Po returns in beautifully animated kung fu epic

Here’s my mini review:

Praise the panda. Prattling Po — plushy, perfectly plump and plagued with precociousness — ponders private parentage problems and protects his peaceful, panic-prone people in a peppy post-prequel packed with punkish pyrotechnics, pleasant protagonists, polished plots, persistent perkiness and prickly pirates in Panda Part 2. Partake the picture perhaps? I proudly proclaim in the positive.

Now the full review, which is good because I was running out of context-appropriate “P” words.

I am quite fond of the first Kung Fu Panda, which was all kinds of silly. Now here’s Kung Fu Panda 2, a sequel that begs to be so much more than the first one simply because it doesn’t deviate from the original’s charm.

Panda 2 is mostly more of what made the first film so delightful: Jack Black’s goofy humor, realistic kung fu, and an animation style that is quite simply beautiful with its deep textures and rich colors. The sequel goes beyond the first film, though, if only because it adds layers to the star, a lovable panda named Po, who still has learning and growing to undertake before he can be the great champion he was prophesied to become. The sequel also solves that lingering dilemma from the first film, which was how a goose could father a panda — yes, panda Po was adopted, to the thankfulness of Mrs. Goose (and the jealous-prone Mr. Goose for that matter).

Po is still in that lush valley with the Furious Five — Monkey, Snake, Tigress, Mantis and Crane, all-voiced by big-name talent — as they hone their martial arts skills and protect the cute little bunnies, pigs and ducks from roaming invaders and plunderers. In an early fight sequence, wolves rappel into the valley to steal everyone’s metal for a reason that’s sure to be nefarious. Po and his five friends dispatch the mangy beasts with their unmatched fighting skills, some of which are a little far-fetched, but fun nevertheless. For instance, dangle a tiger, panda and monkey from a snake and you’re likely to end up with two snakes.

It’s all quite implausible, even for an animated film, but the fighting styles are rooted in actual kung fu styles and movies. Po’s acrobatic spinning and fluttery flipping can be seen in any of the recent live-action classics: Once Upon a Time in China, Hero, Iron Monkey or Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Much of the animated stunt work seems to be a specific homage to the films of Jackie Chan, who also does the voice of Monkey. In his prime, you could give Chan a shopping cart, pinball machine, metal ladder or just a bamboo pole and he could create inventive kung fu moves that were physically magnificent and tinted in delicate comedy. Kung Fu Panda 2 benefits from Chan’s lighter fighting style, and applies it to all kinds of high-flying animated battles. A chase sequence with rickshaws really stands out.

When the film isn’t dropping visual references to kung fu movies it seems to be miming some great gags from silent films, including a fight sequence where a musical bunny is shifted around a battle like a chess piece, and another in which Po tries to get an ox and crocodile out of a jail cell using a revolving cell door. The movie is very funny, and the voice acting is fantastic, but much of it plays out visually, in brilliantly choreographed routines.

It turns out the wolves are stealing metal to create a kung fu killer: massive cannons in the shape of Chinese dragons. The main villain is a nutty peacock voiced by — who else? — Gary Oldman. The peacock also has something to do with Po’s past, which creates a delay in Po’s kung fu. Tigress (Angelina Jolie) is developed much more in this film as she comes to understand Po’s increasing internal toil. Also returning is the great James Hong, who voices Po’s goose dad. Crouching Tiger alumnus Michelle Yeoh joins the cast to help Po as a soothsaying goat who frequently chews on the peacocks silk robes.  

I was wildly entertained throughout Kung Fu Panda 2, but I was especially impressed with the film’s many animation styles. Facial expressions, fighting stances, stunning landscapes … it all looked amazing. But there’s more: the opening credits, end credits, flashbacks, dreams and premonitions within the film are all shown in different animated styles. Some look like paper puppets, others are more akin to Japanese animation, and others more closely resemble traditional Disney hand-drawn animation. And each looks stunning.

It should be noted that the Panda franchise — expect a third one by the looks of the last scene — is a project by Dreamworks, not Pixar. Dreamworks’ animation is getting continuously better at digital animation. It’s unlikely that Pixar throne’s going to be toppled anytime soon, but panda Po represents a blossoming new dynasty in the animated kingdom.

And that’s positively pleasing.

To read my review of the original Kung Fu Panda, click here.

New Pirates suffers from old problems

It’s widely agreed that there were vast problems with the last two Pirates of the Caribbean movies, and the reason they couldn’t be fixed was because both films — each following the same storyline — were shot at the same time. Try dropping anchor on that behemoth and you’re likely to capsize the ship.

