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The woman's timing has been impeccable. Not only have the books tapped into some kind of late 20th-century zeitgeist that I suspect wouldn't have existed 30 or even 20 years ago, but the films certainly would have been unthinkable until the fairly recent advent of CGI effects. Even during the short life span of the Potter films, the CGI has improved noticeably . . . which would imply, of course, that the films have gotten better, more magical, more wonder-inducing. They have. Of course the change in directors hasn't hurt, either. After the first two lackluster entries directed by Chris Columbus, the Harry Potter movies suddenly became real cinema with the arrival of Alfonso Cuaron as director of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. Cuaron brought real talent and even (dare I say it?) a sense of poetry to the film, and left some big magical boots to fill. Chosen to replace Cuaron was veteran Mike Newell, whose past credits (Four Weddings and a Funeral, Donnie Brasco), while decent, didn't exactly mark him as either a visual poet or a Peter Jackson-ish fantasist. It was easy to expect that Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire might not live up to Cuaron's splendid visuals, lovely flights of fantasy and tense pacing. But Newell's done something even better: He's created his own film, one that works both within the Harry Potter universe and as a stand-alone example of fantasy film at its finest. If Goblet of Fire lacks some of Azkaban's sheer filmmaking bravura (it does), what Newell has brought instead is a sense of grandeur, of wide-open spaces and bigger-than-life emotions. He doesn't have just one flying animal (the glorious Buckbeak of the last film); he has an entire fleet of winged horses, drawing a baroque carriage wheeling down from an overcast sky. His Hogwart's feels (possibly for the first time in the series, although Cuaron arguably captured this as well) impossibly huge, ancient, at home in its natural setting, as if nature and magic simply must connect. And it isn't just the sets and framing of shots that seems to have become bigger—emotions are amped up, too, with more close-ups than any of the other Potter films have thus far employed. At the top of the big emotions ladder is Brendan Gleeson's 'Mad-Eye' Moody, the new paranoid, liquor-imbibing, horribly-scarred Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher, who doesn't just smirk or stare—he cackles with glee, rightfully terrifies students, and clomps furiously around Hogwart's like some particularly crazed Richard III. It's a tremendous performance, possibly the single best yet to emerge from any of the Potter films (and given the presence of both Gary Oldman and Emma Thompson, that's saying a lot). For any of you muggles who may actually not know the story yet, it centers on a Tri-Wizard Tournament being held at the Hogwart's Academy, even while there are signs that supervillain Lord Voldemort is about to make a return. Harry Potter (Daniel Radcliffe) and his friends, Ron (the newly deep-voiced Rupert Grint) and Hermione (Emma Watson, swiftly emerging as one of cinema's most gorgeous young actresses), are wrestling with turbulent adolescence, and when Harry finds himself illegally entered as a fourth champion in the Tournament, verbally sparring with classmates will soon become far less important than surviving fire-spewing dragons and tentacled mermen. The Tournament culminates in a terrifying encounter with a rejuvenated Lord Voldemort (splendidly performed by Ralph Fiennes, looking like anything but a romantic star in a creepy snake man makeup), and one character will perish. This climactic death is genuinely moving, as one actor wails in grief, and our protagonists suffer as well. The three young actors have improved throughout the series, and are now all particularly fine, with Grint offering up some outstanding comic timing. Series regulars Alan Rickman (as the oily, malicious Snape), Maggie Smith (the steadfast Professor McGonagall), and Robbie Coltrane (Hagrid the lovable half-giant) all give their usual solid performances, but a particular stand-out this time around is Michael Gambon as Dumbledore, finally gifting the pivotal Hogwart's dean and all-around father figure with the full energy and gravitas that comes across so strongly in the books. Also on hand in a small (too small!) role is the zestfully wicked Miranda Richardson as Rita Skeeter, the reporter sent to cover the Tournament who is all too willing to distort facts in favor of sensationalism. Another welcome change comes in the form of Patrick Doyle, replacing John Williams as the composer of the score. Doyle's work, of course, references Williams' themes but dispenses with Williams' bombast in favor of subtler work; combined with a rich sound mix and superb sound effects, this is probably the best of the Potter films, aurally. With Jackson's King Kong looming on the horizon (to say nothing of the highly anticipated film adaptation of The Chronicles of Narnia), it's too soon to say that Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire is this year's best fantasy film, but so far it's the frontrunner. Rowling's series may have attained their incredible success because of something very contemporary they've tapped into in the collective psyche (I suspect the same forces driving more and more of us to seek religion are—ironically—also responsible for the Harry Potter Phenomenon), but a film as entertaining and visually gorgeous as Goblet of Fire is sure to be around for a long, long time to come.
