#30 - Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Pt. 1

This is kind of cool.  I'm reviewing a movie before it's been officially released in certain parts of the US, and certainly before most of the US official releases have finished showing.  This is because a number of houses (dorms) at my university pooled together and booked a 9pm 'pre-premiere' over at Navy Pier.  That is, over at Navy Pier's IMAX theater, the biggest of big screens.  Definitely how I think this movie should be seen.

Anyway, enough bragging.

As the last chapter of the Harry Potter story unfolds, our heroes are no longer heading off to the hallowed halls of Hogwarts but instead are refugees, fleeing persecution from both the dark army of Voldemort but also from the corrupt Ministry of Magic.  Aided by trusty pals Ron and Hermione, Harry's task is to find the seven Horcruxes - artifacts where Voldemort has hidden pieces of his soul so as to make himself difficult to kill - and destroy them.

I would say that Deathly Hallows suffers from the usual issues of the Harry Potter movie series - it's uncertain as to what sort of movie it's trying to be.  I think there's a great deal of pressure to include the most well-loved parts of the books, or to somehow summarize the books, and what results is what our friends at TV Tropes call 'mood whiplash'.  One moment there are massive car wrecks and spells flying left and right, the next we roll our eyes as the three teenaged stars turn up the romance/angst/drama level.   Furthermore, are we watching a children's movie about magical wizards, where heavy-handed acting is par for the course?  Or is this a very serious Issue Movie, as the constant barrage of Nazi symbolism seems to be trying to pound into our heads?  Even at a 146 minute runtime there isn't room for it to be all of these things at once.

But do note that when it succeeds, it succeeds.  Helena Bonham-Carter finally proves that her Bellatrix Lestrange is not just a 'wacky' gothed-out cartoon but a seriously deranged and actually frightening nemesis.  The movie's climax is just as emotionally hard-hitting as it should be.  The characters do sometimes break out of their cardboard packaging and show some real humanity.  The action sequences are a visual delight, and the expansive wide-angle shots of the gorgeous British landscapes through which our heroes travel in search of the Horcruxes.  So even if Hallows may not hold up under a detailed analysis, it is an enjoyable experience from within the moment of its viewing, and did an excellent job of getting me antsy for Part 2.

#29 - Dog Sweat

Today we travel to smoggy Tehran, Iran, where director Hossein Keshavarz covertly filmed without a license in order to place Dog Sweat in front of its true backdrop.  The film follows five stories which connect at various points: a singer who sneaks out of her house to illegally record pop music, a gay man facing the pressures of a hostile and prejudiced environment, a girl carrying out an affair with her cousin's husband, a young couple trying to escape the boredom of their regimented lifestyle, and a young man - with a craving for the bootleg liquor that gives the film its title - who is finding himself increasingly frustrated at the Iranian government's inability to keep its citizens from falling through the cracks.

We seem to have a theme this week: Dog Sweat, like Let the Right One In, is a film about what happens to the people who don't fit into their society's mold.  Without the supernatural elements of Let the Right One In, Dog Sweat is real in such a way that it is brutal.  It is quiet, not flashy, filmed almost like a home movie, rarely overt and as such doesn't call attention to itself, leaving room for its scathing commentary on the Iranian situation.  It isn't really a politically charged film and in fact tends to leave viewers to make their own conclusions, which I appreciated.

Its simplistic style doesn't always work in its favor; certain scenes seem randomly inserted and unnecessary - perhaps Keshavarz was simply going for verisimilitude, but real life doesn't always make good cinema.  I am still trying to decide whether the fact that I constantly fluctuated between sympathizing with and disliking its characters was a good point (neutrality) or a bad point (not always fleshing out the characters enough to make them understandable).  I am certain though that the film's silence - there's rarely any music or background sound except when very specifically relevant to the plot - was intended to be jarring, so even though at times Dog Sweat is hard to watch, I wouldn't call this a criticism.  It's something I wouldn't watch again; it's far too emotional, but it definitely drew me into its world and made me think about the complicated issues it portrays.