Teenage Wasteland.

Second on the weekend bill was David Yates’ Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, the sixth installment of the series (and Yates’ second directorial outing after 2007’s Order of the Phoenix.) On one hand, this year at Hogwarts is a deftly-made piece of work, and probably the most accomplished and filmic of the Potter movies (tho’ I still prefer Goblet of Fire overall.) But, on the other hand, Yates and the assembled cast are just gathering steam right as the source material is petering out. I racked my brains before the movie trying to remember anything about Half-Blood Prince the novel, and basically came up with the ending, “Slughorn,” “Harry’s Potions book,” and “Dumbledore drinks the crap.” These four things do not a movie make, particularly not a 150 minute movie like this one. You can pad it out with Quidditch and/or various adenoidal episodes on the Big Three’s part, but Half-Blood Prince — the movie like the tome — still feels somewhat overlong, unnecessary, and redundant.

Part 6 of the Harry Potter saga starts in media res — so much so that it feels like Yates & co. have basically given up on the non-readers — with a trio of the Dark Lord’s Death Eaters openly attacking London Muggles in broad daylight. Yes, it’s gotten that bad. But the potential Chosen One (Daniel Radcliffe) has his mind on other matters at the moment — mainly, getting to know the cute waitress at the local station cafe once her shift ends. Alas for Harry, Albus Dumbledore (Michael Gambon) apparates into the scene and bigfoots that plan relatively quickly — Instead, he enlists young Potter in an scheme to entice former Prof. Horace Slughorn (Jim Broadbent) back into the Hogwarts fold. (Slughorn is an inveterate namedropper, and thus susceptible to Harry’s influence. That being said, the dance of seduction here all seems a bit more unsavory when viewed rather than read.)

Anyway, soon Harry — and Slughorn — and the rest of the gang have all returned to Hogwarts (with the exception of those schoolboys in disgrace, the Weasley twins, who are now making a mint in Diagon Alley.) But the darkness all around has now seeped even into Fortress Dumbledore — students become bewitched, various assassination attempts go awry, and the scion of Slytherin in particular, Draco Malfoy (Tom Felton), seems to be under more strain than usual. Perhaps worse still for the gang, the trickle of teenage sensuality seen in Goblet and Order has swollen to a torrent, and Harry, Ron (Rupert Grint), and Hermione (Emma Watson) are now in the full hormone-fueled throes of adolescence. Honestly, after all the pregnant looks, strange urges, and attempted snoggings in the first hour, I half-expected Harry to whip out an ID named “McLovin'” and try to score some butterbeer.

The kids all acquit themselves well enough given the modicum of plot this time around. Still, with all due respect to the teens, the secret weapon of the Potterverse on film remains the long and growing list of distinguished British thespians on hand. From the starting cast (Alan Rickman, Maggie Smith, Robbie Coltrane, Warwick Davis, David Bradley, Mark Williams and Julie Walters) to the later pick-ups (Michael Gambon, David Thewlis, Helen McCrory, Evanna Lynch), Half-Blood Prince is stocked to the gills with well-done character turns. The only person who noticeably stuck out as bad was Helena Bonham Carter — She’s wayyy over the top (again) and may be refining her Queen of Hearts here. (I also would’ve liked to have seen He Who Must Not Be Named at some point over the film, but I suspect he’ll be back for the next two installments.)

That being said, the best thing about Half-Blood Prince is probably Jim Broadbent’s turn as Slughorn. At first, he just seemed to be doing a slightly toned-down variation of his “snip, snip, slice, slice” cameo in Brazil. But Broadbent manages to infuse the character with a melancholy I never took away from his more glad-handing, Falstaffian persona in the book. This should’ve been the “Half-Blood Prince’s” movie, really (or Dumbledore’s, for that matter) — but, particularly given the notable absence of the high adventure or puzzle-solving plot dynamics of earlier Potter tales, it’s Broadbent’s haunted sense of regret here that leaves a mark after the credits roll.

Next Stop Wonderland(s).