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Y'see . . . in the marrow of my inmost guts . . . I know that the Mayor in Buffy is Ronald Reagan, and that Voldemort is Margaret Thatcher. Think about the Mayor, a minute. He's wholesome. He embodies a kitschy vision of the squeaky-clean American ideal. He takes photo ops with Boy Scouts. He is the Norman Rockwell ideal of the community leader who chuckles over The Family Circus: "That little PJ! He sure is a handful!" And he is as dangerous and erratic as, say, the most powerful man in the world joking about bombing "Russia in five minutes" in front of an open mic. Or, say, a former actor living in such a terrifying world of fantasy mixed with foreign policy that he could go on British TV and praise James Bond as if he were a real person and a great symbol of the struggle for freedom for the whole world—never mind that, for the most part, the fictional Mr. Bond wasn't fighting Commies of the Evil Empire, so much as billionaire industrialist egomaniacs very much like the plutocrats who hired Unca Ronnie to be President. The Right Honorable Mayor Richard Willkins III of Sunnydale offered treats to Faith ("I'll buy you an Icee!") the way that Reagan offered jellybeans. He's a nice distillation of the Orange County power base that heralded the coming of wine coolers, the ignoring of the AIDS crises, and the bombing of Tripoli. And let's think about Voldemort, shall we? He had a long and terrible reign a few years before Harry was born. He destroyed families, which split along partisan lines. Look at the Crouch family. And while you're at it, think of the sense of entitlement of the Malfoys. Read the opening of the first Harry Potter book, that chapter, "The Boy Who Lived." When Voldemort was deposed, it was safe at last for all the wizards to come out, and in the first Harry Potter book, at least, it was pretty clear that all the wizards and witches were, for all intents and purposes, old hippies. How did Aunt Petunia think of her sister, Lilly, Harry's mum? "Mrs. Dursley pretended she didn't have a sister, because her sister and her good-for-nothing husband were as unDursleyish as possible. The Dursleys shuddered to think what the neighbors would say if the Potters arrived in the street." Sounds to me like Lilly ran off with a long-hair, followed some lay lines to Stonehenge, and was changed forever at a love-in. Groovy. Later, Uncle Vernon, respectable drill-bit salesman, notes ". . . there seemed to be a lot of strangely dressed people about. People in cloaks. Mr. Dursley couldn't bear people who dressed in funny clothes. . . ." Replace "cloaks" with "tie-dye" and the sentiment would still hold, no? I'm the same age as J. K. Rowling and Joss Whedon. In my early 20s, movies like WarGames, Special Bulletin, and The Day After reminded me that I lived only because of the largesse of a slender thread of Mutually Assured Destruction (to say nothing of more fantastic fare, like The Terminator and Dreamscape). I won't name names, but I was recently on a panel with a fellow horror writer who'd just gotten great accolades for an apocalyptic story he'd published. He mentioned growing up in the '80s, feeling helplessly certain that Reagan and Thatcher were going to destroy the world. "Every time I turned on the TV news," he said, "I saw the faces of people who were trying to kill me!" Here's a list of some of the songs I grew up listening to in the slap-happy 1980s. Google them up. You'll notice a theme: "Last Rockers" by Vice Squad; "1945" by Social Distortion; "Computers Don't Blunder" by The Exploited; "Scorched Earth" by The False Prophets; "Two Minute Warning" by Chaos UK; "Gonna Put My Face on a Nuclear Bomb" by Mojo Nixon; "Making the Bomb" by the Circle Jerks; "Launch 'em Now!" by Peter and the Test Tube Babies; "Warhead" by The UK Subs. Apocalyptic angst as pervasive as what teens and tweens in the late '70s and early '80s faced has got to boil up in what these people produce as adults. Did I like Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire? Of course. But in a very real and very screwed up way, this children's film is a work of deep catharsis for creaky oldsters such as myself. Terrible as what happens to Harry, there is something about watching a kid defend himself against the force that is trying to destroy his world and all that he loves in it that is a weird kind of wish fulfillment that goes way beyond any desire to play a similarly weird kind of rugby on a broomstick.
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