Now here we are with a new Pirates, a fresh plot and more wiggle room to make a film that doesn’t have to cater to the story demands of a sequel. With more freedom Captain Jack Sparrow will soar again, right? Wrong.

All the agonizing issues with Dead Man’s Chest and At World’s End have returned. It seems that spark from the first film, Curse of the Black Pearl, is forever gone, doused by the ocean’s mist I reckon.

Not to say that Pirates 4 — officially it’s called Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides — is a bad film, because it’s not terrible. It’s just mediocre. Considering its potential, and its inflated budget, it should be so much better, especially since it had the opportunity to pop out of that rut created by the last films. Not helping the whole situation is the 3-D, which should have never been applied to a film this dark. Night scenes, dungeons, candlelit bars, underwater scenes, caves, underwater caves … these scenes would be dim even without the 3-D sunglasses. Please, see this movie in 2-D; if we avoid the 3-D versions, they’ll eventually just go away.

Returning are Captain Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp), saucy as ever, and the recently peg-legged Barbossa (Geoffrey Rush), who can’t decide if he’s a hero or a villain. Throughout Tides Jack and Barbossa routinely rotate allegiances with each other and with the other factions — England, Spain and the pirate Blackbeard aboard his treacherous ship Queen Anne’s Revenge — as they seek out the Fountain of Youth, a legendary mystery that Jack solves by using a magic compass. The film bypasses all the mystery and adventure of the fountain’s discovery with that stupid compass from the earlier films; too often it’s used to add more momentum to the plot by cheating. Certainly a treasure map would be a cliché, but also much more interesting.

Along the way, Jack encounters some new characters, including Angelica (Penélope Cruz), a sexy Spaniard who he had a fling with many years before. Jack still has a crush on her, though he can’t admit it — “If you had a sister and a dog, I would choose the dog,” he tells her. Angelica is the daughter of Blackbeard, a fearsome pirate who wants the Fountain of Youth to frighten off his executioner, who has been prophesied to be Barbossa. Jack’s dad, played by Rolling Stone guitarist Keith Richards, returns again and he still looks to be about 120 years old. Jack asks if he knows where the fountain is. Jack’s dad: “Does this face look like it’s seen the Fountain of Youth?”

Much of the dialogue is arbitrary and meaningless, but the actors seem to be having fun, especially Depp, who has found some kind of twitchy nirvana playing a boozy pirate dressed in his leathery layers and clanking accessories. Depp is a very physical comedian, and it shows in all his little gestures and tipsy nuances. I’m glad the franchise kept him aboard and made Orlando Bloom walk that plank.

As rip-roaring fun as Depp is, the plot has all the mechanical failures of the last films: too many side-quests, too many villains, too many double-crosses and side switchers, and way too many rules. The fountain requires a mermaid’s tear that requires a mermaid that requires a map that requires a compass that requires two silver chalices that requires a boat that requires a key that requires a … on and on into infinite. On Stranger Tides doesn’t feel like an adventure, it feels like a checklist at the grocery store. The film is never propelling itself forward on its own energy; it just sort of coasts on autopilot. And like every film before it, this one devotes much of the plot to Jack Sparrow as he tries to get a ship of his own. Apparently just starting the film with Sparrow on a ship is too much to ask.

The action is exciting and technically impressive. One chase sequence through London with burning coals has a wacky ending. A scene of a man being consumed by the Fountain of Youth is mighty cool; it reminded me of ol' popcorn face at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Some of the action seems to copy the earlier films with swordfights in rafters, lots of swinging off things, and Jack and Barbossa fencing in a cave, which is exactly how Black Pearl ended. Then, as if to copy Twilight’s fading fame, the film introduces vampire mermaids who can shoot Spider-Man webs from their hands (?!?!).

On Stranger Tides is probably the second best Pirates movie, which might be faint praise, but praise nonetheless. It could do better, especially with its messy plot. What’s so odd to me is why its producers don’t require better. They have all the pieces right in front of them, but they continuously bungle the delivery. They need to streamline the story, take out all the different opposing factions and just let Jack be Jack in an adventure without so many moving parts. 

From the Vault: At World's End

To celebrate the opening of the fourth Pirates movies — Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides — here is my original review of the third movie, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End. My review of the new movie will be posted Friday morning.

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And so the trilogy implodes. It’s happened to the best of many series — Spider-Man, Aliens, Shrek, The Matrix — and here it has happened to our beloved Pirates of the Caribbean, an franchise so rich in humor and adventure the first time around that it seemed invincible to even the mightiest cannons. Here, though, a single musket could sink it into the sea. And does.

