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Review: "Harry Potter and Deathly Hallows: Part 2"

Harry Potter's epic journey ends with power and majesty. For 10 years and seven previous films, we've waded through oceans of exposition and endured ever-burgeoning layers of new characters and mythology to absorb. All building to: This.

"Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2" does not disappoint. It is easily the best film of the series, mainly because we no longer feel the filmmakers stringing us along to set up yet another movie. People die, many of them central characters, and the audience recognizes the finality of these events.

In the final showdown with the evil Lord Voldemort (Ralph Fiennes, in still-creepy bone-white makeup) there are several sequences that will last with me.

A terrifying chase through a maze with serpents of fire in pursuit. An assault on Hogwarts School by an army of Voldemort's Death Eaters, complete with lumbering trolls and wraith-like Dementors, that approaches the battles of the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy. A sad but illuminating journey through the mind of Severus Snape (Alan Rickman), the Hogwarts professor of shifting loyalties.

And, of course, Harry's final toe-to-toe magical battle with Voldemort. Daniel Radcliffe has grown so much in this role, and he brings it all together in this last movie, showing us the character's bravery and contradictions, his rage and grief. The Harry Potter of "Deathly Hallows" is no longer a young boy excited by magic, but has turned out much like LoTR's Frodo, aged before his time and regretful of the events in which he's been chosen by fate to play a pivotal role.

There's also an element we haven't seen out of Voldemort before -- fear. Early in the story he realizes that Harry, Hermione (Emma Watson) and Ron (Rupert Grint) have stumbled upon the secret to his forbidding dark power. By splitting his soul into hidden objects called Horcruxes, he's given them a chance to destroy him.

For those like me who have not read the series of books by J.K. Rowling, it can be a little difficult at times to keep up with the spinning narrative. At one point Harry pulls out some little golden doohickey that acquired somewhere in his travels, which I could summon no memory of. And then the thing it contains, which we had been told was the secret to Voldemort's downfall, ends up playing no role in their confrontation.

Contrastingly, diehard fans may complain about the film not containing every morsel of detail from the books. Such a thing is impossible -- even when director Peter Yates and screenwriter Steve Kloves split the last book into two movies.

In that sense, this final film may be more satisfying to those who are innocent of Rowling's novels than the untold millions who have voraciously consumed them.

("Part 2" is being released in 3-D, and a more worthless and distracting use of that technology I have never seen. It adds little depth to the action, and dims the movie unnecessarily.

3.5 stars out of four

Review: "A Better Life"

"Let's go home."

With those words -- spoken at the very of the end of the film -- director Chris Weitz ("About a Boy") and screenwriter Eric Eason establish the underlying theme of their stark, sobering new drama, "A Better Life." It's about a gardener living in Los Angeles, trying to move up the economic ladder so he can send his teenage son to a better school away from the gangs and urban grime. A familiar American saga.

One problem: He's an illegal immigrant, and must spend his life struggling in the shadows.

This film is not a pro-open borders diatribe. Weitz and Eason use the immigration issue not as cheap agitprop but as the backdrop for a deep and truly moving human story about people caught in a web of screwy public policy and arbitrary enforcement.

Make no mistake, though: The cumulative effect of this story serves to bolster the view that people like this man are part of our national fabric, and deserve to stay here and thrive if they can.

Demián Bichir gives an amazing, Oscar-worthy performance as Carlos Galindo, a simple Mexican man who has been living in the U.S. for about 15 years. He speaks fluent English, works from dawn to dusk, and worries constantly about his son Luis (José Julián, in an astonishing film debut). His wife left long ago.

Carlos is faced with a dilemma, and an opportunity. His boss Blasco (Joaquín Cosio) has made enough money to return to Mexico and buy a ranch, and wants to sell his truck and business to Carlos. Carlos resists -- he likes things just as they are. He and Luis have a tiny house (Carlos sleeps on the couch), a tidy garden and steady if meager income. In a word: Stability.

But he cobbles together the money, borrowing a chunk from his sister, who married an American and got her green card. The moment when he drives the well-worn truck to meet Luis at his school and announces that he now owns it is a seminal one in their relationship. Luis is at that stage in teen life where his father is something to be ashamed of, and the glimmer of hope and respect in the boy's eyes is like gold to Carlos.

