Wednesday, August 26, 2009

This Week In Tickets: 17 August 2009 to 23 August 2009

Lots of long days at the office during the week, then I headed north to Montreal to make a little extra use of the place I sublet for Fantasia and do some touristy stuff:

This Week In Tickets!

I think I've been to Pointe-à-Callière every year that I've been to Fantasia, and it is always something I come back recommending. The exhibitions on the second floor are always very impressive, and after that you go downstairs and see where they're digging up old Montreal. This year, the display was pirates, and the presentation was more elaborate than usual - a miniature corsair built in the exhibition hall.

(Fun fact: The French naval flag is/was plain white. The surrender monkey jokes write themselves.)

After that, I hung around the Vieux-Port area, taking a cruise on the Le Bateau-Mouche boat. I love going onto the water, but this isn't really the way to do it if you're by yourself and not particularly hungry.

Sunday, I wound up heading up Mont-Royal, with the intention of just staying there for a bit, but I got into the latest Hard Case Crime book and was more or less there until it started raining. Then there was laundry and following that brutal Sox-Yankees game on GameCast, getting on the bus and heading for the border.

Ah, the border. Always fun. It's so much nicer crossing into Canada than coming back. One thing I couldn't help but notice is that Canada seems much less worried about when visitors are going to leave. It makes me sad to think that folks coming to the U.S. may not feel as welcome coming here as I do going to Canada. Reflects badly on us, you know?

And, yes, I saw a movie while I was up there. What can I say, I don't drink and don't speak French, so what else am I going to do with my evening. Besides, it's much easier to walk to the Scotia Cinema while I'm there than to head out to the furniture store.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

* * (out of four)
Seen 22 August 2009 at Cinema Banque Scotia Montreal #13 (First-run IMAX Experience)

The Harry Potter movies are a bad habit of mine, one I probably would have dropped by now if they didn't also allow me to feed my appetite for IMAX 3-D. The cast on these movies also tends to be ridiculously good; I can't not see a movie that features Alan Rickman, Jim Broadbent, Helena Bonham-Carter, Gary Oldman, Robbie Coltrane, and a pretty darn good core of young actors

But, good lord, some of these things are terrible. It doesn't help that this series zeroes in with uncanny precision on common fantasy tropes which I hate, particularly the whole "chosen one" idea. Take the opening scene, where a group of evil wizards destroy a bridge smack in the middle of London, apparently just for kicks as they're doing something else. It shows up in newspapers, but for a big set-piece that could eventually expose the whole secret world, it's treated as awfully unimportant by the characters. And then there's a scene later in the movie where Broadbent's character gets all snarky about Hermione's "muggle" parents (and, man, is that word not just designed to evoke spoiled aristocrats looking down at the common folk?) being dentists... I kind of wanted her to smack him down, saying that they perform a useful duty for all sorts of people, rather than just sticking to an incestuous little sewing circle and having nothing to do with the community around them.

I've said this before, but wouldn't the series be much better with Hermione in the lead? I get that it's main juvenile fantasy is that we're all like Potter, unappreciated by those around us but secretly a Chosen One, part of a magical alternate world that will live or die based upon our actions, but Hermione's story, coming from modest origins but being smarter and better than the aristocrats, seems much more appealing. Besides, she's got an actual personality, and is the brains and talent of the group anyway. Harry Potter is pretty darn useless here, either being spoon-fed information, cheating in class, and being heroic by doing the brave thin of Doing Exactly What Teacher Tells Him! Bah.

And that's before getting to how anticlimactic the meaning of the title is, or frustrating and ridiculous the continuing "cryptic for cryptic's sake" is, or just how transparent a ploy the "shocking" final scene seems to be. For all the polish and quality performances to be found, this is just a bad, bad movie.
Pointe-à-CallièreLe Bateau-MoucheHarry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

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