I would have never thought an entire film could be sustained on hostage negotiations and Mexican standoffs alone, but, alas, here it is with Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End. The film — every bloated minute of it — consists of armed and unarmed negotiation, all of it with endless explanation with in-story footnotes, annotations on the footnotes, and footnotes on the annotations. For a movie about the freedom of the ocean there sure is a great number of rules to follow: nine pirates to a summit, majority vote gets to be king pirate, Flying Dutchman requires a captain, his heart the down payment, and don’t forget parlay. At World’s End creates a world that requires too many plot points to function without constant babysitting.

Meanwhile, the pirates just want to get to it, be it plundering, pillaging or the occasional skirt lifting (“ahlow, poppet”). Arrr! The life of a pirate requires much plot. Too much plot for At World’s End to really show off its creative underbelly of computer effects. In the opening scenes we’re given a beautiful ice world with icebergs and glacier flows. But then nothing happens to it; it was an expensive set decoration. As soon as the film does start to move around and gain momentum: “Whoa there, let’s negotiate this in a tedious below-deck stalemate in which we betray everyone who’s not present.” To my readers: If you can follow the plot to any degree of certainty then please write to the producers to ask for the scriptwriters’ jobs.

This third entry, At World’s End, picks up right where Dead Man’s Chest ended: Captain Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp) is in the belly of a beast, Will and Elizabeth (Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley) are without a ship and tentacle-faced Davey Jones (Bill Nighy) stalks the ocean with his barnacled crew. Davey Jones and his ship, the Flying Dutchman, are being manipulated into a war by the East Indian Trading Company, which is led by one of film’s most unhappy villains, Lord Beckett. Even victory would disappoint the wig-wearing Brit, who is so glum he should cut away the excess glumness and begin exporting it to overly happy peoples around the globe.

Disney has asked me politely (“we respectfully ask …” is the exact wording) not to reveal any of plot resolutions. They are asking not because it would ruin the film, but because if I dished the details you’d be unlikely to care. Or think I was bluffing. Truth is, not much happens. I can’t even imagine what’s not worth giving away. Will and Elizabeth get married? We saw that coming. Could it be that Jack isn’t really dead? Unlikely, because Jack’s on the movie’s poster. Or what about the death of a villain? Now that should be left out of reviews, but only because describing it would require more words than the film’s script.

Like another disastrous “threequel,” the overly-theorized Matrix Revolutions, At World’s End tried to make the story as meaty as the action. In the end, though, it created too much exposition for a story already bloated on exposition. I just wanted Jack Sparrow to be a pirate; I think that’s a reasonable request. And fret not about resolution: all the loose ends are tied up at the end, but that’s only because they’re all knotted on each other 80 minutes before the credits started rolling. Seriously, did we need six different betrayals by Will? Or three from Jack? Or a dozen “look at me, I’m a pretty girl pirate” moments from Elizabeth? What we needed was a swordfight from a windmill, or treasure hunt with a blood-soaked map, the sacking of a Cajun port, a gun battle on a ship’s mast or the plundering of a Spanish fleet. What do we get? Five open-ocean ship battles, a handful of swordfights and two hours spent talking. Woo-hoo! (Now whistle and twirl your finger in the air.)

I will give At World’s End credit, though, for its boat sequences. When the characters finally stop talking and begin sailing, they look amazing in their beautiful ships. Big, clipper-type ships look breathtaking on the big screen and they’re used too infrequently (pretty please with sugar on top see Master & Commander for a far better movie). At World’s End uses a wide variety of clipper ships, pirate frigates, Chinese sampans and British war vessels. They’re crewed by vulgar pirates and super-polite British sailors, the only difference between them is their dental plans. Occasionally these characters man cannons or muskets and take to oceanic warfare. At one point Jack Sparrow swings to a ship’s mast to grapple with a character who has the face of a octopus, the hand of a lobster and the legs of a crab — more than enough for a buffet at the Red Lobster. The scene is stunning for its vast and believable computer animation that supports it. 

The writing might go off the deep end, but the whole movie looks great. As do the stars. Depp isn’t given very much to do, but he makes do with what he’s given. In one scene he hallucinates a vision that multiplies himself dozens of times, creates rock-like crabs that can move great object and sails his ship on a wave of sand. The Depp act doesn’t feel as genuine as it did the first time, but his Sparrow is still very much a lovable character, even if it’s increasingly more prone to parody. Also, Sparrow is given a history this time around: he meets his pops, a seedy pirate played by Rolling Stone guitarist Keith Richards, which is bound to be the cameo of the year whether he snorted his father or not.

