Review #765: 'Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets' (2002)

Director Chris Columbus, responsible for popular cuddly, family-friendly movies such as Home Alone (1990) and Mrs. Doubtfire (1993), here makes his second, and thankfully last, entry into the Harry Potter franchise. The series needed to go way darker after Chamber of Secrets, and did, and this film marked the ending of the bright, and non-threatening, adventures for Harry and co. It's also the last time Potter the film so painstakingly stuck to Harry the book, and here everything that should have been cut in fact remains. Due to this, and the exhausting running time, Chamber of Secrets is the worst of all 8 films.

Still stuck with his horrible adoptive parents (Richard Griffiths and Fiona Shaw) for the summer while he awaits another year at his beloved Hogwarts, Harry Potter (Daniel Radcliffe) is visited by house-elf Dobby (voiced by Toby Jones), who warns him that he must not return to the school of wizardry this year. He finds his efforts to catch the Hogwarts Express scuppered, and instead must travel by flying car with his daft friend Ron Weasley (Rupert Grint). When he does arrive, students begin to turn up petrified (literally), with whispers of the mythical Chamber of Secrets being re-opened and unleashing a terrifying monster into the school.

While the first film needed to spend time on developing the world that J.K. Rowling so beautifully imagined and the colourful characters who inhabit it, Chamber of Secrets has no such baggage. Yet Columbus, along with screenwriter Steve Kloves, have done little other than simply film the images millions of fans already have imprinted in their mind. We seem to slog through every second of Harry's second year at Hogwarts, with little thought having been given to the humour and charm that seemed to spatter every paragraph in the engrossing novels.

Instead, we get special-effects aplenty, with long periods dedicated to a flying car with a mind of it's own, some hungry spiders in the forest, and a Quidditch match that does little that the first film didn't do already. Rowling's books are so recognisably British, with old eccentrics who all seem to have Monty Python-silly senses of humour, and that feeling of the characters all sitting near a comforting roaring fire. Even though Columbus have upheld Rowling's demand for an all-British cast, everything in the film seems fat and Americanised, all CGI and no heart, so far removed from Britain that I almost expected Steve Martin or Robin Williams to walk in.

There are a few saving graces, namely the stellar cast of adults, all returning from the first film. It also introduces Kenneth Branagh as celebrity wizard and new Defence Against the Dark Arts teacher Gilderoy Lockhart, and Jason Isaacs as the father of Harry's arch-nemesis Draco Malfoy (Tom Felton). They chew on their scenes, helping save the still-struggling Radcliffe and Emma Watson (who would get better as the films progressed). It also marked the sad passing of Richard Harris, here appearing for the final time as Dumbeldore, before being replaced by Michael Gambon in the role. But a few decent performances cannot save this bloated, sickly film from feeling stretched and an hour too long.


Directed by: Chris Columbus
Starring: Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, Emma Watson, Robbie Coltrane, Richard Harris, Maggie Smith, Alan Rickman, Kenneth Branagh, Jason Isaacs
Country: USA/UK/Germany

Rating: **

Tom Gillespie

Review #764: 'Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone' (2001)

With billions upon billions of pounds in revenue generated from book sales, film adaptations and all other mediums, and with the hysteria surrounding the series now all but gone, it seemed the perfect time to re-visit the Harry Potter film franchise. I'll state outright that I'm a fan of the books: they are hardly ground-breaking pieces of literature, but they are a meticulously crafted and widely imaginative set of novels, maturing with it's progression and with the age of it's characters and readers. The movie adaptations were consistently average, fiercely loyal to J.K. Rowling's prose but always somewhat lacking in substance.

Shut away in the cupboard under the stairs by his adoptive parents (Richard Griffiths and Fiona Shaw), 11 year-old Harry Potter (Daniel Radcliffe) lives an unhappy life. But there's something different about him, as he learns when he talks to a snake at a zoo and makes the protective glass disappear, causing his vile cousin Dudley Dursley (Harry Melling) to fall into the tank. His life changes when he is invited to enroll at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. The invitations are burned by the Dursleys, and they go to great lengths to stop him going to a place that will teach him magic, until he is rescued by a hairy giant named Reubus Hagrid (Robbie Coltrane).

When introduced into the magical world with Hagrid, Harry learns that he is famous. His parents were killed by an evil wizard named Lord Voldemort (generally referred to as You-Know-Who), but Harry survived the attack, seemingly killing Voldemort and inflicting Harry with a lightning bolt scar on his forehead. When he gets to Hogwarts, he is befriended by the bumbling Ron Weasley (Rupert Grint) and the precocious Hermione Granger (Emma Watson), and the three are quickly embroiled in a plot involving murdered unicorns, a mysterious artefact known as the philosopher's stone, and a giant three-headed dog.

