In Which There Is A Lot Going On In Daniel Radcliffe's Life

Magnetic Poetry

by MIA NGUYEN

What If
dir. Michael Dowse
101 minutes

Daniel Radcliffe plays the lead in Michael Dowse's What If as a miserable medical school dropout anguished with the pain of a two-year-old break-up. What If explores the disturbing vagaries of being told "let's just be friends" by someone you love. Despite all of the unfortunate events happening in the life of Wallace (Daniel Radcliffe), he manages to find the most perfect and peaceful perching spot on the roof of the house of his sister Ellie (Jemina Rooper), overlooking the gorgeous Toronto skyline. He utilizes the spot to mope and wallow with his one and only friend, the fluorescent glow illuminating from his iPhone.

After making the unsurprising and predictable discovery of catching his ex-girlfriend having sex with his anatomy professor in a supply closet of the hospital they both worked in he ended the relationship. The infidelity between the two closely paralleled the lives his parents led: two doctors who cheated on each other constantly with other doctors in the hospital. He didn’t want to follow the same fate of lying, cheating, and manipulation for himself.

In addition to living with his sister Wallace serves as a father figure to his nephew. The two disobey the rules by bingeing on tubs of ice cream with horror movies while she’s away at work. Unfortunately, What If skimps out on the family dynamic in favor of its broader love story; weaving both together might have provided a bit more edge.

What If quickly settles into a romantic comedy groove with the appearance of Allan's (Adam Driver) jacked and brash sense of humor, which audience members rely on to sit through the entirety of the film. His tall stature in relation to Wallace’s is laughable at best, making their friendship heartwarming and engaging. (One was little, one was big, but they were the best of friends.)

Allan tries to fix Wallace’s social displacement and anguish by inviting him to his tumultuous social gathering at a house party where he meets Chantry (Zoe Kazan). The two hit it off and complete each other’s sentences in front of a refrigerator filled with magnetic poetry.

After calling it a night, he walks Chantry back to her apartment only to find that she has a boyfriend, but she willingly scratches her phone number on piece paper from her sketchbook and hands it over to him. This act inculcates his madness for her bright red lips, coy personality, and closet full of cute vintage dresses.

Wallace, like any guy who gets friend zoned, goes home absolutely livid. He climbs on top of his perching spot and ponders if he should even keep her number, allowing the wind to drift it away from his hand. His facial expression screams, "What's the point of even keeping her number if she has a boyfriend. I want someone that can instantly put out. It has been two years!" The piece of paper drifts through the wind with the fairy coming to life on screen as an animation, which closely follows through Chantry’s emotional journey throughout the movie and gives us a better idea of what she does for a living as an animator.

The two rejoice and encounter each other outside of a Princess Bride screening (ugh) and decide to be friends. They go out drinking and rambunctiously dance at nightclubs. Alcohol eases the pain in any situation, even in the friend zone.

The friendship between the two blossoms into a spectacular rose bush and Wallace enjoys talking to Chantry about everything. He falls in love with her, madly in love, but can’t express it. Chantry invites Wallace over for dinner to meet her boyfriend of five years Ben (Rafe Spall). Ben works for the United Nations and suspects Wallace’s sexual pursuits for Chantry with quick mutters and jabs while hastily dicing an onion. Ben resembles someone who you don’t want to be stuck in an elevator with because he will suddenly start a conversation.

In one scene, Allan and Nicole (Mackenzie Davis) invite the friend zone pair on a beach trip. Allan and Nicole pursue a late night skinny dipping excursion, leaving Chantry and Wallace by the fire. Chantry suggests skinny dipping in the dark with Wallace, a dangerous game, but she plays it anyway. In addition, she plays the juvenile I’ll show you mine if-you-show-me-yours game with Wallace underneath the moonlight and he obliges, of course. It’s purely innocent.