Bloom and Knightley are given more starring roles, but they spend so much time on opposite sides it’s easy to forget that a romance is buried in all the pirate politics. They needed more screen time together to make the ending more sustainable (by the way: stay through the credits for an extra scene). The side characters are the best, though, including a one-eyed pirate and his bald buddy, two blundering British soldiers, first mate Gibbs (Kevin McNally), a salty sea dog and his parrot, a monkey, and a small person, who fires a cannon so big it throws him backward into a pit. And Geoffrey Rush, as Captain Barbossa, is terrific if also clutter on an already crowded landscape.

I’m very disappointed in this last entry of the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise. The first film, The Curse of the Black Pearl, was brilliantly funny and endlessly clever. The second film was a sequence of missed notes, and the third film is a symphony of missed notes. And it was on the right track for fun summer flick: the sum of all the set design, makeup, costumes, computer effects and lavish settings is production overkill but it makes for splendid visuals. If only there was a plot, at least one that we could grasp onto like the handle of a cutlass. Instead, we grab and grab and grab and come up with a big stinky piece of seaweed that is apparently the story. 

From the Vault: Dead Man's Chest

To celebrate the opening of the fourth Pirates movies — Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides — here is my original review of the second movie, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest. My review of the new movie will be posted Friday morning.

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When does marketing lead to mutiny? When you sell half a movie as a whole one and then make your customers wait for the ending until May 2007. That’s how you make the summer’s most beloved sequel into something to grumble at.

I blame the marketing of Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest because the commercials are selling the movie as one complete entity. That’s the wrong approach to use on the most anticipated movie of the summer, especially when it ends … well, the way it does — I’m not going to give it away. Kill Bill broke itself into volumes; Pirates needs the same treatment. Or just call it a prequel to No. 3, at least then we know we’re only seeing the beginning of a story.

Ignoring the deceptive cliffhanger lurking toward the end of Dead Man’s Chest, this new Pirates movie plays a lot like the old one: swashbuckling, yadda yadda yadda, canon fire, blah blah blah, Johnny Depp playing Captain Jack Sparrow as a cartoon. No, actually a cartoon drawing of parody of a caricature made from a mascara sketch on a napkin. Depp has taken his drunk captain to the outer limits of reason and the movie suffers for it. What was refreshing and invigorating in the first movie, is simply obnoxious overacting in this one. Luckily Jack and Johnny are given lots to do and their superegos are given breaks during all the swashbuckling.

The new movie concerns a buried pirate’s chest (of course!) which does not contain gold doubloons or Spanish gemstones, but the beating heart of a cursed man who rules the sea, or is ruled by the sea — one of them. Whoever controls the heart controls the man. And since the man has a crew of undead sailors and a giant sea serpent at his disposal he is a valuable asset to control on the high seas.

The man is Davey Jones, a cursed pirate bound by love who roams the seas attacking ships at random. Hundreds of years before we catch up with him, Jones gave himself to the sea as a normal man, but after so long underwater his head is an octopus, his arm a crab claw and barnacles and mussels grow freely on his limbs. His crew, imprisoned for 100 years by their cursed captain, have undergone other hideous transformations; their bodies have taken on so many different kinds of ocean life they are no longer men but sampler platters.

For a variety of reasons, too many to list here, Captain Jack and young Will Turner (Orlando Bloom) head out on the open ocean to retrieve the beating heart before Davey Jones gets wise to the plan and before the East Indian Trading Company can get to it first. I liked the premise, but became more agitated with the plot as the movie unfolded. The movie was a kaleidoscope of redundancy: in two separate scenes giant round things go rolling through the jungle, there are two lengthy sea monster battles that are identical to each other and the motivating factor for every action is the same for all the characters. Everyone wants something and they’re willing to trade anything to get it: Elizabeth (Keira Knightley) for Will, Will for Jack, Jack for a key, the key for Elizabeth, Elizabeth for Elizabeth. Some movies have one exchange sequence, or Mexican standoff, but Pirates is made with them.

Although there is way too much bartering and trading among the characters, not to mention plot holes big enough to sail armadas through — How does Jack become chief of a cannibal village? — Dead Man’s Chest has its high points. They may be clones of each other, but the rolling sequences are fun: one is in a cage made of bones, the other is a sword fight on top of a water wheel. Jack Sparrow’s entrance doesn’t top his entry method in The Curse of the Black Pearl, but it comes mighty close. And some slapstick gags with Jack on a roasting kabob are enjoyable.

