Harry Potter 3, Shrek 2, crabby critic 1

wild_patience and I have been to the movies together twice in the last week. This is more often than we usually go in a year; most often we wait for the video. But curiosity beckoned.

To say that Shrek 2 is not as good as Shrek is to praise with a very faint damn. Nothing could be as good as Shrek, the most nearly perfect animated film I have ever seen. (And a film I was prepared to hate - if for no other reason than that it starred Mike Myers and Eddie Murphy - but was totally won over by.)

No, Shrek 2 is not as good. But it makes a game try anyway. The scenario manages to create conflict between Shrek and Fiona without totally undercutting the happy ending of the first film. Astonishingly, the ending was almost as touching as the ending of the first film. The honeymoon montage full of movie references, near the start, was extremely clever (was that what you were laughing so hard at, sturgeonslawyer?), but like the really awesome replica of Beverly Hills and Hollywood that followed it, it lacked bite. The digs at Disneyland and The Matrix in Shrek were real satire; these were just parody. I really liked the depiction of Prince Charming narrating his own adventures as he enacts them - if that isn't a direct steal from Cerebus, it ought to be - but it's not followed up on. It should be a marker of supreme vanity, but while the Prince remains vain, he's not that vain. (He probably doesn't think this song is about him.) Puss-in-Boots is a great character, and I was very amused by the Noble Steed, but "Mongo" was merely incongruous. A couple scenes that teetered on the edge of being storyboards for theme-park thrill rides never quite fell over into that, unlike the ones that ruined Monsters Inc. and Toy Story for me. On the other hand, there were way too many music video scenes. Most disturbing were a few spots where the plot just doesn't hang together. Nothing in the original film fell apart this way; this was just sloppiness.

You can't recapture magic like Shrek; it would have been better not to try and to do something different instead. But it was fun anyway.

On the other hand, to say that Harry Potter 3 is better than either of its predecessors is to damn with faint praise. It wouldn't take much to be better than those two stultifying, tedious adaptations of sparkling, charming books. A mere change of directors was sufficient, as proven by the fact that there was no change of screenwriter. I enjoyed it, and the plot was reasonably coherent. I agree with replyhazy that Michael Gambon made a better Dumbledore than Richard Harris - you could see the craftiness under the befuddled exterior. Emma Thompson was exactly as I'd pictured Prof. Trelawny to be. And the screenplay was kinder to Hagrid's teaching efforts than Rowling was.

If I came away feeling "ehh" it wasn't because this was a bad effort of its kind, it was because its kind is not very good. Sure the visuals were fine, but as a film in itself, an object of cinematic art, none of the recent fantasies I've seen - except the original Shrek - measure up even remotely to the quality and craft of a good commercial film. That emphatically includes Peter Jackson's trilogy, even totally apart from the question of its merits as a Tolkien adaptation. I go to see films like these more out of curiosity than because I really want to. I'm a fantasy fan and I'm going to be surrounded by people talking about these things, and it's hard to participate in conversations about films you haven't seen. The films of recent years which I own copies of, and have rewatched recently as fine works of cinematic craft, are the various Austen adaptations (including Clueless), Cradle Will Rock, and Apollo 13. And Shrek. What does that say about my tastes?