Word: potters
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...children of Harry Potter - the readers of his books, the viewers of his movies - are growing up with him. Many, perhaps millions of them were six or eight when the first wallop of Harrymania struck the U.S. in the summer of 1999. They are tweeners or a little older now, within cracking-voice shouting distance of the young wizard?s 16 years - in the sixth book, The Half-Blood Prince, published this summer - or 14 years, his age in the new movie version of the fourth installment, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire...
...Potter sagas proceed through the canon, they have turned darker, more fraught; and the older, wiser kids can sense the difference like a sepulchral chill in their bones. They know the change is not from a child?s reality to a adolescent?s nightmares, but from daydreams to the convulsive world of adolescence. Maturity is realizing that the thing we fear most is not what haunts us in our sleep, but what we awake...
...Everybody reading this is familiar with the outlines of the Goblet plot - Hogwarts? hosting of a Tri-Wizard Tournament, in which Harry is mysteriously chosen as a fourth contestant - so we?ll cut quickly through the maze and say that this is the first Potter film to improve on the book...
...Columbus helmed the first two Potter chapters, and Alfonso Cuaron did wonders with Book Three, The Prisoner of Azkaban. This time, Producer John Heyman and screenwriter Steve Kloves, who have worked on the whole series, handed the job to Mike Newell, a Brit who has directed a few good, tense melodramas (Dance With a Stranger, Donnie Brasco) and some engaging sentimental fare (Enchanted April, Four Weddings and a Funeral), as well as the ninth-worst movie ever made (his last one, Mona Lisa Smile...
...What does a new director do on a sustained enterprise like the Potter films (or the James Bonds)? My guess is that, while the series? more or less permanent team keeps the furniture moving, so to speak, the man-for-hire attends to the film?s pace and the care and feeding of the actors. Newell did an exemplary job here, encouraging and eliciting a community of performance...