Review- Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 and The Big Picture

It’s clear that there are two kinds of people in the world. There are the people who get Harry Potter (not just get but devour, savour, rel­ish) and then there’s, you know, me.

Over the last six years I have dog­gedly tried to review the HP fran­chise as if it was cinema, as if there might be view­ers temp­ted along who hadn’t been exposed to the books and who might reas­on­ably be expect­ing to watch a film that stands on its own two feet.

Well, to coin a phrase, “it all ends” now. I give up. With Harry Potter, you can’t divorce your response from your expect­a­tions. If you loved the books it would appear that you love the films and the less atten­tion the film­makers pay to unbe­liev­ers like me the bet­ter you like it.

It’s irrel­ev­ant wheth­er the three kids can act or not when to all intents and pur­poses, after eight films, they are Harry, Hermione and Ron. It’s mean­ing­less to try and explain how greats like Rickman, Gambon and Broadbent are basic­ally phoning their per­form­ances in when their con­tin­ued pres­ence adds a pat­ina of Masterpiece Theatre qual­ity to the pro­ceed­ings. And it’s point­less to knock the lame storytelling when it is doing a respect­able job of hon­our­ing the make-it-up-as-you-go-along inten­tions of the author.

So, I real­ise that I’m not going to influ­ence any­one here about Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 and I won’t try. Head along if you must, leave your credu­lity at home, enjoy and then bring your taste back in time for the Film Festival.

One final thought: For some colossally stu­pid reas­on Event Cinemas decided to intro­duce their HP screen­ings with a short behind-the-scenes video and a wel­come (to “all of you in Australia”) from a sweaty look­ing Daniel Radcliffe. How unbe­liev­ably rude! No only did it add anoth­er ten minutes to the already excess­ive run­ning time but it showed Ralph Fiennes’ Voldemort before his digit­al nose-removal. For a film that’s about magic to have the exhib­it­or (pre­sum­ably with the film­makers’ agree­ment) wreck the movie magic we were there to exper­i­ence is simply unforgivable.

Meanwhile, back in the real-ish world, Eric Lartigau’s French thrill­er The Big Picture is cap­able enough provided you don’t exam­ine the creaky plot too closely. The ori­gin­al French title trans­lates (accord­ing to Google) as “The man who wanted to live his life” which is less of a cliché but prob­ably gives too much away.

Romain Duris plays hot­shot law­yer Paul whose seem­ingly per­fect life is about to fall apart in spec­tac­u­lar fash­ion. Firstly he dis­cov­ers his wife is hav­ing an affair with their neigh­bour who he then (acci­dent­ally) kills. This pro­vokes a kind of pro­found real­isa­tion. In order to save his fam­ily he must dis­ap­pear – he takes on the iden­tity of his deceased ant­ag­on­ist and heads to Hungary – but he needs to rein­vent him­self to save his own soul too.

Underneath the thrill­er trap­pings, then, we have that com­mon theme in French movies: that the bour­geois, intel­lec­tu­al, mater­i­al­ist­ic exist­ence is some­how inau­thent­ic. In order to live a truly sin­cere life you have to shrug all that stuff off and live in the coun­try like a peas­ant. Duris fol­lows his child­hood dream to become a pho­to­graph­er but (even small town Hungarian) suc­cess gets him atten­tion – atten­tion he can­not survive.

The Big Picture was spoiled a little by prob­lems with its own pic­ture – the image was as pixel­lated as a YouTube video at the screen­ing I went to. I won’t cri­ti­cise the usu­ally high qual­ity Roxy present­a­tion as I’m sure the very same digit­al file is play­ing at all the oth­er cinemas in town. It’s just that digit­al present­a­tion has come on so well in recent months that when it falls short of accept­able (i.e. $16 a tick­et) stand­ards the sur­prise and dis­ap­point­ment is all the greater.

Printed in Wellington’s Capital Times on Wednesday 20 July, 2011.