Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

I love the Harry Potter books, I really do. Quite sadly, there are people (and I know many of them) who stare and roll their eyes when the topic comes up. It's easy, I think, to feel derision toward the books—they're ubiquitious, they're over-marketed to the absolute extreme, the mania (even while somewhat subsiding) is a turn-off. The Harry Potter backlash is a bit unfortunate, however, because the works themselves remain very well crafted, terribly fanciful pieces that really deserve their place in the kiddie lit canon. It's been difficult to say the same thing about their film adaptations.

The first two films in the series were, how do you say, crap-tastic. They were perfunctory screen adaptations at best, with Chris Columbus transferring the plot from page to screen with an embarrassing lack of imagination or screen vision. They were plodding and overlong, the strong cast of Brit film stalwarts the only saving grace. To be fair, Columbus put certain necessary elements in place—Hogwarts and the characters look about right, good casting, okay score. They were, for children's fare, probably perfectly good movies, however lacking in grace. Clearly, though, the series needed a better director to possibly pay any sort of tribute to the novels, and it found that in Alfonso Cuarón.

While I said in another post that I had reservations with Y Tu Mamá También, I still hold its director in high esteem. His version of A Little Princess, in particular, has always proven that children's films can be as beautifully crafted as any movie offered to adults (seriously, go rent it, if only for the bizarre performance of the lead actress, and the damn creepy monkey friend). Cuarón frankly cements my faith in him with Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. Far and away, it is the best of the movies made from those omnipresent kiddie epics. Cuarón, unlike his predecessor, films the movie less as a page by page screen adaptation, and more as an entity in and of itself. Not only is the adaptation better (story-wise), the feel of the film has significantly improved.

The biggest accomplishment with the new movie is a visual one. The film is almost grainy, rough around the edges of the grandiose special effects. Even the editing is a bit less pristine. He favors flickering dissolves that are almost reminscent of early film. Somehow all of this is infinitely more appropriate to screen adaptations of Rowling's books. The books are not all light and crystal clear jewel tones, not all about the Quidditch matches and special effects wonders of the wizard world. Certainly there is a fanciful light-heartedness about many elements of the world of Harry, and if anything, you could criticize Cuarón for focusing on the darker elements at the expense of "day-to-day wizarding life," but you'd be missing the larger picture. This book is darker than the ones that came before, so naturally the film must be, but there's more going on here. I don't necessarily think that serials should have an auteuristic touch to them (isn't a serial by nature somewhat generic?), but that is, to a degree, what is happening here. We see Cuarón in the film—there are flickers of all of his earlier works (or at least the three I've seen) in this, and as a result, it feels like someone cared about making it, that it wasn't just some other by-product of the Harry Potter phenomenon. And quite bizarrely, it gave me an entirely new found appreciation of Y Tu Mamá También. Go figure.

This isn't to say that the movie is great. It's not. It is still overlong, the pace still falters in moments not connected with the main plotline, and no new director can convince one Rupert Grint (a.k.a Ron Weasely) to expand his facial expression repertoire beyond that of singular, signature bug-eyed astonishment. But you know what, both Daniel Radcliffe and Emma Watson have actually improved their acting chops (and, uh, looks) with this one, and that's something. And David Thewlis and Gary Oldman are nice additions to the cast (although I hold that Sirius Black, despite the years in Azkaban, should still be more attractive than Mr. Oldman). And as I said, it looks great.

It seems that I'm sort of carving out an unfortunate niche for myself as commentator on over-blown studio fests, but eh, what can you do. At least at Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban I could feel in some way that I was supporting the Latin New Wave, and you know, rather surprisingly it's not a bad movie at all.