Everyone will have their favorite parts. Mine were the character effects of Davey Jones (no mention of his locker) and his crew, one of them being Will Turner’s dead father, Bootstrap Bill (Stellan Skarsgård). At first glance they look like menacing zombies with their guts hanging out of their torsos, but look closer — they are made up entirely of ocean life. One sailor has a live eel protruding from his belly; whether it is a stowaway or actually his stomach is hard to determine. Another character has hermit crabs that take up residence in all the wrong places. Several sailors use swordfish and saw fish as — what else? — real weapons. And I thought the seafood at Sizzler was bad.

All this good stuff aside, though, I couldn’t shake the feeling of disappointment when the movie ended. I wanted a resolution and all I was given was a teaser for a movie next summer. That’s called a rip-off in most parts. In the Caribbean it’s called pirating.

ElecTRONic sequel three decades later

Rarely are films so completely unique that they invent new genres upon their release. Even rare still: that the only other entry in the genre — call it cyber-adventure — is the original film's sequel 28 years later.

The first TRON was a watershed moment for computer imaging in films, so much so that the organization that runs the Academy Awards, scratching its head at the film’s pyrotechnic wonder, barred it from the special effects category. They simply didn’t know what to do with it.

No one really knew what to do with it, which is probably why you’ve never seen anything even slightly similar to TRON in the last three decades. In an industry where everything is derivative of something, TRON was genuine.

So is its sequel.

TRON: Legacy, the hotly anticipated computer adventure, is everything the Web geeks and techno nerds have been saying about it through the last few weeks of pre-release hype. It is as uniquely stunning as the original, but with some much-needed visual upgrades and with all the hyper-kinetic additions films have embraced since 1982: dazzlingly rendered computer effects, lightning-fast editing, a technocentric soundtrack (by Daft Punk) that soothes the film’s digital ego and some fresh, young stars who fill this realm of circuitry. Even the 3-D, which I loathe in principle, worked rather well in this neon-tinted wonder of computer imagery.

The film begins several years after the original TRON, with game designer Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges) being permanently uploaded into the digital world of the first film, leaving his son with a crumbling software empire and without a father. Years pass and Sam Flynn (Garrett Hedlund) is more into mischief than following the footsteps of his forgotten father. The mischief leads him back to his father’s hidden office and into the rabbit hole of the digital universe.

It’s here on the Grid that Sam is forced to compete in a series of gladiator-like games involving Frisbees, ricocheting walls, gravity-manipulating arenas and the famous Lightcycles, which leave trails of neon ribbon behind them. It’s also here that he finds the original Kevin Flynn, now much older, and a computer clone called CLU, who serves as the villain — maybe he was created with ctrl-C and ctrl-V commands.

The story is fairly straightforward, though it leaves plot holes big enough for terabytes of information to flow from in big streaming arcs. There’s a whole business with CLU trying to take a digital army from the Grid into the real world, and some more business about a race of intelligent algorithms that are somehow the answer to the world’s problems. None of this really make sense, but neither did most of the first TRON; we’re just expected to watch and enjoy, not figure all this out.

Bridges is a lot fun, and occasionally he channels his inner Dudeness — “It’s like bio-digital jazz, man.” Between this and his turn as Rooster Cogburn in True Grit, Bridges has a lock on the holiday movie season. Hedlund performs well in a role that must have required a lot of standing in front of green screens and grimacing at tennis balls on sticks. The two men are completed by Olivia Wilde, who plays one of the lost algorithms. She’s so perfectly beautiful that the geeks of the world might replace their gold-bikini’d Princess Leia toys with ones of Wilde.

The film is a dazzler. Much of it is shot in blacks and grays, but with this nifty neon trim attached to everything from clothing and Lightcycles to the Grid’s fantastic vistas and the computer architecture. And when characters, called programs, are killed — often by deadly Frisbees — their individual little bytes break apart as if corrupted by a deadly computer virus. It’s a neat effect.

There is no shortage of things to look at in TRON: Legacy: There are numerous Lightcycle scenes, laser battles, chase sequences and one-on-one fights to see who can crumble the other’s pixels first. I had a blast in this movie. I think you will too, whether you’re visiting the TRON universe for the second time or the first. Go have fun with this movie.

