tom Felton), and some of the teachers, including Alan Rickman as Snape.

Movie is one long fantasy travelogue with no payoffs for its many sights and situations: John Cleese as a ghost, a three-headed dog named Fluffy, a troll threatening Hermione, Harry riding a broom smoother than the other wigglebottoms…

And then – Quidditch. And we thought the pod race in PHANTOM MENACE was a waste of time. Snape bewitches Harry’s broom during this game, making us realize J.K. Rowling really didn’t think this game or this story through (see POFFY SEZ).

Then it’s Christmas at Hogwarts! Yay, let’s celebrate the birth of Christ, the first true wizard and zombie! Well, ghosts regularly wander the hallways, which means there’s life after death. So why is everyone so worried about dying?

Harry gets a cloak of invisibility and never once uses it to do something sensible, like raid Hermione’s room.

He finds a magic mirror that shows him his dead parents, but I call foul: if ghosts are a regular thing in this universe, why can’t his parents appear to him and be done with it, instead of teasing him like apparitions in a real ghost story?

Hagrid takes the kids to the forest for the one chilling moment in any HARRY POTTER film: they come upon a hooded creature drinking the blood of a dead unicorn. It is interrupted by them, and glides towards Harry along the ground. Harry’s scar hurts like Parker’s spider-sense whenever danger is near, so it’s bleeping like crazy – until a centaur saves him. Of course, a centaur. Because a mythical creature that hasn’t been foreshadowed in this story can come out of nowhere like a deus ex machina.

Hagrid’s constant unintentional blurting of secrets is a funny running gag, performed well by Coltrane – he runs the last lament into the conversation without stopping, accompanied by a slight grimace, as when he tells them how to get past the guard dog: “Just play a little bit of music and he’s out I shouldn’t have told you that.”

The Sorcerer’s Stone eventually makes an appearance, and Harry must get it. Don’t ask. Lord Voldemort is also trying to acquire this McGuffin. (Voldemort is called He Who Must Not Be Named here, but I guess that got too clunky in sequels, and he is not Ralph Fiennes, who would play him in physical form in future entries, but Richard Bremmer.) Voldy can do anything to anyone, anywhere at any time, yet he still bothers with this extra talisman; like Saruman and the One Ring, now it’s just greed, dude.

For Harry to triumph, Ron must sacrifice himself in a giant chess game. He dies a horrible, noble death. Then all the emotion we spent on him goes for naught when we discover he’s alive a few minutes later. What was the point of the sacrifice? Harry finds the stone in his pocket, and is told by Dumbledore that it only appears to people who don’t want to use it. Great. Anything else you wanna make up right on the spot?

SORCERER’S STONE perfectly sets the tone for the series to come – confused, illogical, senseless. Might as well just get on the train and go home. Which they do.

END

SWA: Surgeons With Attitude.

I Heart Heart Surgery.

Apparently Mos Def is a rapper. But alongside veteran actor Alan Rickman, we’d be hard-pressed not to regard him as Rickman’s thesp equal.

A True Story worthy of movie status. Not another Viet Nam bore-fest or boxer’s tragic rhapsody or musician’s clichéd biopic, SOMETHING THE LORD MADE addresses an aspect so embedded in our modern culture we take it for granted – the story of the first heart bypass surgeries.

Alan Rickman is cardiologist Dr. Alfred Blalock (endowed with that god-attitude intrinsic to most heart surgeons), who arrives at John Hopkins Hospital in 1941 with Vivien Thomas in tow (Mos Def), his poverty-stricken, creative, resourceful lab technician.

Blalock and Vivien together create new disciplines in operating on malformed hearts. The means by which they arrive at solutions to their biological puzzles must seem simple and obvious to today’s heart surgeons, but it was counter-intuitive in those days when the medical profession’s idée fixe was that the human heart was so complex that Man should go nowhere near it. It was Something The Lord Made (which presumes – for people who believe “the Lord” had anything to do with the human body at all – that he either didn’t make everything else, or that he made the rest of it as simple as a cucumber).

