Writing Roundup.

Head to PopMatters where I review Harold Lloyd's iconic comedy Safety Last! and the endlessly disappointing Quartet.

Then, visit The Film Experience and read my short take on Rooney Mara and David Fincher's new collaboration and my need for the Dragon Tattoo sequel.

Happy weekend y'all!

GBU: "The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel", "Wanderlust", "Total Recall" and "Dark Shadows".

Since writing full reviews - and even Short Takes - has become almost impossible (until someone pays me maybe...hehe) we'll give GBU a try and rank the Good, the Bad and the Ugly of recent films I've seen. Let me know what you think of this new experiment and as always thanks for reading!

Total Recall (dir. Len Wiseman) *½

The good: It's always nice to see Colin Farrell onscreen, although he's made it clear that he now fares much better in smaller works (see Ondine and In Bruges). Also that body, wow!

Also, give Kate Beckinsale more villainous roles, she was delicious in this!

The bad: why bother remaking a movie when you'll just remind audiences of why the first one isn't even much of a classic to begin with? 

The ugly: the whole Asian-meets-futuristic aesthetic felt old in The Matrix and that came out almost 15 years ago, in this movie it just was awful to watch.

Wanderlust (dir. David Wain, 2012) ***

The good: this Aniston/Rudd reunion reminded us what made them so great to watch in The Object of My Affection back in 1998. Their chemistry is spot on! Wain's screenplay (co-written with Ken Marino) is a treasure chest of one liners and manages to be funny without being too crass and insensitive.

The bad: just nitpicking here but the ending was slightly facile.

The ugly: N/A

The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (dir. John Madden) ***

The good: Judi Dench. Maggie Smith. Tom Wilkinson. Bill Nighy. Celia Imrie. Penelope Wilton. Ronald Pickup. Enough said. This cast is to die for and it's great to see real grown up movies are still being made. Dench's soulful performance was worth the admission ticket. How can an actress do so much with so little?

The bad: too many plots means we always end up craving more from the best, like Wilkinson's character.

The ugly: why does Dev Patel keep playing Indian stereotypes?

Dark Shadows (dir. Tim Burton) *

The good: Michelle Pfeiffer needs to be in more movies! It was also nice to see Helena Bonham Carter pushing her shtick to new places and Eva Green was simply to die for! (No pun intended)

The bad: the Burton-Depp thing has been old for almost a decade now, it's time to stop them!

The ugly: Burton's aesthetics seem to be getting more self indulgent with each passing film, in Dark Shadows the settings were so contrived that we couldn't allow ourselves for a moment to see the fantastical in all of this, everything felt just so stale.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 ***

Director. David Yates

Cast: Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson, Rupert Grint

Ralph Fiennes, Julie Walters, Maggie Smith, John Hurt

Helena Bonham Carter, Michael Gambon, Alan Rickman,Clémence Poésy

Can mediocre literature make good cinema? This, and not how to kill Voldemort, has been the biggest mystery in the entire Harry Potter movie saga which began precisely a decade ago. Perhaps under precise hands even things as immaturely misguided as J.K. Rowling's bestsellers could achieve some sort of efficiency or even brilliance (Alfonso Cuarón's entry in the series is still the only one that came close to this) but most of the Potter films have reveled in big setpieces, lazy performances and too much information that might've worked in literature but feels muddled and conspicuous in cinema.

Take for example the horocruxes Harry (Radcliffe) has been searching for the last two films. In all honesty anyone could've told him about this since the beginning and get Voldemort done with. Why wait ten years to let him know how to destroy his biggest enemy? Raising values and teaching children how to find their true worth in the face of adversity by way of faceless demon creature? Maybe.

More cynical audience members might be willing to call it squeezing money out of your wallet though and they might be right. In all cases, these movies could've been retitled Harry Potter and the Efficiency of the Red Herring. The fact that this is the last film and therefore forces the director and writer to tie everything up gives it an urgency that the other movies never had. This is obviously evident in the huge dramatic punch the movie carries. There are farewells, deaths, shocking twists (Gambon's Dumbledore wasn't as nice as we thought and Rickman's Snape was!) and it all comes down to an anticlimactic showdown between the young wizard and Voldemort (Fiennes who will be remembered as one of the creepiest villains in film history).

For all its flaws the film results quite entertaining and after a tedious start picks up and delivers the goods at a brisk pace.

The children still are rather dull actors (except for Granger who oozes onscreen charm) but lukcy for them they are surrounded by astonishing actors. Smith gets more of a chance to shine this time around and in a fantastic fight scene, Walters goes all Lt. Ripley on the equally superb Bonham-Carter.

This time more than ever, the visual effects and production design seem to click and some scenes are completely spellbinding but perhaps most of the film's value is merely because it's the last one. As such it comes as a complex beast to evaluate in terms of purely adequate artistic value. The Potter films were never meditations on life and to come out of them with the desire to engage in Bergman-ian dialogues is out of the question, but they could've had a little something extra that went beyond the notions of just telling a story.

