This Christmas will bring us a new Coen brothers’ movie . . . always a welcome gift at anytime of the year.  This time it is a retelling of True Grit, written and directed by the brothers.  Click here to see the new trailer for the film, and note the use of Johnny Cash’s cover of “God’s Gonna Cut You Down.”  Can’t wait to see this movie.

This installment of the Harry Potter films (the 6th of 8 films, with the last book being made into two movies) may very well end up being my favorite.  In any case, it is at least as good as Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004), which was directed by Alfonso Cuarón, and which had been my favorite adaption up till now.

David Yates, who also directed The Goblet of Fire, does a wonderful job of telling this tale.  The movie is filmed beautifully, and the young actors (Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson, and Rupert Gant) who have starred in all six films, keep getting better and better. They have developed a chemistry with one another that is obvious on screen.  Alan Rickman and Michael Gambon, as Snape and Dumbledore, are also especially good in this movie, as is Tom Felton, who plays the tortured Draco Malfoy.

Two things stand out for me in this film.  The first is it’s emphasis on the romantic lives of the young leads, and the angst and humor that this emphasis brings with it to the film.  Second, the relationship between Harry and Dumbledore is plumped to new depths and is a fascinating study of mentoring/discipleship.

One of the best reviews I have read of this film comes from salon.com’s Stephanie Zacharek.  I encourage you to read the whole review here, but two quotes from her review follow, as does a video interview with her.  I give the movie 9 out of 10 dancing fish.

Hollywood’s maniacal drive to give us increasingly bigger, allegedly better special effects. But "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince" — the sixth installment in the series of movies based on J.K. Rowling’s roaringly popular novels — suggests a less flashy and far more rewarding strategy: What we really need aren’t bigger special effects but more magical ones — and having a story worth telling should always be the foundation. The effects in "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince" are so believable they seem more naturalistic than special; they’re situated so perfectly in their imagined universe that we have no trouble believing in their authenticity.

Rowling’s Harry Potter novels begin as children’s books and gracefully evolve into young-adult fiction, and it’s in "The Half-Blood Prince" that the suffering and frustration of adolescence really begin to emerge with great clarity. Yates contrasts those small moments of terror with bigger ones: One of the most unnerving sequences features an image borrowed directly from J-horror. But Yates is attuned to all kinds of emotional pain, and his youthful actors — who have become both stronger and more relaxed as performers with each successive movie — are right in step with him. In one scene, Hermione suffers as she watches Ron willingly cuddle up to Lavender. She’s conjured a circle of swirling little birds — as she tells Harry, in whom she tentatively confides her heartbreak, they’re the result of a charm spell she’s practicing. When Ron clumsily fails to grasp that he’s hurt her, she sends the birds hurtling toward his head — they narrowly miss his head and shatter in a mist of feathers on the wall behind him, tiny, floating remnants of her fury and pain. Yates also guides his actors through a scene of astonishing erotic beauty, an encounter between two characters that’s more tender than it is overly sexualized. The moment takes place amid a jumble of old, magical artifacts: Romantic love, as an idea, may technically be very old, but it’s the young who keep it new by continually breathing life into it.

Cover of The Road

“The Road,” based on Cormac McCarthy’s bleak post-apocalyptic novel of the same name, is one film that I am looking forward to see this year.  Starring Viggo Mortensen, Guy Pearce, Robert Duvall and Charlize Theron and directed by John Hillcoat, this film has been on my radar since I first heard it was being made.  “The Road” was the first McCarthy novel I read, and I was stuck by the sparse narrative and dark tone of the book.

At the time of my reading it, I could easily envision it being made into a film, but I was afraid that whoever did so would be tempted to add unnecessarily to book.  I was hoping for a more faithful adaptation, in line with what the Coen brothers did with “No Country for Old Men,” one of the best films from 2007. At first, the trailer below, would seem to support my fears rather than my hopes.  As Elisabeth Rappe at Cinematical writes:

The mysterious disaster is made explicit, Charlize Theron is given a lot more screen time than the wife ever had in the book, and the action is upped ten times over.

But perhaps all is not lost. Rappe goes on to state:

However, this trailer has caused a lot of controversy already with people who have seen the film. Esquire just published a review this week, and noted that the Weinstein Company was falling prey to the temptation to cut a trailer that looked like a post-apocalyptic action movie. According to Esquire, John Hillcoat’s film is (and other reviews have borne this out) as quiet, harrowing, and bleak as the novel is, and may just be “the most important film of the year”.

Here’s hoping that Esquire is right.  In any case, I am sure I will be in line to see this movie when it premieres later this year in October.

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