Allan and Nicole’s mischievous scheme of taking their clothes leave the two out cold for the night. Being naked doesn’t even lead to second base and they end up spending the night back-to-back in a sleeping bag furious.

Chantry gets a job offer as a project manager in Tokyo and feels an exorbitant amount of pressure to make a decision. It’s the only source of control she feels she needs to take advantage of. Instinctively and rationally, she sits alone with a pencil and writes a pros and cons list. She allows to be honest with herself and her feelings for Wallace. Her heart can no longer deny that their friendship is more than just a friendship. The calculated risks and steps Chantry takes guide her onto an illuminating path on questioning her career and 5-year long relationship with Ben. She finds happiness in her honesty and becomes unafraid.

Mia Ngyuen is the features editor of This Recording. She is a writer living in Los Angeles. You can find her website here.

"Scar Issue" - The Color Morale (mp3)

"Developing Negative" - The Color Morale (mp3)

In Which We Say Goodbye To Gryffindor

Multiple Personalities

by KARA VANDERBIJL

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2
dir. David Yates
130 min

Voldemort dies. Through a slightly confusing turn of events, Harry sacrifices the part of Voldemort’s soul that was imprinted on him, dies, comes back to life, and kills Voldemort. Voldemort has an issue with being killed, because he has been trying to kill Harry since roughly 1997. The flesh melts off of his face and turns into black smoke and disappears in the sky. Early on in the film, his bare feet are covered in blood as he passes through rows of corpses. His presence is unsettling, although perhaps not in the ways we would expect of him.

Harry’s life has quite literally led him to this moment, to face off with the most powerful wizard in the world amidst the ruins of Hogwarts. His parents, his friends and his classmates have all sacrificed something to preserve him for this moment. Somehow, he and Ron and Hermione are still alive after chasing the horcruxes and destroying them and meeting up with people who are not on their side.

Conveniently, it is easy to tell in the wizarding world when somebody is on your side: they don’t disappear trailing a cloud of black smoke or have skulls tattooed on their wrists. The only person in the story with ambiguous allegiance is Snape, but he doubles for Dumbledore at a high price: the woman he loves must be protected. We have no chance to wonder if losing Lily Potter will push Snape to the dark side — he simply crawls back to Dumbledore. When people say they learned more about doing the right thing from Harry Potter than from anything else, I laugh a little bit. What moral isn’t represented in this story? Take your pick.

Yates saw the final two parts as quiet, almost reverent in their solemnity, and bordering on restlessness. The action lacking from the first half of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows manifests in short, dream-like sequences. Any dialogue is exceptional, and for the most part, useless. Near the beginning of the film Harry and his friends spend ten minutes talking to Olivander about Bellatrix’s wand, but only three minutes are devoted to Snape’s early memories of Lily, Harry’s mother.

Where was Ron’s comic relief, I wonder, and does Yates know anything about what happened to Ginny Weasley? Or the centaurs? Or Hagrid’s half-brother? Or Dumbledore’s back story? Or anything else that Rowling wrote about in the series, except for Voldemort’s face?

Yates is obviously not afraid of Voldemort or else so afraid of him that he must ridicule him. If he hadn’t given Mother Weasley her “Not my daughter, bitch!” before exploding Bellatrix into a million pieces, we might have all stood up and left.

Choice and its many consequences run like a silver thread through this messy little movie, the final part in the coming-of-age saga we were all beginning to search for circa 1999. People choose to die for Harry for no apparent reason other than they are biased against noseless wizards. Hermione randomly chooses Ron over Harry, although Yates’ tête-à-tête between Hermione and Harry in a tent in Part 1 would have had us believe otherwise.

Slytherin punks choose to spend the duration of the grand battle in the dungeons, Snape chooses to remain faithful to Dumbledore, Malfoy chooses to be the stock coward, the Grey Lady chooses to disclose the location of the lost diadem of Ravenclaw, and Harry chooses to die. Some of it is fate, yes, but most of it is just long shots of Harry looking into the distance with Ron and Hermione behind him and nothing but angst over what should be done.