In the trailer bin of late:

She’s given up, stop: Mia Wasikowska, a.k.a. Alice, takes a tumble down the rabbit hole anew in our first look at Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, also with Johnny Depp (frontlined a bit much here), Anne Hathaway, Helena Bonham Carter, Stephen Fry, Michael Sheen, Christopher Lee, Alan Rickman, Matt Lucas, Crispin Glover, Noah Taylor, and Timothy Spall. (Looks like a good start, although clearly there is still much CGI-rendering to do.)

In a post-apocalyptic wasteland, where naturally Gary Oldman is up to no good, a Mad Maxish Denzel Washington may be carrying the secret to something-or-other in the trailer for the Hughes Brothers’ The Book of Eli, also with Mila Kunis, Ray Stevenson, Jennifer Beals, Frances de la Tour, and Michael Gambon. (It’s good to see the Hughes, of From Hell and the underrated Menace II Society, back behind the camera. But I’m betting this’ll seem a bit been-there-done-that, coming so soon after John Hillcoat’s The Road.)

Kate Beckinsale uncovers something deadly, dark, and dangerous in the furthest reaches of Antarctica in the straight-to-video-ish trailer for Dominic Sena’s Whiteout, also with Gabriel Macht and Tom Skerritt. (It looks like The Thing, with shower scenes. Beckinsale is probably one of my bigger movie star crushes, but lordy, the woman needs a new agent.)

And, as Comic-Con 2009 is just kicking off:

Pushing Neil Blomkamp’s District 9, Peter Jackson talks The Hobbit and Tintin. (Apparently, the script for The Hobbit is three weeks away, and four or five of the 13 dwarves have been front-lined. Spielberg has finished a first cut of Tintin: Secret of the Unicorn, and The Lovely Bones comes out Dec. 11, with a trailer Aug. 6.)

Jonah Hex gets a poster that is sadly devoid of Malkovich. (For what is here, the scar looks decent enough, Megan Fox in anything gives me pause (but I guess she’s a hot ticket after the Transformers sequel made so much bank), and the lettering looks a bit futuristic for the property…unless they’re going post-Crisis Hex.

TRON 2.0, a.k.a. TR2N, is now called the much-more-boring TRON LEGACY. But, hey, at least they’re not abusing the colon…yet. (More TRON news, of sorts, in the post below, and, since the weekend is young, undoubtedly more Comic-Con news to come.) Update: The TR2N footage that premiered last Comic-Con is now — finally — up in glorious Quicktime.

Down the Rabbit Hole.

“There is the usual Burton-esque ghoulishness (Helena Bonham Carter’s Red Queen, whose favorite retort is ‘Off with their heads,’ has a moat filled with bobbing noggins), but Zanuck assures most kids can handle it. ‘The book itself is pretty dark,’ he notes. ‘This is for little people and people who read it when they were little 50 years ago.’“

USA Today obtains some stills from Tim Burton’s forthcoming adaptation of Alice in Wonderland, including some unsettling shots of Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter, and Anne Hathaway as the Mad Hatter, Red Queen, and White Queen respectively. Also in the cast: Mia Wasikowska as Alice, Alan Rickman as the Caterpillar, Christopher Lee as the Jabberwock, Michael Sheen as the White Rabbit, Noah Taylor as the March Hare, Matt Lucas as the Tweedle twins, Crispin Glover as the Knave of Hearts, and Stephen Fry as the Cheshire Cat.

Life and Death Experiences.

Plenty of variety in this weekend’s trailer bin: 28 Weeks Later‘s Jeremy Renner is the man you call if you’re in the Green Zone with a bomb on hand in the trailer for Kathryn Bigelow’s warmly-reviewed The Hurt Locker, also with Anthony Mackie, Brian Geraghty, Evangeline Lilly, Ralph Fiennes, David Morse, and Guy Pearce.

A foolproof inside job at an armored truck company presumably goes horribly wrong in the new trailer for Nimrol Antal’s Armored, with Matt Dillon, Jean Reno, Laurence Fishburne, Skeet Ulrich, Amary Nolasco, Milo Ventimiglia, and the much-missed Fred Ward. Remo Williams, the adventure continues.

