Harry's Return of the King?

For most people, the word "consider" means ... well, exactly what you think it means.

For Hollywood types, it connotes something very specific: an Oscar campaign in full swing.

Which is why Los Angeles is the only town where there could be billboards all over the city, featuring grandiose stills from Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 and the word CONSIDER in big letters, and there would be no explanation necessary about what was going on.

Simply put, the push is on by Warner Brothers to get the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to recognize the final installment in the Harry Potter saga, the same way they recognized the final installment in the Lord of the Rings trilogy eight years ago.

And I guess they might have a shot.

On the surface, it would seem like an uphill battle. There are a number of important differences between Potter and Rings. For starters, Rings featured three films released in consecutive years from the same director, which were filmed concurrently, so they benefited from the same look. What's more, each of the previous two films was nominated for best picture before Return of the King finally took home the statue.

With Potter, there had been seven previous films over the course of a decade, none of which have been nominated for best picture. (Neither have there been any acting nominations, and overall, not as many technical nominations as you might think.) What's more, these movies represented the creative vision of four different directors, whose approaches sometimes differ sharply from one another. (And whose backgrounds in film are quite different as well.) It's not so easy to re-frame the Potter movies as one holistic viewing experience that maintained a consistent tone and quality from start to finish.

But Deathly Hallows Part 2 does have certain things going for it. For one, 2011 has yet to produce an obvious front-runner for best picture. I'd say The Descendants probably has the best shot right now, but it doesn't have nearly the heat other front-runners have enjoyed at this point in the campaign. (Of course, being the front-runner in early December doesn't usually work out well. Just ask The Social Network.)

Before it would have the chance to vie for top honors, the film would have to first get nominated -- a feat none of its predecessors has accomplished. Here too there is some hope. Most of those predecessors didn't have the advantage of a field of possibly as many as ten nominated pictures. Given the love Part 2 has gotten, it shouldn't seem like a stretch that it would finally score the series' first nomination. However, cancel some of this advantage because of the change in rules this year, which will allow as few as five films to get nominated if only that many films get a certain minimum percentage of first-place votes from Academy voters.

The thing that's noteworthy about this push by Warner Brothers is that a typical CONSIDER campaign is found in the pages of trade magazines, not on billboards around the city. If you were not previously familiar with the indelicate machinations involved in getting an Oscar nomination, you may remember that Melissa Leo was widely chastised last year for funding her own crass yet ultimately successful CONSIDER campaign for best supporting actress, which was a full-page glamor shot of her wearing some kind of animal fur. (Her awful acceptance speech at the Oscars only compounded the sense of tackiness that started in that campaign.)

So taking the campaign beyond the insiderish world of industry types and bringing it to the masses could indicate two things: 1) A skepticism that people are reading the trades as much as they used to, and B) A sense that this year's best picture statue really is there for the taking.

It could also represent a growing acknowledgment of the power to create buzz that's now in the hands of everyday citizens. With the ways people can reach each other through Twitter, Facebook and the blogosphere, maybe your average citizen really does have the ability to influence the way industry people fill out their Oscar ballots. It's all one powerful interwoven force known as "hype."

Well, we'll know if all the money Warner Brothers is spending was a success on January 24th, when the nominees are announced, and then again on February 26th, when some movie will take home that coveted statue.

Only with a victory on that second night will Warner Brothers "consider" its mission accomplished.

I made it

WARNING!

WARNING!

WARNING!

The following post contains major spoilers about Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2! Read at your own risk! (But mostly about the story, not the movie itself.)

Over two years and four months ago, I wrote a blog post discussing my amazement at the fact that the end of the Harry Potter series had yet to be spoiled for me. The film of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince had not even been released yet, so I still had a ways to go.

Well, I did it. I made it through to the end. I walked into the theater on Saturday afternoon, for the 1 p.m. IMAX 3D show of The Deathly Hallows Part 2, and I still did not know whether Harry Potter would live or die at the end. (As it turns out, he sort of did both.)

Miraculous.

It's just amazing that in this day and age, I would be able to go so long without having such a big secret spoiled to me. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the novel, was released four years ago this Thursday, meaning that J.K. Rowling's series of seven books had the same decade-long span (1997 to 2007) that the eight films had (2001 to 2011). The world has known for almost four years whether Harry would live or die.

I have only known for two days.

So thanks to everyone who helped make this possible by keeping your traps shut. You are a credit to your species.