The other prejudice in SOMETHING THE LORD MADE is that good old good ole boy standby – racism. Vivien is black, which, in those times, meant denigration, deprivation, and prejudiced dismissal at every opportunity. You know, exactly like today. Couple that with the fact he has no medical degree and the racial and medical prejudices are off the doctor’s charts. Though he had no formal education, the ambitious, autodidactic Vivien’s understanding of medical procedures was so innate he ended up advising Blalock in the operating room (on the special procedures for heart shunts they invented). To the chagrin of the all-white surgeon country clubbers.

Movie dramatizes and compresses all the double-prejudices. Only those who lived through those times would ever know the gutshock reality. Nothing can truly convey the utter contempt that the ruling white classes harbored for blacks – we can only be reminded by movies that such times existed. In this age when there is still much racism to be overcome, we cannot imagine how frightful it must have been for whitey to accept a black man in the operating room touching his innards. Especially a rapper.

Mary Stuart Masterson is Dr. Helen Taussig, another cardiologist instrumental in Blalock’s and Vivien’s research. These three far-seeing minds pioneered treatment of the “blue baby” syndrome (called tetralogy of Fallot, a congenital heart malformation that robs the blood of oxygen, causing the baby’s face to turn bluish).

If we’re to believe the end credits, the “blue baby” operations at Johns Hopkins launched the field of cardiac surgery.

I spent most of this movie on the verge of tears, for the greatness of these people. (And for the greatness of Mos Def’s talent in burying himself in this humble role.) Tempering my admiration – ego, politics, peer pressure. Blalock was a respected white doctor and there were times when he simply succumbed to passive racism for its political benefits. Yet when he needed Vivien most – in the operating room (his oft-repeated question, as he hunched over patients’ open hearts without the luxury of turning around, “Are you there, Vivien?”) – Vivien was always at his shoulder.

In Blalock’s defense, the prejudice aspects have a tendency to overshadow his achievements and courage. Blalock did, in fact, forge new methods for heart surgery. Give the honky a little sugar, EO activists!

Both their portraits hang in equal prominence at John Hopkins, and Vivien received an honorary degree for his work, achieving the recognition he neither sought nor cared for, but through the recognition, gaining his long overdue respect. But for Mos Def to win any sort of award for this magnificent performance, well, don’t turn blue holding your breath…

END

You should see this place on a Friday…

An Action Hero is Born Hard.

You know that irritating cliche: “rip-roaring rollercoaster ride”? Invented here: DIE HARD. The original and best. Action movie that carved a template for action movies – back in the day when even white guys could be terrorists.

This close to being a pissant B-Action-Movie, DIE HARD is where TV’s smarmy David Addison transitioned to Being Bruce Willis. Lost the hair. Gained the muscle. Still smarmy.

John McClane (Bruce Willis), a New York cop, arrives at the Nakatomi Tower skyscraper in Los Angeles, invited by his estranged wife, Holly (Bonnie Bedelia) to attend her company’s Christmas party and spend a few days (“Come out to the coast, we’ll get together, have a few laughs…”).

Meanwhile, Euro Bad Guys are sealing off the building, dispatching the perfunctory ineffectual security guards, then crashing the Nakatomi Christmas party with their automatic weapons and Euro accents.

Poffy Ki-Yay

Led by Hans Gruber (Alan Rickman, deliciously taking big bites of cheese), we discover these terrorists are after the Nakatomi vault. Everyone hostage. Except McClane, the fate of the hostages in his wise-cracking hands.

Thus is birthed McClane’s own brand of Everyman, sweaty t-shirt, fly-in-the-ointment action-heroing, as he avoids capture by shimmying through Nakatomi’s unfinished floors and elevator shafts, killing the terrorists one by one, throwing spanners into the Euros’ plans while blowing things up.

