![]() This time, at least, he seems committed to thrilling the kiddies even more: Chamber of Secrets is darker and scarier, with lots more incident, and several of the set pieces have a Spielbergian kick. The same might be said of director Chris Columbus, who in the last movie brought little to his work beyond an eagerness to please his corporate masters. (Batman is often cited as the most self-made superhero, but he could never have fashioned that particular persona without a whopping inheritance.) The Potter mythology might prove to be even more complex than those above: Increasingly, Harry may be seen as less the creation of his murdered parents than of their murderer, who gave the baby some of his own fearsome power along with that lightning-bolt scar. ![]() And Harry’s powers are no less earned than those of Clark Kent, a superhero for no reason other than his Krypton DNA, or Luke Skywalker, whose affinity for the Force is surely a genetic bequest from Dear Old Darth. Even in the homogenized Hogwarts, there are hints of rage toward the English “muggle” world for its repressive good taste, its vicious civility. While it’s true, as Chris Suellentrop has suggested in a lively Slate takedown, that Harry is something of a fast-food hero-an opportunistic blend of nerd-outsider and jock-celebrity-he is also our way into a richly imagined alternate universe. Rowling’s Potter books and feels there is plenty of real life in them to harvest. I write that as someone who treasures J.K. A movie about the care and feeding of the child stars of Harry Potter would be more entertaining than the thing itself. ![]() Remember when all you could register on the face of Brooke Shields was her new Frankenstein brow?) Given the billions at stake, is someone at the studio monitoring these kids’ hormones? Are there dermatologists on call night and day? We’re talking six sequels, folks. (Even the comeliest kids have weird stuff happen to them. ![]() What will these tykes look like on the other side of the Great Adolescent Divide? For a lot of child actors, the early teens aren’t pretty: Those marvelous features have a tendency to grow at different rates. As I sat through this sequel-which is more entertaining than the first film but still two hours and 40 minutes-with no bathroom breaks, Mom and Dad-I passed the time wondering if AOL Time Warner had thought to protect its investment with computer simulations of Radcliffe, Emma Watson (Hermione), and Rupert Grint (Ron) over the next decade. ![]()
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