It was simple when it started. Harry’s voice had not yet changed and Ron was vomiting frogs into a bucket and Hermione was still the obnoxious bookworm. They did things a certain way because they had been programmed to, maybe by their parents or just Rowling herself sitting alone in coffee shops writing while her baby slept upstairs. Maybe a curse had left a scar with a memory in it on their foreheads. Voldemort didn’t have a face back then, he was just pure evil, and when you are little it is so very easy to hate evil and be plucky and play Quidditch and do right.

In a heartbeat you are at King’s Cross station and it is a little bit like Heaven and Dumbledore is there, but there is also a screaming baby covered in blood that has Voldemort’s face, and you feel pity towards it or perhaps a little bit of love. “Do not pity the dead,” whispers Dumbledore. “Pity the living.” No one is totally clear on what that's supposed to mean.

Harry loses himself for a moment in the bright white light and forgets what to do. It is the only moment where he vocalizes any sort of self-doubt. Why go on living, if it is such a pity? Later, he snaps the most powerful wand in the world in two and throws it over the side of a bridge. Suicide. This strange and almost blissfully carefree behavior underlies every current of heroism in the film.

Do you choose your end, or is it chosen for you? Few people complained about the differences between Rowling’s books and Yates’ films until recently. This is so rare in screen adaptations that it would be an oversight not to call attention to it. Perhaps what is most shocking to us is that someone should choose to see a story differently than we have.

We grow up, and realize we have no idea what it means, so we grow our bangs to cover our scar and run around trying to destroy the evidence that we are here, splitting our possibilities in half with every step. There is another film, another Harry Potter, another J.K Rowling out there somewhere where the other choices — the ones we never picked — live until they have names we can say out loud and faces we can see.

Kara VanderBijl is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Chicago. She last wrote in these pages about books to read in the summer. She reviewed Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part One here. You can find her website here.

"Is It Done" - J Mascis (mp3)

"The Lung" - Dinosaur Jr (mp3)

"Said the People" - Dinosaur Jr (mp3)

In Which Harry Potter Answers An Unwelcome Call of Nature

The Boy Who Needed Two Parts

by KARA VANDERBIJL

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1
dir. David Yates
146 minutes

Watching the first part of the last installment of J.K. Rowling’s celebrated series and sitting through a very long plane ride are uncannily similar. In both cases the tickets cost too much and the food is bad and overpackaged. An unwelcome call of nature inevitably leads to embarrassing encounters with your neighbors’ knees. Your worst enemies are screaming children and giants. The only reason you put yourself through all of this is because it is taking you somewhere you want to be: namely, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2, which brings me to the issue at hand.

Why is Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows in two parts? I have a sneaking suspicion that this is the franchise's way of rudely gesturing at its current archrival, Twilight, the fourth installment of which — you guessed it! — is in two parts and also comes out next year. Still, a contest between which love triangle or battle for the universe will win more millions seems a tad immature, although appropriately so. Few books, and even fewer films, are made for something as outdated as cultural, historical or aesthetic significance.

Drawing attention to the resemblances between Twilight and this most recent installment of Harry Potter could scarcely benefit anyone. It is obvious that they resemble each other. If you don't believe me, just think about how from now on, anything including a love triangle and shirtless magical beings will allude to them both. I would much rather ponder about what it is, exactly, that makes Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 (now I know why most people just say HP7) a bore.

It started out so well! They had us early on — they had us when we were ten in 2001, and we were so easily lured. We were drawn in by our own naiveté and the fact that, like Harry, the thing we knew best was the inside of our own closet. And we found out, like The Boy Who Lived, that there is just a small step between learning what you are and engaging in what will cost you your life — that is to say, your life.