During the siege, McClane allies with a beat cop on the ground via walkie-talkie, Al (Reginald Veljohnson), who can only talk in clichés. Paul Gleason, direct from THE BREAKFAST CLUB‘s (1985) detention room, is Police Chief Dwayne T. Robinson, and if he had his petulant way, everyone here would be in detention.

Suddenly – Ellis!

What a scream! Hart Bochner brings the smarm like a smarm junkie on smarm steroids, sideways-mouth, fastidious beard, waggling head, pick-up-line ‘tude, smokin’ ego, coked nose, coming onto McClane’s wife… trying to smarm his way out of hostage situation.

“I close million-dollar deals for breakfast… Hans – booby!”

Ellis negotiates with McClane via walkie-talkie to stop throwing spanners and give himself up, so that the Euros can do their bad stuff in peace and everyone can go home. (Now we know the 80s loved the venetian blinds look – from movies to music videos – but in the offices at the top of Nakatomi Tower, where Ellis negotiates with Hans and McClane, there are no other buildings as tall, no other light sources higher than Nakatomi, and it is night – yet everyone in the office is COVERED in venetian blind shadows!)

Ellis fails, pays the price. And Gruber’s albino sidekick (Alexander Godunov) goes hell-Euro to kill McClane, as does Gruber himself, to no avail. McClane is just too slippery and his wisecracks too juicy, to be caught. We find out that Hans Gruber’s takeover of Nakatomi is more prosaic than it would seem at first – they are not terrorists, just “exceptional thieves,” going for 600 million in Negotiable Bearer Bonds – until The John McClane happens.

“I want to enjoy killing again. Bring me Ellis.”

With Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony motifs running passim, DIE HARD explodes from one action sequence to the next, nary a breath in between, loaded with every action movie cliché that didn’t know it was an action movie cliché until a decade later: the callous FBI guys, the ranting Police Chief, the rebel policeman flatfoot, the renegade lone cop out of his jurisdiction (is that three-clichés-in-one?), pretty orange explosions, outlandish action sequences (why must McClane take a fire hose off the roof when he could’ve run down the stairs with the other hostages? Stairs not good enough for Action Heroes?); the downed Bad Guy coming back to life for one last scare-thrill…

Though we would not realize it at the time, this first DIE HARD was thankfully R-rated, so the profanity and violence was at a premium. Though the action is all hyperbole, the offhanded swearing lends this piece a harsh reality when it comes to bad men and the Action Heroes who love to fight them – something which the makers of LIVE FREE OR DIE HARD (2007) sacrificed for a wider, younger, dumber audience.

From a novel by Roderick Thorp, Nothing Lasts Forever (1979, which was the sequel to his 1966 novel, The Detective, featuring the same cop character, named Joe Leland) – bet Thorp would never have guessed The John McClane would actually last forever…

Directed by John McTiernan (PREDATOR, 1987), with Jan de Bont as Director of Photography (a lauded action director himself now, starting with SPEED in 1994, often referred to as “DIE HARD on a Bus”), DIE HARD became such a shorthand for action movies that pitches would start “It’s DIE HARD on a boat,” or “DIE HARD on a plane,” until – the apocryphal story goes – some genius started his studio pitch, “It’s DIE HARD in a building”…

Yippee ki-yay, motherfucker!

END

Slashing Singing Scissorhands.

Edward Scissorhands is all grown up! Never more apparent than when Johnny Depp (as the eponymous demon barber, Sweeney Todd) holds aloft a gleaming razor and boldly affirms in song: “At last! My right arm is complete again!” (My Friends.)

Shave and a Haircut – Uh oh!

Violent, gruesome, blackly hilarious, deliriously entertaining, director Tim Burton’s vision of SWEENEY TODD: THE DEMON BARBER OF FLEET STREET is a wild cry of bloodlust put to song.