Young Abigail Breslin offers up her kidney to save her sibling’s life in the trailer for Nick Cassavetes’ My Sister’s Keeper, with Cameron Diaz, Jason Patric, Alec Baldwin, Sofia Vassileva, and Joan Cusack. (Not really my cup of tea, but you never know. Hopefully, it goes better than this plan did in A Christmas Tale.)

Escort (and adult film star) Sasha Grey foregoes Craigslist for more Spitzer-type fare in the trailer for Steven Soderbergh’s The Girlfriend Experience. (Which reminds me, the four-hour version of Che just made it here, although I haven’t partaken yet. Kind of a heady time commitment and all that.)

Finally, even the Muggle world is threatened by the darkening clouds of He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named in the most recent trailer for Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, with Jim Broadbent’s Horace Slughorn joining the usual Hogwarts suspects. Yeah, I’m in.

The Summer Contenders.

“I’ve been waiting for this day my whole life, this day of reckoning.” Some choice offerings from the rest of the Watchmen trailer bin, which are now online: Harry digs deep into the memory hole to Anakin up He-Who Must-Not-Be-Named in the second preview for David Yates’ Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. (To be honest, I think I might’ve missed the first trailer from last November (at the same link) — that one’s not bad either.) Iowan ne’er-do-well James Tiberius Kirk straightens up and flies right in a preview for J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek of epic scope. Hugh Jackman dons the claws once more in another look at Gavin Hood’s X-Men Origins: Wolverine. (Meh, bub.) And an animated Ed Asner braves floating houses, boy scouts, and talking dogs in the newest trailer for Pixar’s UP. Pixar will go wrong someday — this doesn’t look to be it.

Mudblood Aristocracy.

Don’t drink the water…With Michael Gambon looking and sounding more Gandalfian than ever, the international trailer for David Yates’ Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is now online. Well, ok then.

Riddle in the Dark.

In anticipation of the HP & The Half-Blood Prince trailer, which should be on later tonight, USA Today scores two stills from the forthcoming sixth Potter film, including this one of young Tom Riddle looking Omen-ish. (Conveniently, he’s played by Hero Fiennes-Tiffin, Ralph Fiennes’ nephew.)

Update: “I can make things move without touching them. I can make bad things happen to people who are mean to me. I can speak to snakes too. They find me, whisper things…” And here it is. (Link sent via Raza.)

Grave and a Haircut, to go.

The trailer for Tim Burton’s Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, starring Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter, Sasha Baron Cohen, Alan Rickman, and Timothy Spall, is now online. Burton wants me to see a bloody musical? I dunno.

The Dark is Rising.

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, director David Yates’ take on the fifth installment of J.K. Rowling’s (soon-to-be-completed!) series, is, I’m happy to report, a somber, suspenseful return to the increasingly dire matters at Hogwarts, and well in keeping with the higher standard set by Alfonso Cuaron and Mike Newell in the past two movies. While I think Newell’s Goblet of Fire remains my favorite film outing thus far, this one is right up there in my estimation, and given how much less Yates had to work with, that’s rather impressive. (For all its girth, Book V felt basically like a holding action to me — the wider narrative arc didn’t progress all that much from the end of Goblet to the end of Order, and the story suffered from a wham-bang action climax that didn’t really work on paper (it comes off better on-screen.)) Indeed, Yates’ Order not only captures my most prominent impressions of the book — Harry’s burgeoning teenage moodiness, the growing sense among the students of grim times ahead and important events already set in motion — but also significantly streamlines and distills Rowling’s most-sprawling tome into two-and-a-half hours of sleek, well-paced cinema. No mean feat of magic, that.

