Word: rickman
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...potions as relationships foment between Ron and Hermione as well as Harry and Ginny. The acting in “Half-Blood Prince” is at its series peak. Although greatness can be expected from the giants of British acting that appear throughout the film—Alan Rickman as Snape, Michael Gambon as Dumbledore, Helena Bohman Carter as Bellatrix Lestrange, among others—the most surprising depth is seen in the younger actors, especially Watson and Tom Felton, who plays Draco. The inner turmoil caused by his burdensome task allows Felton to express a broader range...
...guardians of youth. They're not all suited to the job; some are foolish, some sinister. The new teacher, Horace Slughorn (Jim Broadbent), runs a salon for his pet students. An incorrigible name-dropper, he "collects" children whose talent or connections might bring him glory. The resentful Snape (Alan Rickman, effortlessly oily), whose motives have been murky but whom Dumbledore continues to trust, becomes Draco's surrogate dad: snake for snake...
...amputates his thumb. Meanwhile, a voiceover declares, “Good and bad are not so absolute.” What follows for the next two hours is little more than an exercise in human depravity. The film centers on the various members of the Michaelson family. Eli (Alan Rickman) is the cantankerous patriarch, and a Nobel-prize winning chemist; his wife Sarah (Mary Steenburgen) is a long-suffering forensic psychiatrist who has accepted her husband’s wandering eye. Their struggling son, Barkley (Bryan Greenberg), is an immature graduate student still recovering from a recent divorce. When Barkley...
This much of the story is true: In 1976, an English wine merchant named Steven Spurrier (Alan Rickman), operating out of a small shop in Paris, is consistently snubbed by the insular and snooty French oenophile establishment. So he sets out to prove that offerings from other countries, which he unsuccessfully stocks, can equal those of the previously unchallenged French vintages. This leads him to California's Napa Valley, where he seeks wines that might fare well in a blind tasting he plans to stage in France. There he finds, among other good wines, a Chardonnay bottled by cranky...
...wine business that almost immediately followed was probably a nice breath of fresh air in what had been a tightly sealed cellar. But still, the lack of authentic surprise and eccentricity in the story and its characters, the sense that everyone concerned with the picture (possibly excepting Rickman, who projects an unwelcoming sullenness that may not be funny but is at least weirdly human) is eagerly looking for the easy way out, is mildly dismaying. I'm sure that by this time some reviewer has applied the word "Capraesque" to Bottle Shock. If I were one of its makers...