The tale of Sweeney Todd is apocryphal at best, but it makes for a grand murderous musical: a naïve London barber, Benjamin Barker (Depp, sans eye-liner) with a wife (Laura Michelle Kelly) and young child, is deported by a lustful judge (Alan Rickman) on false charges, so that the judge could carnalize the barber’s wife and raise the barber’s child to young womanhood (Jayne Wisener), with intent to have carnal relations with her also. After years in exile, the barber returns, wearing more eye-liner than Twisted Sister, more Aquanet than C.C. DeVille, with a new alias, Sweeney Todd. Opening a homicidal barber’s shop above a flagging meat pie shop, owned by Mrs. Lovett (Helena Bonham Carter, looking more Edward Scissorhands than even Johnny Depp), Sweeney turns the corpses he makes into the pies she bakes; his single-minded goal – to get his deporting Judge in the barber’s chair and give him the closest of shaves (wink bloody wink).

As Sweeney sails into London harbor, he croaks his first pessimistic lines (No Place Like London): “There’s a hole in the world like a great black pit / And it’s filled with people who are filled with shit! / And its morals aren’t worth what a pig can spit…” Then he spends the movie proving it.

The most urgent question asked of this production is: “So can Johnny Depp sing?” Yes, of course he can. So too can everyone else in the cast. A production of this size would not allow less-than-exemplary performances to make the finished cut. What do people expect they’re going to hear? Breaking voices and flat notes? Alan Rickman’s Judge is probably the “Oliver Reed” of the bunch, falling back on the untrained singer’s “talking/singing” technique.

Screenplayed by John Logan, Steven Sondheim’s numbers are edited for Hollywood-movie-length and, though none could be regarded as “classics,” are generally snappy enough to move the story along briskly; the only reprise that garnered repose being Johanna, the daughter’s theme – every time someone started puling “Johaaaaana!” my eyelids grew heavy.

Sacha Baron Cohen – back after BORAT – slam-dunks his hilarious cameo to the canvas as a rival barber, Signor Adolfo Pirelli, who unwittingly exposes Sweeney’s barbering talents in public, whereupon the Judge’s liege, Beadle Bamford (deliciously lecherous Timothy Spall), books a shave for the judge at Sweeney’s new establishment. Narrowly missing his throat-cutting opportunity with the Judge, Sweeney falls into insanity, installing a tilt-a-chair that drops his arterially-spurting victims down a chute and onto their heads – hard – in the concrete basement of Mrs. Lovett’s Pie Shoppe.

Mrs. Lovett only has raccoon eyes for Sweeney, who only has sunken eyes for his razors and there is a smart overlapping of vocals where they are both singing the same line, her to him, and him to his razors in My Friends: “Come let me hold you / Now, with a sigh, you grow warm in my hand / My friend! / My clever friend…”

Another smart double-vocal is when the Judge is in the chair and sharing thoughts with Sweeney over Pretty Women: though they sing the words in unison, Sweeney is remembering his lost wife, while the Judge is perversely thinking of his underage charge and Sweeney’s daughter, Johanna. “Sitting in the window or / Standing on the stair / Something in them cheers the air. / Pretty women.”

In a surprising turn of fortune, the more Mrs. Lovett grinds and bakes Sweeney’s unfortunate customers into her meat pies, the more successful the pie shop becomes. Still, her grinding machine could do a better job, as their young apprentice finds fingers and feet aplenty garnishing the upper crust of his pastry. Nonetheless, I must admit that seeing the grand meat pie again (a novelty food indigenous to British and Australian shores) made me hanker for one, no matter what flesh was ground into it!

It is pleasantly surprising to see that Burton never stays his hand when it comes to brutality. SWEENEY earns its R rating decisively, with many a spurting carotid being accompanied by joyous song. All set in visual tones cartoonishly gloomy (production design by Dante Ferretti), unnaturally leached of all color except blood-red, with ornately gutter set design (by Francesca Lo Schiavo) and churling cinematography (by DP, Dariusz Wolski) impeccably screaming Burton’s auteur hand.