Now that I've learned the secret, however, I guess I have a better idea why I never learned it before. Namely, the thing most likely to happen actually happened: Harry beats Voldemort in the end, and no other really major characters die. Yes, Snape dies, but you could sort of see that coming. And Bellatrix LeStrange dies, but duh, she's one of the main villains. I already knew that Dumbledore dies -- I allowed my wife to reveal it to me after she finished reading the book -- but that happens at the end of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. So the series does not end with any really major surprises. If Harry had died in the process of killing Voldemort (the only way he could die, because there was never any way Voldemort would win), I probably would have found out. But the big surprise, really, was that there was no surprise.

Okay, I take that back. As I was watching on Saturday, I didn't know the true dimensions of how Harry was connected to Voldemort, that he had a horcrux embedded inside him that contained part of Voldemort's soul. And that both Dumbledore and Snape knew about this, and that perhaps Dumbledore had been manipulating Harry all his life. Well well. I was chilled by the revelation.

Then again, I didn't even really know what a horcrux was as recently as Friday night -- I had to ask my wife about it when we were watching Part 1. And that gives you an idea of how sketchy my understanding of the whole Harry Potter mythology has been. I've watched all the movies, the first four in the theater, followed by three on video before returning to the theater for the grand finale. But the saga has dragged and plodded for much of the time, as I felt like there was a lot of killing time to get to the "good stuff" -- stuff we've finally been seeing in the last movie or two.

For example, as I sit here now, I could not tell you what the significance was of the sorcerer's stone, what was hidden in the chamber of secrets, who drank from the goblet of fire, what the order of the phoenix was, or who the half-blood prince was. I know that Sirius Black was the prisoner of Azkaban, mostly because that movie was head and shoulders above the others. And I know what the deathly hallows are, mostly because I've just seen those two movies.

So "I made it" has a secondary meaning as well. I mean that I made it to the end, all eight movies, to finally get my reward.

And what a reward it was.

I absolutely loved Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2. Where I thought the other movies continually introduced characters and subplots of questionable relevance, and I never remembered what happened from movie to movie, the final part felt streamlined and accessible. Not only that, but when it goes big, it goes BIG. The movie has easily some of the best action set pieces of the series -- love the entire Gringott's break-in -- and the epic final battle at Hogwart's does not disappoint. And part of the reason I felt so enthralled to see the good Hogwart's instructors fighting the bad was because it was an end to all the gentility and politics that had consumed many of the previous installments. The cards were finally on the table -- now it was time to just shut up and fight it out.

I think I loved this movie as much as I did, in part, because it reminded me of a Lord of the Rings movie more than any of its predecessors. But also because it reminded me of the best Star Wars prequel, Revenge of the Sith. Why Revenge of the Sith? Because in Deathly Hallows, something finally happens. A part of the plot you've long been anticipating has finally arrived.

And that's what's really interesting about the Harry Potter series, taken just as movies. There's a whole lot of nothing going on for most of the series. Dress it up however you like, but in retrospect, it kind of looks like a TV series where they didn't figure out what their endgame was until season five of an eventual eight seasons. I think the reason most people tolerated this was because the books prepared them for it. Without having read the books, I just spent most of the series feeling impatient. In what other series of movies does your primary antagonist not even make an appearance on screen until the fourth movie? Just to be sure I'm right about this, I checked Ralph Fiennes' credits on IMDB, and true enough -- 2005's Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire is his first appearance in the series. And apparently, the appearance of Voldemort didn't even interest me very much, since I consider that the weakest film in the series (followed closely by Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets).

The transformation that occurs between Part 1 and Part 2 of Deathly Hallows astonished me, however. Even as I was watching Part 1 on Friday night, I still felt a bit of a sense of ho-hum about the whole thing. I had to keep asking my wife (during breaks) for clarifications on things that I thought were not sufficiently explained, and who this person was, and who that person was, and why were they going off on this tangent so late in the story.

But I guess that's what a little plot resolution can really do for a movie. I was wide-eyed and excited from the first moment of Part 2, and the ride never let up.

I must pause also to wonder about the potential impact was of seeing the movie in the theater -- not just the theater, but in IMAX 3D. I know 3D wasn't an option until this movie, so I'm not comparing apples to other apples, but would I have felt more enthusiastic about Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince or Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 if I had seen them in the theater? Maybe you, who saw them all in the theater, can answer this question for me: Is the last Potter movie as much better than the previous seven movies (except Azkaban) as I seem to think it is, or was I just really impressed by some quality 3D and a very large screen?