The next day, Carlos drives his truck to the corner of a local garden store where migrant workers loiter looking for work: He needs a helper. The beaming look on his face as eager men crowd into his window tells all you need to know: Six years earlier, it was Carlos waiting in this very spot to be picked by Blasco. He chooses a kind-faced fellow he previously met, and they begin trimming bushes, mowing lawns, etc.

In a year, Carlos figures, the debt on the truck will be paid off, he and Luis can move to a nicer home with a better school, and perhaps he can even afford to take weekends off to spend time with his son.
Disaster strikes when his helper steals the truck, and with it all of Carlos' hopes and dreams.

He and the boy begin searching desperately for the truck, traveling all over the city in a long sequence that deliberately recalls the great Italian film, "The Bicycle Thief." Here is another working-class man whose entire existence hinges on regaining possession of a mode of transport.

The added twist is that Carlos has nowhere to turn for help from the authorities. There's a pivotal scene right after the truck is stolen where he looks around desperately for a policeman, but after finding one realizes he cannot report the theft.

Through this journey, a man and son reach a breaking point in their small family, and threats from gangs and immigration authorities loom constantly. "A Better Life" is a harrowing epic writ small, a vision of our country's promise and failings.

Carlos Galindo personifies the American Dream, as it actually is rather than how we would like it to be. This is one of the best films of the year.

3.5 stars out of four

Video review: "Rango"

I can't think of a movie I had more fun at so far in 2011 than "Rango," a loopy, occasionally psychedelic animated flick starring Johnny Depp as a bug-eyed lizard. A domesticated pet who lives in a terrarium and invents companions and theatrical productions to amuse himself, he's literally a chameleon, and not just when it comes to the shade of his pebbly skin.

He ends up lost in the Mojave and stumbles into the town of Dirt, populated by every manner of desert critter imaginable. Things are tough in Dirt -- there's a gang of tunneling thieves waiting on the edge of town, a local crime boss looking for newcomers to squish, and the rumor of a slithery gunslinger named Rattlesnake Jake heading back their way.

Through a combination of wild circumstance and his own even more far-fetched boasting, the lizard finds himself appointed sheriff of Dirt, dubbing himself Rango to better suit his new role. Of course, there are all those aforementioned troubles that he's now expected to tackle.

Although kids will surely enjoy it, "Rango" is really a cartoon for adults, stuffed with highbrow humor and sly pop culture references.

Please note, "Rango" hits video outlets on Friday, July 15.

Video features are quite impressive, and you don't have to spring for the top-of-the-line edition to get good stuff.

The DVD version includes both the theatrical version of "Rango" plus an extended cut. To accompany both versions is a feature-length commentary track by director Gore Verbinski and several of his key crew members. There's also a collection of 10 deleted scenes, including an alternate ending, and an educational short about desert animals.

Opt for the Blu-ray/DVD combo pack and you add a number of other goodies, including a digital copy of the film. There's also a virtual tour of Dirt, a doc about this first foray into feature-length animation by Industrial Light & Magic, and a picture-in-picture feature where you can watch the movie in storyboard form.

Movie: 3.5 stars out of four
Extras: 3.5 stars out of four

Review: "Horrible Bosses"

"Horrible Bosses" had me, and then it lost me, and then it got me back again. This often clever, sporadically vexing comedy takes the premise of Alfred Hitchcock's "Strangers on a Train" and turns it into a horny goofball affair. Not that that's necessarily a bad thing.

Jason Bateman, Jason Sudeikis and Charlie Day play three working stiffs who each have what the title says they have. They resolve to kill their evil bosses, with each doing another's boss to throw off suspicion.

Of course, because they're angsty modern men rather than calculating killers, they mess the whole thing up and get into a bunch of comedic scrapes -- or one big one, depending on how you count it.

I enjoyed the set-ups as we meet the bosses, learn the trio's personalities and how they mesh. The section where they slowly come around to the idea of offing their supervisors, try to find a hit man and ultimately resolve to do the deed themselves isn't very funny, and seemed to go on and on.