The end draws near for Potter and crew

As confusing as all the spells and magic formulas are in these Harry Potter flicks I doubt the children who flock to them in drooling packs will be as perplexed by the Horcrux spell or dragon’s blood potions as they’ll be by all the snogging in this, the sixth Potter film.

Yes, there’s lots of snogging in Half-Blood Prince, enough so that I can begin a review with it. Snogging is the cheeky British word for making out, although it sounds like it requires a cigarette afterward. Ginny Weasley snogs with Dean Thomas. Ron Weasley snogs with Lavender Brown. Hermione wishes to be snogging with Ron while Harry Potter longs to be snogging with Ginny, even as he makes tactical moves to snog with a cute waitress and then a batty Luna Lovegood. At one point Ron takes a love potion and nearly snogs nice and hard with Harry, who is clearly not so keen to snog back. And then there’s emo-king Severus Snape, who’s wound so tight he needs a good snog just to lighten up.

That’s a lot of names to hit you with so soon (and a lot of snogging, too), but by now some of those names have entered into the pop-culture lexicon and need no introduction. Han Solo, Fozzie Bear, Donald Duck, Vito Corleone, Harry Potter … some names just speak for themselves.

Aside from all the rump-slappin’ love that’s floating through the cast of characters, all the usual J.K. Rowling fantasy elements are present and accounted for: a train ride through the country to Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, Quidditch matches, paintings that come alive from the walls, Hagrid and his creepy pets, and a wacky new teacher, this time it’s Professor Slughorn (Jim Broadbent). Thankfully, one thing's not returrning — all the floppy homeless-looking haircuts.

Harry Potter (Daniel Radcliffe), still reeling from the calamity of the last movie, Order of the Phoenix, is taking orders directly from an increasingly worrisome Professor Dumbledore (Michael Gambon). Voldemort and his many black-cloaked minions are still in an undeclared war with Dumbledore and Hogwarts. Many of Voldemort’s tactics are guerrilla incursions — espionage, abductions, random terrorizing, mischief. By the end of the film, war will be officially declared with a salvo that strikes at the heart of Hogwarts. I am, of course, referring to the spoiler — "______ kills ______" — those meanies (read: heroes) from the YouTube video yelled at the group of kids who had just purchased the minutes-old sixth book.

The plots, as fiendishly inventive as they are, have never really been the high points of Potter films; this one is a mystery (they all are) with Harry trying to mine the brain of Slughorn, who taught a young Voldemort at Hogwarts. What I admire over the plots are all the characters, and all the things that create the atmosphere of Potter’s world: the lavish sets, the hundreds of little magic props, those wonderful costumes and all the special effects, magic tricks of a different variety — movie magic. Many of the effects are disposable sights sprinkled into the film just because they’re so delightful, like one of a little penguin skiing in the icing on a cake.

Really, though, Harry Potter films work because the core trio — Hermione (Emma Watson), Ron Weasley (Rupert Grint) and Harry Potter — can carry a film all on their own. I truly hope these three young actors all find important roles in other films when the series ends in 2011 after a two-part Deathly Hollows, although I can’t imagine Grint as anything else but a Weasley. And I pray that Watson, now that her eighteenth birthday has passed, can escape the Internet perverts and skirt-invading paparazzi (one word Emma: "Panties") so she can concentrate on the acting talent she seems to have.

I draw attention to the trio, but it helps that the they are surrounded by a talented ensemble including Gambon as wizard Gandalf the Gray … er, Dumbledore the Gay, and Snape, played by Alan Rickman, who is my own personal cult-figure superhero. Even the extras are interesting; you’ll know Elarica Gallagher when you see her. And then there’s Potter friend Luna Lovegood (Evanna Lynch), who’s so spaced out you have to wonder if she’s naturally this silly or just stoned. I could watch a whole movie of her brushing her teeth or mowing a lawn or something even more mundane.

I must also comment on Tom Felton, the apparent long-lost son of Hulk Hogan who plays miserable little twerp Draco Malfoy. I can't remember the last time a character was so vile and venemous just by existing as a static peice of flesh in time and space. This poor kid; he'd even scowl at a wet snogging. As over-the-top as the character is — and how cruel for Felton, who perfectly delivers the same lines over and over again — I love Draco Malfoy. You gotta applaud him because his contempt for everything is refreshing.

Half-Blood Prince is not the best of the Harry Potter films, but it’s in a six-way tie with all the rest. Am I a coward for not picking a favorite? Maybe. But they’re all so fantastical and charming — and they’re all so consistently well made — that picking one favorite would betray all the other favorites.