I'm just glad that I prioritized a theatrical screening of the last movie. I felt like I owed it to the series, a series that has brought me occasional joy alongside that occasional frustration. And like I said, I was rewarded big-time for making it to the end. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 delivers, and the add-ons (IMAX, 3D) are most certainly worth it.

So now we enter a world entirely post-Harry Potter, and even though I was never an ardent fan who consumed the novels within a week of them being published, I'm feeling a bit of the melancholy they're feeling.

So what's next, Hunger Games? I haven't read any of them and the first movie comes out next year. Maybe I'll get reading, so no one has the chance to spoil the ending of this one for me.

Then again, sometimes the humans surprise you, by keeping the surprises to themselves. In the case of the Harry Potter series, the humans who conspired to not spoil it for me gave muggles a good name.

Instant carmageddon's gonna ... help you?

If you live in Los Angeles, there's only one word on your lips this week:

Carmageddon.

If you live elsewhere, it's possible you need an explanation for what's going on.

A section of the most heavily used and traffic-filled freeway in the country (citation needed), the 405 freeway, also (never) known as the San Diego Freeway, is closing down from midnight Friday night to 5 a.m. Monday morning. It's so they can blow up a bridge that runs across it, widen some lanes, and set a record for the most amount of work ever accomplished in a 53-hour period. In fact, so much emphasis is being placed on getting the work done in a timely matter, the contractor is being charged $6,000 for every ten minutes the freeway reopens late. They've been warning us about it for months, and about six weeks ago I started hearing it referred to as "Carmageddon." (See, we love our cars in L.A., so if you take them away from us, it's the end of the world as we know it.)

This means that the hundreds of thousands of cars that usually run along the freeway on a given summer weekend are going to be doing other things, if they're smart. The authorities are encouraging us to stay home -- not literally in the house, but in our home neighborhoods. In fact, it's being used as an excuse to promote local businesses. We are being encouraged to explore our local neighborhoods and see what they have to offer.

And when we explore them and decide that they offer nothing of interest, we will go to the movies.

I know my wife and I are planning to go to the movies, anyway. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows: Part II opens this weekend (duh), and after we see the penultimate Potter movie tonight, we're going to divide and conquer for the rest of the weekend: She'll see the final movie one day, I'll see it the next. Or vice versa. We haven't gotten that specific in the planning yet.

Of course, we're not the only ones who have this idea. It stands to reason that this could be the biggest opening for any Potter movie since the first one. What I'm wondering is: Will it be even bigger because of Carmageddon?

Let's think about it. Los Angeles is basically the largest metropolitan area in the country, in part because the borders of what people consider to be Los Angeles are so sprawling. Not to mention that Angelenos tend to be more movie-crazed in general, because so many people who work in the industry also live here. Add in the fact that we're spoiled by summer weather for most of the year, meaning we don't care about sacrificing some prime afternoon weather on a summer weekend to go to the movies, and then add in Carmageddon, and you could see the overall box office of Harry Potter rise slightly just because of a highway construction project.

Of course, it's very difficult to measure the impact of a real-world event on box office because you don't have a baseline. Not until a movie opens can you really be sure how successful its advertising campaign has been. With box office, you're never in a position to say "Harry Potter would have made $117.2 million this weekend. Because of Carmageddon, it made $118.6 million."

But I do think it's interesting to ponder. And with a movie like Winnie the Pooh, the only major movie brave enough to go up against Potter, you can posit a bit more of a relationship between the real-world event and the box office. I mean, over 90% of the available seats for Potter were going to be taken this weekend anyway. Carmageddon might mean this number goes from 93% to 98% in LA.

Pooh? It's hard to say. I mean, I'm not in the 0-3 age demographic it's targeting, but I can't really say there's much anticipation out there for this one. Past Winnie the Pooh movies have been notable for being five years behind the current standards for both animation technology and pop culture references inserted into the script, and in keeping the exact same animation style for this one, it doesn't feel like any kind of earth-shattering reboot of the concept.

So if Pooh rakes in more money than we think it will, is it possible we could blame LA's automotive outage for that one? Or will it just be that younger kids who didn't get tickets for Potter will accept Pooh as a (distant) second choice?

I suppose, before any of my readers take me too seriously, I should insert a paragraph referencing the fact that I'm being a bit disingenuous here. I know the LA market is such a small part of the overall domestic box office that any difference made by Carmageddon wouldn't even be felt. Besides, adults are the ones who are not going to be driving. Many adults without kids will not be seeing Potter, and most if not all adults without kids will not be seeing Pooh.