By the start of Order, Voldemort (Ralph Fiennes) is loose, Cedric Diggory is dead, and Harry Potter (Daniel Radcliffe), once more at the mercy of the Dursleys for the summer, is poised on the verge of adolescent rebellion. He hasn’t heard a pip from friends Ron (Rupert Grint) and Hermione (Emma Watson) for months, nor has he heard any news of goings-on in the magical world. So it is with no small amount of surprise and consternation that Harry finds himself first attacked by Dementors one gloomy evening, then expelled from Hogwarts — by authority of the Ministry of Magic — for using his wand to defend himself. Brought back into the magical loop by these events, Harry discovers that many of his former allies, including godfather Sirius Black (Gary Oldman), have banded together to re-form the Order of the Phoenix in preparation for Lord Voldemort’s next move. More troubling, it seems Minister of Magic Cornelius Fudge (Robert Hardy) is not only not inclined to believe Harry that You-Know-Who has returned, but also views Harry and his mentor Albus Dumbledore (Michael Gambon), as a political threat, and has turned the general public and popular press against them both. Finally, to further complicate Potter’s prospects, Fudge dispatches one Dolores Umbridge (Imelda Staunton) to Hogwarts with a ministry mandate to stamp out both dark sarcasm and Defense against the Dark Arts in the classroom. Thus hemmed in, Harry, Ron, and Hermione find once more they need to take matters in their own hands, and begin to defiantly assemble what they call Dumbledore’s Army, a student organization dedicated to preparing for the worst. But, all the while, Lord Voldemort is up to his own tricks…and what good is Dumbledore’s Army if its young, bespectacled leader is already hopelessly compromised by his still-unexplained connection to the Dark Lord?

As the paragraph above attests, there’re a lot of balls in the air this time around, but Yates, screenwriter Michael Goldenberg, & co. do a solid job of keeping everything moving without doing grievous harm to any of the many included subplots. (Several have been excised regardless, such as this year’s Quidditch match. No real loss, imho.) And throughout, what Order of the Phoenix gets most right — in fact, one could argue it’s actually done better here than in the book — is the feeling that things are simmering to a boil. Hermione, Ron, and especially Harry have grown from wide-eyed, trusting children to gawky, hormonal teenagers (and better actors, for that matter), seething with imminent rebellion against the powers-that-be, and their world has similarly gone from a colorful, fantastic, and ever-so-occasionally dangerous realm of magical delights to a gray, ominous land of hidden agendas, political propaganda, fallible adults, and fatal consequences. In the last movie, Harry’s Hogwarts cohort were on the threshold of early adolescence, and had just begun to discover the tantalizing mysteries of the opposite sex. Here, slightly older, they come to another classic teenage rite-of-passage: finding that the world — and, more often that not, the people in charge — aren’t all they’re cracked up to be, and that they may even actually be out to get you.

Of course, Yates is helped out tremendously in bringing Order to life by his ever-expanding Dream Team of British thespians. Imelda Staunton, as the main new cast member, is note-perfect as Umbridge. A pink-festooned, unholy cross between the Church Lady and arguably the real You-Know-Who of Rowling’s books, Margaret Thatcher, she’s like something out of a Roger Waters fever dream (and continues the “The Tories are Coming!” subtext I noted in my review of the last movie.) Even with Staunton aside, tho’, Order is packed to the brim with quality actors reprising their roles from the first four films — Oldman, Hardy, Brendan Gleeson, Maggie Smith, Michael Gambon, Emma Thompson, Jason Isaacs, Robbie Coltrane, etc., and particularly Fiennes and Alan Rickman. They’re all excellent, and frankly it’s good fun just to see so many of them around again to help further flesh out the Potterverse. (Although, having seen Naked and The History Boys since Goblet, I’m slightly more concerned about Harry hanging around the likes of Remus Lupin (David Thewlis) and Vernon Dursley (Richard Griffiths)…what would the Umbridges of the world have to say about that?)

Dumbledore’s Army.

Alert the Ministry: The new trailer for David Yates’ Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix is now online, albeit not in the best format. Looks…ok, although I’d be surprised if it lives up to Newell’s Goblet of Fire (or even Cuaron’s Prisoner, since Order may have been my least favorite book in the series thus far.) Update: It’s now available in Quicktime — go here instead.