Category: Daniel Radcliffe

THE LOST CITY

By Marc S. Sanders

Sandra Bullock’s film The Lost City is nothing more than rollicking fun at the movie theater.  A popcorn movie.  You can simply focus on gorging yourself with endless amounts of popped kernels and large fizzy drinks and you’ll never find yourself lost in a complex plot.  It’s a screwball adventure in the same vein of Romancing The Stone.  What I appreciate is that it is not a duplicate blueprint of Romancing The Stone.  Maybe just the opening scene, but no matter.

Bullock is Loretta, a reclusive romance novelist, who knows that her books are nothing more than cheesy pulp material to the umpteenth degree.  Her agent Beth (Da’Vine Joy Randolph) keeps a positive attitude as she encourages a book tour to promote Loretta’s newest installment in a series that follows the adventures of Loretta’s fictional swashbuckler.  That hero is preserved on the covers of her novels in the image of fashion model, Alan (Channing Tatum) – a Fabio inspiration.  Alan dons the gorgeous blond locks wig with the beefcake chest and the fans seem to go wild for him more than they do for Loretta’s work.  Even the glittery purple jumpsuit with stiletto heels that Loretta dons for an appearance at a book fair doesn’t deter the screaming fans away from Alan’s muscular build and chiseled chin.

When Loretta is captured by a spoiled brat of a villain known as Abigail Fairfax (Daniel Radcliffe), she finds herself having to research the location of a lost city on a remote island rumored to possess treasures beyond anyone’s wildest dreams.  Somehow, within Loretta’s fiction she implied the actual location of this place.  Abigail needs her to delve even further towards the destination.

This all sounds cliché.  It is, actually.  So what!

What saves The Lost City is the screwball comedic approach to the film.  Bullock and Tatum are nearly twenty years apart in age.  Yet, they make a great pair in the same way that Hepburn and Grant did in Bringing Up Baby.  I could care less about the actual lost city and whatever treasure was there.  The symbols etched on an old piece of parchment that Loretta attempts to decipher never mattered to me.  Two days after seeing the movie, I don’t even remember what the lost city revealed when they eventually got there.  I did like the endless pratfalls of Tatum and Bullock, however. 

Channing Tatum looks like the adventurer of a romance novel.  Yet, he’s nothing more than a pretty boy or a “mimbo” as Jerry Seinfeld might describe him.  He’s actually got a crush on Loretta and upon determining that she’s been kidnapped, he recruits the legendary problem solver Jack Trainer (who could only be encapsulated in the form of a gorgeously blond, tan and muscular Brad Pitt) to rescue Loretta.  It’s important to Alan, though, that he gets recognized as the savior.  So, he kind of learns as he goes. 

Adventures in the jungle abound.  There are bad guys on motorcycles.  Guns, of course.  Fires within Alastair’s luxury SUV. Rock climbing.  Rivers with leeches.  Dark caverns and on and on and on.  Yeah.  I’ve seen this all before.  Again, I say so what!  It’s just a fun time at the movies that brought me back to the fast-paced escapades found in the 1980’s films I grew up on.  Yet, it has its own spin thanks to the relationship of Alan and Loretta.

Daniel Radcliffe and his beard are also great characters.  It’s a nice departure from the shoe horned role that’ll never leave him as a certain boy wizard who will not be named here.  He just brings out his fun bratty side.  His beard seems to wink along with him.

A better side story could have come with Da’Vine Joy Randolph though.  As the agent goes from one traveling step to the next as she attempts to find Loretta herself, Randolph just doesn’t look comfortable in the role with her sky-blue pant suit and big breasted physique that is intentionally in your face.  Where’s the slapstick that should be accompanying her?  She’s specifically made up to look like diva luxury and you’re waiting for one disaster after another to befall her. Beyond having to fly on a puddle jumper plane carrying farm animals, she simply survives her trek unscathed.  Either this storyline should have been excised all together, or it should have been rewritten to be just as silly as what Bullock and Tatum are delivering.  A flop in the mud or a slip in the river would have helped this plotline. 

The Lost City is just a cute film for Sandra Bullock and Channing Tatum to look…well…cute together, and in a world where celebrities are slapping each other silly on live television, isn’t this a much better escape on a Saturday afternoon?

HARRY POTTER AND THE GOBLET OF FIRE (2005)

By Miguel E. Rodriguez

Director: Mike Newell
Cast: Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson, Rupert Grint, Ralph Fiennes, Brendan Gleeson
My Rating: 9/10
Rotten Tomatometer: 88% Certified Fresh

PLOT: A young wizard (Radcliffe) finds himself competing in a hazardous tournament between rival schools of magic, but he is distracted by recurring nightmares.


[DISCLAIMER: This review will more than likely contain spoilers, as well as Potterhead references galore.  I apologize in advance.]

When I first saw this movie, I grieved over how much of the enormously entertaining book had been sacrificed on the altar of box office viability.  Why not make two films out of it?  (Which they did later on with the final book, of course.)  What happened to Winky?  What on earth is going on with the tournament scoring?  (Seriously, try to keep track of it…it makes no sense in the film.)  Where’s the subplot about how Rita Skeeter obtains her inside information?

Watching it again years later, for perhaps the 6th or 7th time, I think I’m a little mellower.  Comparing a movie to its source material is a fool’s errand.  There’s a great story about how, years ago, someone complained to Raymond Chandler how Hollywood had ruined his book, The Big Sleep.  Chandler calmly pointed to a bookshelf, and said, “Well, there’s my book right there.  Hollywood didn’t ruin it.  It still exists.”  (I’m paraphrasing, to be sure.)

So.  Movies and books, apples and oranges.  To quote Carl Weathers in Predator: “It comes with the job.  I can accept it.”

Having said all that, I think the best way to give my impression of the film of H.P.a.t.G.o.F. is to list what it gets right and what it gets wrong.

RIGHT: The second task, involving hidden treasures in the Black Lake.  I loved the look of the mermen and mermaids and the hinkypunks.  This scene managed to captured almost exactly what I saw in my head when I read the book.

WRONG: The first task, involving retrieving a golden egg.  We see FAR too little of how the other contestants fared in their attempts, jumping right past the first three just to see what Harry does.

RIGHT: “Mad-Eye” Moody.  I’ll never be able to read the books again without seeing Brendan Gleeson’s magnificent performance in my head.  That amazing enchanted eye, the facial tics, the glee with which he transforms a student into a ferret…it’s perfect.

WRONG: The Yule Ball.  As it appears in the film, it literally brings the movie to a halt.  It’s all about the interpersonal relationships between Ron, Hermione, and Harry, but nothing happens to move the plot forward.  I can’t help thinking there was a better way to stage this pivotal event.

RIGHT: The events in the graveyard.  I can recall vividly the moment when I read the words, “He was dead” in the book.  I sat up on the sofa, my eyes grew wide, and I exclaimed out loud, “Holy s**t!”  The movie gets this entire sequence right.  As I recall, the graveyard covered two or three entire chapters in the book, and the film condenses it nicely into a 10-minute sequence.  (Approximately.)  It’s the moment, in both the books and the films, when the franchise became much more than “kid stuff.”

WRONG: Snape’s role in the film.  The movie curiously omits the incredibly relevant moment in the book when, after Dumbledore observes the Dark Mark on Snape’s arm, he tells him, “You know what to do.”  And Snape nods curtly and leaves the room.  That comes into play to a GREAT degree in the latter stages of the franchise.  Ah well.

And I’ll leave it there.  I could go on.  All in all, it’s a good film, a great spectacle, and a turning point for the series.  They could have called it, Harry Potter and the Advancement of Maturity.