Still, though -- if you're like me, and you live in LA, and are planning to go to the movies this weekend ... plan ahead. Even movies like Bad Teacher and Green Lantern may be selling out.

Forget the movies, though -- the best show this weekend might be getting to watch them blow up the Mulholland Bridge. I'd pay movie ticket prices to see that one.

Number soup

It's Harry Potter time again.

I actually haven't seen the last two Potters in the theater, having lost my interest in theatrical screenings after the disappointing Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. In fact, I heard a brilliant summation of what's wrong with the Harry Potter movies on a podcast I listened to recently, in which one of the podcasters contended that no one can ever remember what happens in any of these movies. That is 100% true for me, at least with the last few -- Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban being the notable exception of a great film within a series of mediocre ones. It should also be said that I'm a 37-year-old guy who only read the first book, so I don't know if I'm the best candidate to determine whether the events of the Harry Potter mythology have significance or not.

However, I became interested again when I saw the poster you see here, which showed up this past spring or summer in movie theaters, and chilled me to the core. I've still managed to avoid learning the ultimate fate of Harry, Hermione, Ron and Voldemort, so seeing Hogwart's in flames was an arresting visual indeed, making me think the series was finally getting serious. I suppose events that have meaning could have already occurred in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince -- in fact, I know of one event in particular that's a pretty big deal, because someone leaked it to me when the book came out -- but I can't say for sure because I haven't seen that yet. We'll finally be watching it this weekend in anticipation of a potential theatrical viewing of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1, which will probably only transpire if I hear it's really, really good. (Don't forget, the baby elevates my standards considerably for what I will prioritize seeing in the theater.)

If you know me at all, you'll probably know that I'm not here today to discuss the Harry Potter franchise on the whole. Actually, I'm once again inspired to post about an issue of semantics.

When the last Harry Potter movie was released, I wrote about not liking the shift in the advertising philosophy, to start using acronyms to promote the movie. That movie was advertised -- not everywhere, but in a lot of places -- as HP6. The previous film had not been HP5, so calling this one HP6 seemed like not only a shift in strategy, but some kind of insult to our intelligence. I posited at the time that the racially sensitive phrase "half-blood" in the title might have had something to do with it.

I've gotten over this particular complaint to some degree, so that when Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows is called HP7, I'm not quite so bothered by it. At least now there's a precedent.

What does bother me is that they've chosen to advertise the last two Harry Potter movies as HP7: Part 1 and HP 7: Part 2. That's a few too many numbers for me.

You could argue -- and some people have -- that they should never have broken The Deathly Hallows up into two movies anyway, that the screenwriters needed to make decisions about what to excise in order to wrap the series up with just one movie. But since they did do it, I think you either need to market the movies as HP7 and HP8 or just by their full titles.

Let's think about it logically. By calling the previous movie HP6, you are trying to help the audience keep track of how many movies there have been. (And deemphasizing the phrase "half-blood"). You could argue that there is a too-sensitive word in the new titles as well -- what parent wants to take their kids to a movie with the word "deathly" in the title? Then again, the PG-13 rating means that younger kids should not really be seeing it anyway.

So if your goal is to make a tacit acknowledgement that the number of Harry Potter movies is getting ridiculous -- even though it was always known that there would be at least seven movies -- and to give audiences a way to start numbering them to keep track of them, calling them HP7 and HP8 would make the most sense. These acronyms are, practically speaking, divorcing the movies from their source material anyway, so why worry about whether people understand that the last two movies are adapted from the same (really long) book? The chronology of the whole series is sequential anyway, so does it really matter if audiences understand that the last two movies are "related to each other"? That there is a part 1 and a part 2? I mean, you could easily say that Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets is part 2 of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, couldn't you?

Like many semantic arguments, this one probably gets a little circular the more you pick at it, and threatens to collapse in on itself. So, HP7: Part 1 and HP7: Part 2 it is.

One thing I will say as a positive for the people at Warner Brothers is that they really played it right on the decision not to retrofit Part 1 for 3D. They started doing it -- in fact, the original trailers advertised that both parts would be in 3D -- but they scrapped the plan when they weren't happy with the results. It might be just smart business, after seeing the lambasting that films like Clash of the Titans and The Last Airbender received upon hurrying out shoddy 3D conversions. But I'd like to think that they had the best interests of the viewer at heart as well.

And I guess if they credit us with knowing the difference between good and shitty 3D, they probably also credit us with being able to deal with the number soup of HP7: Part 1 and HP7: Part 2.

In truth, probably the only people objecting to it are semantic pedants like me, looking for a blog topic on a gray Friday in November.

