"Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince" (short review)

Well, the story of J. K. Rowling’s success is fabled (and reviewed last night on my TV blog), much bigger than “le mien”: it boils down to this: kids like it.

I think it means something: Harry Potter is the “nerd”, the little boy that might have been teased into silence or retribution back in the 50s; but he roars back, starting with chess (in the first film), and becomes a young man of destiny.

In “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince”, Harry says to Dumbledore, “I’m going to tell you something” – and then we learn of his destiny. It is a bit like Clark Kent’s perhaps, except that Harry is 66 inches with glasses, and his “powers” (of magic) were taught to him.

Actually, the three major stars (Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, and Emma Watson) are now entering young adulthood; Radcliffe will be 20 in a few days, and Grint will soon be of “legal drinking age” by US rules. Both Radcliffe and Grint have virilized and bulked up (although Radcliffe stays totally modest in this movie, unlike Equus); Grint, in fact, is imposing enough for a part in “Smallville” as another Kryptonian, probably (Jimmy Olson on that show reminds me of a grown up Potter, who puts two and two together). Grint has a silly episode in this film when he takes a “love potion” (courtesy of the potions teacher Slughorn (Jim Broadbent) and winds up in the Hogwarts infirmary (and Harry doesn’t do the CPR correctly).

The best sequence in this film is the “action” sequence toward the end, which starts with almost pure black-and-white in the underground lake with the stones and turns to fire. It turns into an exercise in film hue and saturation technique, especially digital, for its own sake. The other impressive sequence is the opening, where the City of London (complete with Trump’s and princes’ condos) is under attack from “Supernatural” black excrescence from atypical thunderheads.

There is a curious conversation where the professor (as I recall) talks about immortality, with a mechanism where stem-cell portions of people's souls get stored in common objects (like the Prince book), particularly when people have moral debts to pay. This sounds like the notion of karma, and brings the matter of morality down to the individual, regardless of the function of his community. But the "kids" at Hogwarts seem to get that.

This whole plot (which Potter fans say take liberties with the book) starts with an old book, and remember that the whole world of Harry Potter is a kind of parallel universe, with instant communication that is comparable to our Internet, but happens with magic (and animation of paintings and books). The whole world of these movies is coming to be a bit comparable to “Smallville” – if you think of Hogwarts as that special kind of place for a whole fantasy series.

The airborne quidditch scene is really effective – 3D lacrosse, with Ron (that is, Grint) as a most effective goalie, and a curious elliptical roller coaster structure surrounding them that looks like a contraption from Stephen King’s “Langoliers.”

Of course, the film has the mandatory train ride through the Scottish countryside.

The film is directed by David Yates, runs 153 minutes, and is available in Imax 3D in some theaters. The original music is by Dennis Hooper, but I thought that the quidditch dance theme was by John Williams.

Attribution link for City of London