One of the most entertaining aspects of Harry Potter was watching Harry and his friends grow up; it is sobering to realize they are now adults. Did you notice how many times parents and relatives are outdone by their offspring? Hermione doesn't give her parents much of a choice when the Dark Lord comes: she Obliviates them. Harry sends his relatives off packing; even Lucius and Narcissa Malfoy cower behind Draco a few times. As such, Harry and his peers become rebels much in the same way that Voldemort did. It is only the confines of the movie’s plot preventing them from going berserk, drunk on power.

Well, not quite. When the trio infiltrates the Ministry of Magic looking for a locket horcrux, it is amusing not only because of the famous Polyjuice Potion plot device but also because the potion gives them bodies that they wear badly, like new clothes. This discomfort characterizes the whole movie, mostly in scenes involving Harry and Hermione together. They look curiously childish, especially during a scene in which Harry pleads with his best friend to destroy the horcrux. As the locket explodes and Voldemort's soul seeps out, Ron is confronted with his worst nightmare: a world in which he is not needed or wanted. Spectres of Harry and Hermione engage in an embrace which expresses what they feel but don’t dare express, trapped as they are in that strange space between childhood and adulthood.

This partially funny, partially painful tension between Harry, Ron and Hermione strikes a chord in the film that it never did in the book, since the film version of Harry constantly attempts to come onto her where his print counterpart was content with Ginny. The extended slow dance in the tent between Harry and Hermione, as well as their almost-kiss will spawn a decade's worth of fanfiction among faithful Harry/Hermione supporters. Never mind that the film could have been doing something much more interesting at this point. As always, Ron's inexhaustible comic relief throughout is comforting, proving once and for all that even after ten years some things never change. Ultimately, this is why Hermione will end up with him. Everything comes back to logic.

Meanwhile Harry pulls a Bella Swan and claims he's not worth dying for (conveniently after Mad-Eye already has), and also begins to engage in self-destructive behavior. I lost several imaginary extremities to imaginary frostbite every time I saw him diving into freezing water and walking around barefoot in the snow.

Speaking of clothes, the wizards are substantially underdressed for the weather. Only an Urban Outfitters model (and hobbits) can pose in snowy climes barefoot and wearing nothing but a pea coat, thank you very much. Later, the cast dons flannel and jeans on the beach while mourning the death of a house elf. I had forgotten that part from the book, but was so distracted by Harry's wet denim and sandy knees (pet peeve!) that I could not sympathize.

Visually, Yates' direction doesn't disappoint. The spirited animation of the tale of the three brothers constitutes a welcome refuge from the film's ubiquitous forest settings. Forlorn landscapes reminiscent of Forks, US of A engage in an almost Romantic entanglement with Harry's moods. At one point, I could have almost sworn Yates replicated Wanderer above the Sea of Fog. The magical creatures are fewer in this film than in previous ones, which is probably why they felt forced.

When Kreacher appeared, I wanted to ask why there was an elf in the cupboard, and then remembered where I was. And like anything else, Voldemort was far scarier when nobody said his name and when he didn't have a corporeal body. The faceless intruder in your closet is always scarier than the one you can identify. He is especially (and only) scary when you can't remember what films he had a nose in and when he played Heathcliff opposite Juliette Binoche.

We saw far too much of him, and far too little of all the people I really wanted to see: Harry’s parents, Snape (although we did see his Patronus), and a fully clothed Ginny Weasley. I suppose that we will have to wait another six months for the real fun to begin, and by that I mean that we will actually be able to shed this dust jacket of a first part and dive into the crooked binding of J.K Rowling’s imagination, if you will excuse the poorly executed metaphor. See you in 2011. 

Kara VanderBijl is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Chicago. You can find her previous work on This Recording here. She last wrote in these pages about Rene Magritte. She tumbls here.

"Talk You Down" - The Script (mp3)

"Breakeven" - The Script (mp3)

"The Man Who Can't Be Moved" - The Script (mp3)