There is a subplot of a young sailor (Jamie Campbell Bower) rescuing Johanna from the clutches of the Judge, and there are tale twists where we hold our breath that Sweeney is going to do something regretful – and parts where Sweeney DOES in fact do something regretful – all winding to an inevitable climax that merely proves the philosophy of both protagonists in the story, Judge and Sweeney alike: that all men have done something in their lives for which they deserve to die.

“There’s a hole in the world like a great black pit / And it’s filled with people who are filled with shit!”

Mmm! I feel like a feet pie!

END

Those Comedy Traffic School guys always try too hard.

Mining the Diary, Missing the Madman.

Douglas Adams did not live to see his wondrous literary creation, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, made into this feature film. Maybe that’s fortunate.

Each individual component of this movie is well done, from Garth Jennings‘ direction, to the astoundingly creative set design (all the good guys sport spherical décor, the bad guys, cubical) and creature visualizations (the Vogons are magnificently vile prosthetic puppets), to the performances (from creatures and humans alike), to the creation of the on-screen Hitchhiker’s Guide entries, to the artful compressing of Adams’ sprawling opus into a 109 minute movie. Yet somehow, the end result of all these superior elements comes out as flollopy as a mattress from the swamps of Squornshellous Zeta.

Eternally-vexed Arthur Dent (Martin Freeman of Ricky Gervais’ THE OFFICE) is hitch-hiked off Earth by Ford Prefect (Mos Def) just before it is vaporized by Vogons to make way for a hyperspace freeway. So begins Arthur’s trek through the galaxy in the company of opportunist Ford, intergalactic rogue and President of the Galaxy, Zaphod Beeblebrox (Sam Rockwell) and flighty Earth girl, Trillian (Zooey Deschanel), attended by “paranoid android,” Marvin (voiced by Alan Rickman).

Approaching a movie with this level of cult status is slippery from the outset. The screenplay issues from the demented pen of Adams himself, so cultists have little to complain about, though whether his second draft should have been the FINAL one – his death getting in the way – is definitely a matter for contention. Objectively, this enterprise is miles above the British television series – for production value, better acting and snappier writing – but fails in conveying a sense of empathy, because we do not get to live with these characters through weekly adventures.

The actual Guide is smartly purveyed as a computer – even in our modern day, we call laptops “notebooks” – and there are seemingly endless elements of Adams’ book incorporated into the Guide and the movie itself. The more obsessive you are, the deeper into the movie you’ll fall.

At film’s end, when the Improbability Drive turns the spaceship into various objects – as our intrepid adventurers seek the Restaurant at the End of the Universe – Adams’ face is the last image we see as the space cyclorama fades to black. We can only hope he would have been proud of the effort.

And the question remains: With the movie failing to break box-office enough to warrant funding for a big-budget followup, how many inferior sequels will be churned out to court the cultist fanboy dollar?

The answer may be as unimportant as Slartibartfast’s name.

Then again, the answer may just be 42.

END

That moment when they need volunteers for a horrible space death.

No Dreck on This Trek.

In its swinging skewering of that TV series which featured that Vulcan guy and that Overacting guy, GALAXY QUEST is everything that the SCARY MOVIE parody franchise is not: well-produced, well-written, well-acted – and funny.

Action Man Poffy

Jason Nesmith (Tim Allen) is the ex-captain of a television starship not unlike that one that boldly goes where no man has gone before, from a show which was cancelled 20 years ago, GALAXY QUEST. He and his crew, typecast for eternity as the crew of “The NSEA Protector,” fill their weary, laurel-resting days appearing at science fiction conventions, mall openings and autograph signings.

