Then:
Daniel Radcliffe as Harry Potter in 2001's "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone" (with his owl, Hedwig, and with pals Ron Weasley [Rupert Grint] and Hermione Granger [Emma Watson])
And now:
Radcliffe as Harry Potter in "H.P. and the Goblet of Fire" (with pubescent pals Ron and Hermione and in a bathtub, about to be sexually harassed by a horny ghost)
Film review
Hairy -- er, Harry Potter
and the Goblet of Fire
Wow. In one "Harry Potter" movie Harry Potter and his bud Ron Weasley take Ron's father's flying car to Hogwarts School, a la "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang." Pure kids' stuff. Then, before you know it, in another "Harry Potter" movie -- "H.P. and the Goblet of Fire," the fourth and current installment of the series -- the ghost Moaning Myrtle persistently tries to get a peek at Potter's private parts as he sits in a giant bathtub.
Not that I blame Myrtle; actor Daniel Radcliffe, who plays Harry, is growing up and becoming a fine-looking young man (and, at 16 years old, in his native Britain, Radcliffe has reached the age of consent, which does me absolutely no fucking good whatsoever). The pasty-faced, bespectacled little Harry Potter, whom we first saw in 2001's "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone," now, in "H.P. and the Goblet of Fire," is sporting body hair and has his eye on a female student.
Yes, Harry is growing up.
I don't maintain that the characters of "Harry Potter" are supposed to remain stuck in time and can't grow -- literally and figuratively.
But I have to wonder if parents who took, say, their 5-year-olds to see "Sorcerer's Stone" in 2001 now want their kids, just four years later, to watch a naked Harry Potter, now showing secondary sexual characteristics, being sexually harassed in a bathtub by a horny ghost.
I want to see that; but it's no longer little kids' stuff, so parents beware. ("Goblet of Fire," in fact, is the first "Harry Potter" movie to earn a rating of PG-13. My friend Margie, who has read the Harry Potter books, tells me that the bathtub molestation scene is in the book -- I haven't read any of the H.P. books -- but that only makes me surprised that the scene is also in a "children's" book.)
Anyway, at the rate that the "Harry Potter" movies are going, with the main characters' bodies developing rapidly and their hormones increasingly raging, the next "H.P." movie is going to be a porn flick: "Hairy Peter and the..." -- use your imagination, but I'm pretty sure that we're going to be seeing a lot of Harry's, um, magic wand.
What about the rest of "H.P. and the Goblet of Fire"?
OK, I confess: I'm sick of the "Harry Potter" movies. The last three, including "Goblet," have dragged on for way too long; "Goblet" clocks in at about two and a half hours. The plots of the last three "H.P." movies are so bogged down by intrigue and the complicated details of dastardly deception that by the time it's all finally resolved you really don't give a shit anymore -- you just really have to pee.
I already sat through the too-long plot of "Goblet"; I don't feel like spending even more of my time regurgitating any of it here -- and so I won't.
And Lord Voldemort -- he's supposed to be the bad-ass villain, but he's no Darth Vader. He's more like Dick Cheney or Donald Rumsfeld: evil, yes, but at the same time, when you really think about it, pretty petty -- and even perhaps a bit girlie. Yawn.
I've been hanging in there with the "Harry Potter" movies this long only because I'm waiting for Harry and his bleach-blond nemesis, Draco Malfoy, to consummate their obvious love for each other. (That wand fight that they had back in "H.P. and the Chamber of Secrets":
Oh, tell me that wasn't Freudian.) But alas, Malfoy (Tom Felton) has made only brief appearances in the last two "H.P." movies. (Margie tells me that he plays a large role again in the next book in the series, so I guess that we'll see a lot more of him in the next "H.P." movie.)
But in all seriousness, if you want to see a great fantasy movie right now, you're going to have to go back to your "Lord of the Rings" DVDs, as I plan to do shortly (I have the extended versions of all three installments of the trilogy, which should cleanse my palate of "H.P. and the Goblet of Fire").
And we can hope that the upcoming "Chronicles of Narnia" movies will deliver what the "Harry Potter" movies -- at least the last three of them -- promised to deliver but never did.
My grade: C+
P.S. Because I haven't read any of the Harry Potter books but have seen all of the "Harry Potter" movies, I can judge only the "Harry Potter" movies. I think that's a good thing where reviewing the movies is concerned, though; I doubt that someone who has read the H.P. books can judge the "H.P." movies only as movies. (Many, if not most, of the people who have read the H.P. books, I surmise, will judge the movies largely, if not primarily, on the basis of how much detail from the books the movies manage to cram in; but is that really what makes a movie good?)
Maybe the Harry Potter books work, even though my friend Margie, who has read the books, did confess to me that after you read the monstrosities, nothing really sticks with you, which I don't take as a good sign.
The "Harry Potter" movies, in my opinion, for the most part don't work. (The last three, as I said, drown themselves in their own detail.) Perhaps the books never should have been turned into movies.
11:46:35 AM 
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