Avoiding information

I went to great lengths this weekend to avoid learning anything about Watchmen.

My usual Friday ritual involves flipping directly to the movie section of my Entertainment Weekly and seeing what grades the new releases have been given. I don't usually read the reviews, because I don't want to inadvertently steal someone's perspective if I review this movie someday. But I am curious to get a general sense of how EW critics Owen Gleiberman and Lisa Schwarzbaum have judged a film.

This week, however, I was afraid to even open the magazine. I was on high alert against accidentally finding out what I was trying so hard to avoid learning -- that the movie might stink. Maybe they chose this week to shift the movie reviews from the back of the book to page 5. Or maybe I'd suffer a momentary failure of finger dexterity and end up there through an errant flip. I just had to last until Sunday night.

Having bought my tickets online Friday morning could have had something to do with trying to avoid having my enthusiasm crushed. You might say it should actually matter less under those conditions. I'd be seeing it no matter what, and it would theoretically be better to avoid getting the bad news were I still on the fence about buying tickets. But I couldn't afford to be on the fence. Those IMAX tickets went quickly. By Friday morning, my desired 3:15 show had already sold out, and I had to settle for the third row of the 6:30 screening if I wanted to go on Sunday at all.

So I was locked in anyway, and a bad review could only mean I'd have the chance to be pleasantly surprised, right? I'm a big fan of the pleasant surprise, and I'm also a big believer in the idea of the possibility of a pleasant surprise. Lots of people let their moviegoing desires get curdled by a single bad review. For me, it's a setback, but it doesn't ultimately stop me.

Still, I wanted to go in totally fresh to Watchmen.

I mostly succeeded. I managed not to get sucked in by any unexpected headlines on any of my websites. I wasn't in the presence of anybody discussing it. And that part of the Entertainment Weekly stayed safely closed until after my viewing, though I did venture into the early parts of the issue by Saturday morning.

What actually got me was facebook. I'd had the distant notion that somebody's facebook status might ruin the movie for me, but I perused my status updates anyway. (Addictions are, by definition, hard to break). I actually read two Watchmen-related status updates, but one of them was a joke, where my friend said he "was confused. He thought Watchmen was about clockmakers in the '60s." Good one. It gets across the point that you saw the movie, without spoiling anything.

But then another friend got me by sneaking it in at the end, as a non sequitor: "James is on the porch, lesson planning and thinking about how AWFUL The Watchmen (sic) was."

I grimaced.

Well, fear not, friends. For now, I will extend to you the same courtesy of information avoidance -- though if you've read this far, you've probably dared to learn my thoughts on the film already. Until more of you have seen it, I will just say that my friend James does not speak for everybody.

But as usual, Watchmen is just an entry point into what I want to talk about. I wrote a post early on about what lengths you have to go to if you want to avoid spilling the beans about a certain movie. Well, here's the flip side: In our information-saturated culture, how can you avoid learning what you don't want to learn?

Instead of pontificating on that for awhile -- I mention some of my own strategies above if you're interested -- I'd rather declare my amazement. I'm not amazed at how easily information seeps through to unwilling minds, but rather, how some of the information you think you'd be likeliest to hear can remain hidden, through no essential effort.

Case in point: I still do not know what happens at the end of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

When you consider how many people I know who have read that book, how many people in society at large who have read that book, and how many cultural commentators are getting faster and looser with what constitutes common knowledge, I think it is a downright miracle that I still don't know the fate of Harry, Hermione, Ron et al.

What does this have to do with the movies, you ask?

Well, it means that when Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part II finally becomes the eighth movie in the series in 2011, the ending may actually still be a surprise to me.

Now I should say, I wouldn't really care that much if I did find out. I read only the first novel in the series, and have allowed key secrets to be divulged to me over the years. I watch those movies not so much to be surprised at what happens, but mostly because they're big event movies and I want to see if they're any good. (Speaking of which, I saw an IMAX-sized trailer for Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince before Watchmen, and it looks like some crazy shit is going to be happening in it). Truth be told, I tend to forget what happened in the last movie, and I've really only thought one of them was truly great, Alfonso Cuaron's Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.

This is not an invitation for you to go spoiling it for me in the comments section. Because this is quite a thing I've got going on here, and I want to see how long it lasts. I want to see if I really can walk into a theater sometime in 2011 without knowing whether Harry Potter lives or dies.

If I do, it'll be pretty certain proof that the world is not composed only of ruiners and TMZ-bred gossip mongers. Maybe, just maybe, there's a silent majority of people who like staying silent.