Director Seth Gordon and his trio of screenwriters needed to give this script another wash or two.

But once the movie hit its stride during one long night of hi jinks, it's a decent enough laugh-fest to garner it a marginal letter of recommendation.

Bateman, the rare child star who turned into a fine adult actor, has a very specific sense of comic timing. He usually plays variations on the same character -- the precise, easily perturbed and slightly anal-retentive nice guy who is vexed by the vagaries of others. In this case it's Dave Harken, played by Kevin Spacey riffing on his "Swimming with Sharks" character. Bateman plays Nick, who's been busting his hump for eight years to land a promotion ... one guess if he gets it.

The archenemy of Kurt (Sudeikis) is his boss' son, a coke-head with a horrid comb-over played by Colin Farrell. When the old man bites it, the son is put in charge and demands that people be fired to squeeze more profits out of the company to fuel his partying. Sounds like some newspaper executives I know.

Most people would not acknowledge Dale's (Day) problem as a real dilemma. A recently engaged dental technician, Dale is being sexually harassed by his dentist, Julia, improbably played by Jennifer Aniston. Julia's favorite trick is to knock her patients out with gas and then try to grope her subordinate.

My problem with these bosses is that they're all cartoons. They do not exist anywhere outside a Hollywood screenplay. Take Aniston's Julia. She could have any man she desired, so why would she pick on the short, hirsute and excitable Dale? It's like she has a hobbit fetish or something.

Farrell's character, Bobby, has the potential to be the most interesting, with his complete lack of empathy for fellow humans and a house crammed full of pinball machines and paintings of himself. ("A douche bag museum," Nick dubs it.) Unfortunately, the movie spends the least amount of time with him, so don't get to know him well enough to truly hate him.

Spacey's a treat playing nasty, since he does it so well. Jamie Foxx turns up as a heavily tattooed con with a colorful name.

"Horrible Bosses" isn't horrid, and sometimes it feels like punching a clock. But there's more good than tedious, and having to watch it didn't make me hate my job.

2.5 stars out of four

Video review: "Of Gods and Men"

"Of Gods and Men" is a loving tribute to Trappist monks living in isolation in the largely Muslim nation of Algeria in the 1990s. It's based on a true story, and is a tale of tragedy and bravery, of men who put their faith and devotion to their fellow humans ahead of their own well-being -- even their very lives.

It is also, truth be told, exceedingly dull at times.

Director Xavier Beauvois, who also co-wrote the film that won the Grand Prix at Cannes Film Festival, patiently follows these holy men on the quotidian tasks of their daily lives -- praying, singing, tending gardens, cleaning kitchen pots, etc.

I'm guessing his idea was to immerse the audience in the existence of the monks, both their deep spiritual thoughts as well as their petty conflicts and drab chores, so as to better identify with them. Perhaps I'm shallow, but mostly it convinced me that the life of a Trappist monk is dreadfully boring.

When the film focuses on the fateful choice the monks have to make after Islamic extremists threaten Westerners in the area, "Of Gods and Men" hits a powerful chord. It's a shame they didn't make a shorter, more intense movie that focused on their dilemma rather than their daily life.

An interesting note on this video release: As near as I can determine, "Of Gods and Men" is only being issued as a Blu-ray or a Blu-ray/DVD combo pack -- no standalone DVD version available. I believe that's the first major film release with which I've seen that.

The combo pack comes with only two extras. The first is "The Sacrificed Tibéhirine: Further Investigation," an 18-minute documentary looking at the real case of the murdered priests, and revisiting the actual monastery where they lived. The other is "Merrimack College Augustine Dialogue IX with author John W. Kiser," a 41-minute religious-themed chat with the author of a book about the Tibéhirine monks.

Movie: 2 stars out of four
Extras: 2.5 stars

Reeling Backward: "Sid and Nancy" (1986)

"Sid and Nancy" is a film about repulsion. It's the story of the punk rock movement, which embraced nihilism with a swagger and a sneer, or at least it did in its early days with the Sex Pistols and the rest. Soon The Police were singing ballads and Billy Idol came along to give it a slick MTV veneer, and punk was co-opted and commoditized like a thousand rebellions that came before.

Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen were not sell-outs. Maybe if they'd lived long enough, they would have embraced being part of regular society instead of spurning it. But they died young, after Nancy was stabbed to death -- mostly likely by Sid -- and he overdosed on heroin in 1979 before his trial for her murder.

The interesting thing about modern pop culture, say since 1955, is how people embrace those who spit on social norms. Rebellion became cool, which is how Sid Vicious and the Sex Pistol could become icons despite their obvious disdain for those who listened to their music and showed up to their concerts.

Even by the Sex Pistols' standards, Sid (Gary Oldman, in his breakout role) was out there. Ostensibly he was their bass player, but even his band mates acknowledged he was a terrible musician who might as well have been playing a different song. When not on stage he was usually drunk or high ... and often on the stage, too. He cut himself with razors and got into fights just for the pleasure of the violence.

Johnny Rotten, the anarchic but calculating frontman for the Pistols played by Andrew Schofield, sums it up by calling Sid "a fabulous disaster."

The film was directed and co-written (with Abbe Wool) by Alex Cox, who had a brief heyday with this film and "Repo Man," and then disappeared deep into low-budget indie obscurity. He approaches the material with energy and wit, though the film doesn't have as much emotional punch as it should.

This is, after all, the story of two people who threw their lives away on drugs and what today we would call co-dependency. Sid and Nancy were in love, or at least what they conceived of as love, but they were too enamored with the rush of heroin and other hard drugs to have much empathy for anyone but themselves. In the film's depiction, Nancy broke up the Sex Pistols because she pulled Sid out of their orbit and into hers.

Something I don't think the movie sufficiently touches on is just how young Nancy and Sid where. They projected a world-weary cool, but they were naifs: Sid was just 21 when he died, and Nancy was a mere 20. Most people that age are considered a smashing success if they've managed to move out of their parents' house -- these two sought to bring the world to its knees when they were still teenagers.

Both Oldman and Webb were around 30 when the movie was made, and those few years make all the difference in terms of capturing the wild, noxious innocence of youthful rebellion. Ironically, if Cox had cast actors who were the appropriate age, they probably couldn't have pulled off the performances.

Oldman lost a lot of weight to play the role, and in one scene where we see Sid and Nancy walking away from the camera, we can see that he's actually thinner than Webb -- who was borderline scary-skinny herself.

Webb is an abrasive presence as Nancy -- so off-putting, in fact, that we wonder what in the world Sid ever saw in her. In my experience people who get into relationships with someone who's openly abusive to them do so because their self-worth is so low: They think they don't deserve any better. Since Sid arrives at the beginning of the movie fully formed, we don't grasp why he was attracted to her, since she so obviously sought only to glom onto somebody -- anybody, really -- who was famous.

Oldman and Webb nail the surface of these people, but we never get inside their hearts and heads. Their characters remain a spectacle, to be amazed at and pitied, but never understood.

Much of the attention about Vicious and Spungen, and by extension this film, centered on the circumstances of her death. But I found that the least interesting thing about the movie. If Sid hadn't knifed her in a haze of drug-induced fighting, then she was already set on the path leading to a similar demise.

Sid's was just the final one of the proverbial thousand cuts.

The film's crowning achievement is depicting the soul-sucking toll that drugs take on the talented and the naive. It's notable that Cox doesn't depict Sid and Nancy actually shooting up until near the end of the film; the lateness serves to underline just how exacting heroin addiction is, since its abusers end up becoming amateur physicians with an encyclopedic knowledge of a wide range of pharmacological effects.

In the beginning, junkies take drugs because they think it intensifies their personality. Later, when they're hooked, they find they need that razor's edge all the time, despite the fact it becomes harder to reach and maintain. Eventually, drugs replace the people they were, and they turn into mere vessels to an all-consuming craving. They become their addiction.

Heroin didn't just kill Sid and Nancy's romance; it overwhelmed and consumed it.

"Sid and Nancy" is an often engrossing tale of human degradation substituting for love. What a horrifying trade to make.

3 stars out of four