Philosopher's Stone is almost defiantly faithful to the books. Sure, lines are altered here, and minor characters are snipped out there, but this is as close as literally 'bringing a book to life' gets. Yet while this works in it's favour in terms of visualising Rowling's creations, it doesn't even try to develop any ideas of it's own that would have only worked in a visual medium. Much of Rowling's silly and charming sense of humour is lost in simply filming whatever happens on the pages. One of the main criticism's I have for the books is that a lot of the major characters are little more than archetypes, so a lot rested on the three young leads' shoulders in making us interested enough to stick with them.

Sadly, two of the three fall rather flat, with only the gurning and hang-dog Rupert Grint showing a natural gift for appearing on the big screen. Potter is a simple enough character anyway, at least he is at this point of the story, shy, naive but brave, but Radcliffe gives an incredibly one-note performance, encapsulated in the scene in which he discovers he can perform magic. "I'm a... wizard?" he says, lacking anything resembling a facial expression. Watson also struggles to bring much likeability to her self-satisfied bookworm, her eyebrows constantly rising and falling as she struggles to perform her lines with any conviction.

For the rest of the cast, director Chris Columbus has rounded up a smorgasbord of British and Irish talent, a collection of well-trained thespians who steal the entire film from it's leads. Richard Harris plays Professor Dumbledore, Hogwarts' headmaster, Maggie Smith is Professor McGonagall, head of Gryffindor, the house Harry is chosen for, Alan Rickman is Professor Snape, Harry's greasy-haired Potions teacher, and John Hurt makes a small appearance as a wand-maker. Coltrane probably steals the film as the beast-loving grounds-keeper Hagrid. It's an amazing line-up that would consistently grow both in talent and in numbers as the films progressed.

Ultimately, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone is a success, weaving an interesting enough story about the possible return of the dark lord Voldemort, with Harry's wide-eyed introduction to the world of hocus pocus. John Williams' Oscar-nominated and now widely recognisable score captures some of the giddy movie magic of early Spielberg, and the attention to detail is often remarkable. But like the book, it ultimately suffers from being too kid-friendly, spoon-feeding lessons in morality without giving much for adults to chew on. It's little more than a well-told children's story, something that would change as the novels became darker and more complex, but at this point, it's a gentle introduction to a captivating world.


Directed by: Chris Columbus
Starring: Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, Emma Watson, Robbie Coltrane, Richard Harris, Maggie Smith, Alan Rickman, Ian Hart, John Hurt, Richard Griffiths, Fiona Shaw
Country: UK/USA

Rating: ***

Tom Gillespie

Review #79: 'Red Desert' (1964)

"There's something terrible in reality," Guiliana (Monica Viti) tells Corrado Zeller (Richard Harris) towards the end of the film. This statement encapsulates Viti's character perfectly. Guiliana is withdrawn, has bouts of anxiety and paranoia. She had previously been in a car accident involving a van and been hospitalised for a year with serious shock. This role is played beautifully by Viti (who had collaborated with Antonioni on his three previous films); whilst she strikes the occasional contorted pose, she uses her eyes majestically to portray a fractured, anxious thought process. If her eyes are not frantically darting around, encapsulating immaculate confusion, then they are sunken, glacial, and permeated with sadness.

Guiliana is married, but on meeting her, Corrado seems almost infatuated with her awkward, unstable demeanour. They enter into a subdued affair that is restrained by her seemingly perpetual elusiveness. She is haunted by details - that we have no awareness - of the road accident. It could also be argued that Guiliana is affected by the surroundings she inhabits. The film is set in Ravenna, an industrialised, bleak landscape of factories; chimneys pumping out fumes, infecting the horizon with a dense fog. All that is left of the natural surroundings of field and trees, is the bare-bones of rotten, forgotten husks. The once-green grass churned into slurry. The infected waters, yellow and frothing as the waves hit the poisonous rocks.

This was Michelangelo Antonioni's first film in colour. The last in a loose tetralogy informed with themes of alienation in the modern, industrialised world. Red Desert was preceded by L'Avventura (1960), La Notte (1961) and L'eclisse (1962). Whilst much of the landscape filmed here, the overall effect of the visuals is astonishingly beautiful. These stark, brooding images stay with you. Whilst the natural colours (dissipated by the onslaught of industrial waste infecting the air) are washed out by heavy pollution, Antonioni lightly daubs his mise-en-scene with slight painterly strokes of colour (often out-of-focus) across the composition with a mass-produced object of manufactured descent.

The theme of the relationship between the polluting element of the manufacturing industry with human emotion is open to interpretation in this film. Do we see these objects of consumerist desires that illuminate the screen with their intensely garish, gauche, fabricated colours, as the fundamental fascination with the industrial age? Are we, like Guiliana, so totally absorbed by our modernist surroundings that we find solace in the objects that this modern industrial age has produced? Any film that is open to new ideas excites me. A film that can be represented with new adaptation of thought. Our understanding of technology, and the changing face of industrialisation/globalisation will undoubtedly change, as I am sure will the interpretations of this beautifully constructed piece of cinema/art.

Directed by: Michelangelo Antonioni
Starring: Monica Vitti, Richard Harris, Carlo Chionetti
Country: Italy/France

Rating: *****

Marc Ivamy