In what must be closer to the scathing truth than any real life series typecastee would care to admit, Nesmith’s crew moan en masse at their fate, which is double-edged: forced to dork themselves and recite lines from 20 years ago, but able to pay the rent for it. Living long. But not prospering. All except for Nesmith, who enlivens his role as action captain just a little too over-dramatically, not unlike that enterprising captain from that 60’s show.

There is ex-Shakespearean, Alexander Dane (Alan Rickman; though the loudest wheel in disparaging the GALAXY QUEST legacy, never thinks to remove the ludicrous latex headgear that buries him in the role of his alien character – the obvious Science Officer to Nesmith’s Cheesy Captain); Sigourney Weaver, a world away from Ripley, giving a Breasts-First performance as Gwen DeMarco (whose sole spacefaring job is repeating the captain’s orders to the computer and repeating the computers replies back to the captain), and the underrated Tony Shalhoub as Fred Kwan (parodying that Scottish engineer fella, but on ‘ludes); and we all know Sam Rockwell‘s character – the crewman who is sent down to the planet with the major stars – only to NOT make it back to the ship alive (you know – for that touch of “realism”), appropriately named Guy – as in “Guy #6.”

As Dane might have elocuted 20 years ago, “There are more things in heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” Shocking them out of their stupor, the Galaxy Quest crew is abducted by an actual alien civilization, the benign Thermians – who over the years picked up transmissions of the series broadcasts, believing them to be “historical documents” rather than fiction – and seek their aid in defeating a real intergalactic villain named Sarris (Robin Sachs, in a fantastically diabolical performance, with makeup effects by legendary Stan Winston).

These “real” space sequences are where GALAXY QUEST pulls its biggest surprise. No quarter is spared in creating stunning space effects and authentic-looking alien monster villains. For the satire to run on steel-biting wheels, it was necessary to make this “real-life” intergalactic fracas as realistic as possible – otherwise director Dean Parisot would have had just another B-Movie on his hands with the cheapness and artificiality exhibited by the actual series he was spoofing!

The Protector crew must assimilate into their television personalities to weather the real intergalactic battle, as the Thermians, led by Mathesar and Teb (Enrico Colantoni and Jed Rees fleshing out their extraterrestrial roles with decidedly alien flair), have based their culture on the GALAXY QUEST canon – from its technical details (the NSEA Protector in operational full scale) to its slogans: “Never give up. Never surrender!”

This movie is to the 60’s series as Spinal Tap was to heavy metal: it captured all the insider jokes that true fans would notice, and laughed WITH the fans, not at them. Dane disdainfully notes Jason’s Shirtless penchant; a hallway for no reason has chompy, crushy things just to serve as obstacles; engineer Kwan’s method for assessing the breathability of an alien planet’s atmosphere is to open the hatch and take a sniff; all the while, Guy wailing whenever unnecessary risks are taken, as – being credited only as “Crewman Number 6” – he is certain he will be the first to die.

The hero-worshipping of the Protector crew by the Thermians lends itself to unexpected poignancy, when Dane, who holds his most famous phrase in contempt (“By Grabthar’s hammer, you will be avenged!”), unwittingly finds an opportunity to utter it, in grave sincerity, to someone for whom it carries worlds of weight – a dying Thermian who regarded Dane as his otherworldly father… How are we suddenly weeping?

GALAXY QUEST affectionately gives the fanboys their due as rocket scientists trapped in dweeb bodies, as ubergeek Brandon (the stammering Justin Long), with fan-researched tech specs, aids in saving the Protector, blowing up Sarris, and winging our heroes Earthward.

But when Sarris appears at the film’s finale (I mean, the villain-surviving-for-one-last-stab had to be exploited, right? Sigourney Weaver can testify to that!), it is up to Jason Nesmith to save the day with a cheese-alicious duck-and-roll and phaser powerblast worthy of… that guy in the yellow jersey (occasionally Shirtless and body-oiled) who made an art form of melodramatic pausing between lines – you know who I mean… by Grabthar’s hammer, the name’s on the tip of my tongue…

END