Now on Screen: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2, Blank City

By John Semley

Because Toronto’s more movie obsessed than a Quentin Tarantino screenplay (yuk yuk), Torontoist brings you Now on Screen, a weekly roundup of new releases.
This week on the big screen, we shed a single tear for the little-boy-wizard-who-could as he makes his last stand against the evil villain it’s taken him seven books and eight movies to defeat. Also, on the smaller big screen, we get a neat look back at NYC No Wave cinema.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 Directed by David Yates

Blank City Directed by Celine Danhier

So I should probably say right off the bat that I don’t care about the Harry Potter franchise of tween wizard–related products and that I’ve only seen one of the previous films (the third one) and never read any of the books. This is because, no matter how much you may try to defend the “richly imagined” magical world of Potter, or argue how “dark” the books are (people die!), they are children’s books. And I am an adult man who does stuff like drink beer and buy stamps and read books for grown-ups.
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 (or HP7b, for short) picks up where the first part leaves off, presumably. A dark cloud has fallen over the magical whimsy-world that Harry (Daniel Radcliffe) and his witching and wizarding buddies inhabit. The Dark Lord Voldemort, whose name you’re not supposed to say and who is played by Ralph Fiennes in prosthetics that make it looks like his nose has been run over with a belt sander, has all but seized control of the realm, which is like just below London, England, or something. Voldemort is an evil wizard who wants to kill all the good wizards, chiefly Harry Potter. After talking with a goblin played by Warwick Davis (of course), Harry and his best pals Hermione (Emma Watson) and Ron (Rupert Grint) hatch a plan to destroy a bunch of things called “horcruxes.” Doing so will weaken the Dark Lord and aid in his defeat. Then it’s a series of RPG-style fetch quests as Potter and pals use magic spells and cloaks of invisibility to locate and destroy the remaining horcruxes.
Eventually, they take a secret tunnel back to Hogwarts, which is the school where the young Harry learned to become a wizard but that is now dim and solemn, under the gloomy rule of scowling Headmaster Snape (Alan Rickman, who once played the dynamic German terrorist Hans Gruber in Die Hard but has now grown pudgy and gothy under years of caked-on wizard makeup). After expelling Snape, Harry half-assedly rallies the enchanted troops for a final showdown against Voldemort, who’s lurking on Hogwarts’ periphery with his army of huge trolls and banshee-looking things and people who can turn into chuffs of black smoke.
Yates, who has helmed the bulk of the Potter films, exhibits a confidence with the material. He knows how all these wizards and whutzits move about, and he lenses the half-climactic good-versus-evil Hogwarts showdown competently, with all the good blasts of magic energy and evil blasts of magical energy ricocheting around spryly. The final showdown, though, between Harry and Voldemort lacks the sense of consummated epic destiny you’d expect. It’s taken, what, 10 years and eight films to get here? And all we get is the standard good beam of light pushing back on the evil beam of light? Credit, though, where it’s due: for Potter’s denouement, the film is gracefully light on exposition (though a lengthy mid-film flashback can almost catch up those of us whose heads have been deliberately buried in the sand), deferring instead to the whizz-bang wizardry this “epic conclusion” promised its fans.
For others more clinically disinterested in Potter lore, though, so much about HP7b thuds. It works to ham-handed conclusions about people being both good and evil, how both of those concepts contain the other, and how, through sheer tyranny of will, good can overcome evil. But not without the ghosts of dead family and friends who live in your heart! Its Star Warsian thematic simplicity may explain why Potter resonates so forcefully with kids aged eight to 12, but to expect anyone else to be more than mildly amused is a bit insulting.
Still, as HP7b races towards its final showdown, even the disinterested will find satisfaction, even ticking-clock glee, in knowing that soon, just after this scene of broom-riding, and that tearful reconciliation with a circle of ghosts, Harry Potter just might be over for good.
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 opens Friday, July 15, in wide release. Click here for showtimes.

The problem with using “wave” to describe the eddies of artistic movements is that the term is usually disingenuous—a handy qualifier slapped on movements by critics as a way of easily making sense of them. Find three or four people in an urban area who dress kind of the same making different kinds of art that may or may not share any thematic or aesthetic preoccupations and you’ve got a wave. The great thing about New York’s mid-’70s to early-’80s No Wave movement is how it eschewed this whole idea of waves. It was the wave that wasn’t.
In this excellent document of the era, Danhier gives life to the squalor, nihilism, and pure artistry that emerged against the crumbling, crime-ridden backdrop of NYC’s Alphabet City in the ’70s. While the legends of many of this period’s bigger-name musicians (the Ramones, the Talking Heads, Blondie, Patti Smith, Richard Hell) have now become the stuff of rock ‘n’ roll textbooks, Blank City focuses on the film and video experiments that accompanied the angular punk booms at CBGB and Max’s Kansas City. (Granted, footage of plenty of these musicians is included, partly because they were the subjects of many No Wave films, and partly, it seems, because Danhier knows they’re the gateway to the whole movement.)
Blank City explores the origins of East Village No Wave filmmaking, hewn up by run-and-gun would-be filmmakers like Amos Poe, Scott B and Beth B, and Vivienne Dick. The film hammers home the no-budget ‘tude (it’s hard to keep track of how many times someone says something like, “We made the films for nothing because we had nothing!”), but still proves impressively thorough, following the movement right up to the so-called Cinema of Transgression of Nick Zedd and Richard Kern and the rise of Jim Jarmusch as a certified American indie auteur. Peopled by a highly charismatic cast of characters (seeing Zedd stare dead-eyed into the camera, it’s easy to believe he’s as scary as everyone says he is), and defined by its honest, sympathetic portrait of the movement, Blank City proves a highly engaging eulogy American independent cinema’s scuzziest, richest, and out-and-out coolest non-wave.
Blank City opens Friday, July 15, for a limited engagement at the Royal (608 College Street). Click here for showtimes.