As exciting and harmlessly captivating as this installment is, leaving the theater you might notice you have already forgotten what the movie was all about.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince **

Director: David Yates
Cast: Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson, Rupert Grint
Michael Gambon, Jim Broadbent, Alan Rickman, Maggie Smith
Helena Bonham Carter, Robbie Coltrane, Tom Felton, Bonnie Wright

"Are you confused?" asks a concerned Albus Dumbledore (Gambon) to Harry Potter (Radcliffe) as they uncover yet another dark mystery halfway throughout the film. "I wouldn't be surprised if you were" he continues without waiting for Harry's reply.
Dumbledore, as it seems, may not only be speaking to Potter, but to an entire audience, who have never read J.K. Rowling's famous books and will have a hard time following, or even being interested, in a movie that contains as many plot holes, discrepancies, lack of character subtext and coherence as there are tastes in Bernie Bott's Every Flavor Beans.
Since there is no re-introduction needed the film throws us back into Hogwarts where Harry and his friends Ron Weasley (Grint) and Hermione Granger (Watson) return for another year of misadventures.
This time around Lord Voldemort's Death Eaters, who have seemingly recruited Draco Malfoy (Felton) as an inside agent, have been attacking the Muggle world and are, as usual, trying to infiltrate Hogwarts and help their master take over the world.
After almost reaching a decade of movies, the Harry Potter series has become formulaic and by now everyone knows that all of the films will at some point have all of the following: Christmas vacations, a Quidditch match, a sudden attack from Voldemort and a new professor in the school.
Said professor now comes in the shape of Horace Slughorn (Broadbent) who is reluctant to return to Hogwarts, but does so after insistence from Dumbledore.
Slughorn may possess valuable information about Tom Riddle (A.K.A Voldemort) which might help the good guys get rid of him before long.
Dumbledore of course recruits Potter to carry out this mission and most of the film consists of the execution of said plan.
The problem with such a thing is that the films have fallen also into a state of disconnect from any sort of "realism".
Why are we supposed to believe that things go wrong only when the kids are back in Hogwarts? Does evil also take a summer break? None of the films in the saga so far have been able to create believable links between each installment.
It's ironic when Professor Minerva McGonagall (Smith) tells Harry, Ron and Hermione "why is it that whenever something happens, you three are always involved?".
It's obvious that they're the stars, but it should be only obvious for the audience, not the characters themselves.
Most of the ensemble does a good work; people like Smith, Gambon, Carter (who is a wicked tease!) and Rickman can do no wrong (he is a particularly sinister scene stealer) and the delightful Broadbent brings freshness to what was feeling like a stale staff.
The kids on the other side are obviously still learning their craft. Most of the time they act like actors acting.
This problem is more obvious with Radcliffe, who movie after movie, manages to turn Potter into an uninterestingly smug kid playing humble and nice.
It comes as no wonder however that they act this way, when the film constantly neglects their "human" side. They are forced fed with dialogues and quips that have no verosimilitude and because of this the film loses its most important ally.
There are several subplots involving their sexual self awareness. Harry begins to fall for Ron's sister Ginny (Wright) while Hermione puts aside her pride and accepts that she might have feelings for Ron. They all of course spend most of the film denying such things and date other students to get over their actual feelings.
And it's not so surprising that these are the most involving scenes in the movie, where the kids get to act like kids and saving the world is something that comes second after finding who they really are.
The film is filled with sexual innuendos (that seem accidental) but actually make the whole thing feel alive for once. There is a particular Quidditch match where the position of Ron's broomstick only rises more as he becomes more satisfied.
But then the director comes and completely de-sexualizes the characters turning them into words straight out of a screenplay.
One, that isn't even that good to begin with. Writer Steve Kloves' delivers his most uneven script of the series yet. Many things in this installment seem incomplete; several key characters disappear for long periods of time and some are featured just for the sake of filling a billing.
Even if you haven't read the book it's easy to detect that a lot of material has been ignored because the plot advances in a bizarre way, it stalls more than it flows.
Fans of the book will probably dislike this feeling, but those who go to the theater expecting to see a movie will also have much to wish for.
Both Kloves and Yates seem to have forgotten that they are crafting a movie and unlike in literature there are things that can't be found by turning back a page at your desire.
"The Half-Blood Prince" feels more like a work in progress than an ultimate adaptation and very few scenes evoke a pinch of emotion out of the viewer.
It's a shame because with the magnificent work of the tech department (the costumes and art direction are stunning) the look of the saga has finally matured.
Particularly with the achievement of director of photography Bruno Delbonnel, who does actual magic with the light and his camera.
Several scenes in the film will take your breath away just from the sheer beauty they possess. Delbonnel transports his sunny French take into Hogwarts which is a more macabre environment.
His aesthetic sometimes recall nineteenth century fairy tale engravings which had both the mystery and the humanity that fascinated and attracted people so much to these stories.
Through his lens for the first time the things inside a "Potter" movie feel less like props and more like actual lived-in heirlooms.