Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
Director: David Yates
Brüno
Director: Larry Charles
If you are thinking of seeing Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, but have not read the sixth in J.K. Rowling’s series about the young wizard, I can save you 153 minutes of your time by summarising the only significant moments. The “Half Blood Prince” in question is Severus Snape (Alan Rickman). Potter’s nemesis, Voldemort, has split his soul into seven pieces, which have to be retrieved in the seventh and eighth movies – the final book has been split in two – before he can be killed. There is also the death of a major character that turns this into The Empire Strikes Back of the Harry Potter series.
There are not many plot points in a Potter film. I’ve come to sit through them, muttering: “Hurry, plodder”. Take the opening. There is a mysterious kidnapping carried out by so-called “Death Eaters” (among them Helena Bonham-Carter). Is it significant? You won’t find out in this movie. Later, potions professor Horace Slughorn (Jim Broadbent, a Potter newbie) extracts venom from a large dead spider. Does it have a use? Not in this flick. You see school bully Draco Malfoy (Tom Felton) being coerced into an act of murder. He is genuinely ambiguous about it. Do you find out why? Of course not!
There is a general sense that something bad will happen some time during the school year. No hurry then, just time for a few games of Quidditch – here Ron Weasley (Rupert Grint) becomes a goalie and a babe magnet – a few lessons and lots of stuff about being a “tweenager” in love (the young cast are approaching 20). There is a barely contrived reason for Harry (Daniel Radcliffe) to go back to school. He needs to find out about Voldemort’s schooldays from Slughorn, who has been lured back to teaching by the promise of “collecting” Potter.
Quite apart from the wizard-shopping street, Diagon Alley, looking like it has been hit by the recession, there is a sinister undercurrent to this movie. “Collecting” sounds like another word for grooming and Harry is essentially offering himself up to the vainglorious Slughorn – the man even has “horn’” in his name, for goodness sake. In the film’s most bizarre scene, three adults stand over Ron’s hospital bed as he murmurs in a catatonic state the name of his second best friend, Hermione (Emma Watson) – and then his girlfriend walks in. There is also a girl lifted up in the air by a spirit and shaken violently, pushing the limit of the film’s 12A certificate.
At its heart is something as monumentally stupid as anything in a Transformers movie, namely a tampered memory. We are asked to believe that Slughorn would donate a memory to Dumbledore (Michael Gambon), then tamper with it rather than steal or destroy it. The Harry Potter films have such a guaranteed audience that such criticism is pointless. At the screening I attended, the film drew token applause. There is little for young children here, though, and not much creature action. Director David Yates coaxes a sympathetic, three-dimensional performance from Broadbent and Radcliffe has a good comic sequence after Harry swallows a bottle of “Liquid Luck”. Playing light-headed, the inner-actor in Radcliffe is released and for about 15 minutes I did not mind that not much was happening, slowly.
On the evidence of Brüno, caricaturist Sacha Baron Cohen’s humour has not developed much since his skits on Channel 4’s The Eleven O’Clock Show. Whether he is playing a wannabe gangsta from Staines (Ali G), a reporter from Kazakhstan (Borat) or an ultra-camp but never cross-dressing Austrian talk show host (Brüno), he assumes the same dim but rude and insensitive exterior in front of real people in an interview situation. Caroline Aherne found that there was life after, her fictional talk show host, Mrs Merton, with The Royle Family, but Baron Cohen is some way down the comedy evolutionary cycle.
This movie is essentially a re-run of Baron Cohen’s 2006 film, Borat, with Brüno heading to America to become Austria’s most famous export since Adolf Hitler and insulting everyone he meets. In early scenes, you see him attempt to get an agent but giving an appalling read-through. He produces an intentionally awful TV pilot with a digitally manipulated penis that spins and lip-synchs. It mouths “Brüno”, naturally. He tries to orchestrate an infamous sex tape with Congressman Ron Paul who storms out of Brüno’s suite in a homophobic rage.
When conventional fame eludes him, Brüno tries to “solve” the Middle East peace process. Later he attempts to get himself kidnapped, before returning to the US with an “adopted” African baby. After the child is taken into custody, he tries to go straight, attending a military academy and hanging out with a group of hunters whom he compares to the Sex and the City girls.
The film has two modes. In the first, Baron Cohen plays on the vanity and desperation of others seeking media attention, such as mothers who want to make money putting their children into acting. Brüno proposes a photo-shoot with babies playing the thieves crucified next to Jesus. In the second, Baron Cohen essentially ambushes people, such as hotel employees who find him in a state of undress handcuffed to his assistant.
Almost everyone in this mock documentary is giving a performance in an attempt to give Brüno what he wants, so their reactions are not very revealing about their characters or indeed very funny. Indeed, the film recycles the same joke – that is, the extent to which they do not acknowledge that Baron Cohen is wasting their time. The film is 81 minutes long and pretty much a waste of the audience’s time, although I did enjoy the female swinger who attempts to dominate Brüno, hitting him with a belt.
For me, Brüno smacks of the very desperation it attempts to satirise. Watching Brüno play out a scene in front of a medium where he makes contact with the dancer in a sexually explicit fashion, I was reminded why I hate mime.
Patrick Mulcahy
