... FOR "FRANCHISE FACE-OFFS (PART 6 - 'HARRY POTTER' EDITION)"

It is, without a doubt, one of the great rags-to-riches stories of the past two decades: A single mother, living off of welfare, carts her baby down to the local coffee shop in Edinburgh, Scotland, where she writes the first book of what will become the most successful children's series of all time. She goes from poverty to multi-millionaire status all within the span of five years; her novels sell over 400 million copies; are translated into 67 languages; and her iconic creation – Harry James Potter, aka "The Boy Who Lived" – becomes a permanent fixture in households worldwide.

Joanne "Jo" Rowling says she conjured up the idea for Harry Potter in 1990, while on a return train to London. But she didn't actually finish writing The Philosopher's Stone – the story of an eleven-year-old boy who attends Hogwarts School Of Witchcraft And Wizardry – until six years later. During that time, Rowling suffered a series of emotional setbacks that pushed her close to the breaking point: Her mother, Anne, died of multiple sclerosis in December 1990, the impact of which forced Joanne to move from London to Portugal, Spain, to pursue a career as an English teacher. While there, she met and married Jorge Arantes, a journalism student with whom she had a tumultuous relationship. The birth of their daughter, Jessica, in July 1993 only seemed to heighten the tension between them, and following a violent argument in November of that same year, Joanne took the baby and fled back to England. (The couple eventually divorced in August 1994.) Jo's father, Peter, had since re-married and their relationship had become strained, so she moved to Edinburgh to live near her sister. Jobless, penniless, and living on a weekly £69 allowance from social services, she began a daily routine of wandering her neighborhood streets, pushing Jessica in her stroller until the baby fell asleep. Then she would duck into the nearest coffee shop or restaurant and write. She completed Harry Potter And The Philosopher's Stone in early 1996, and after many rejections from different publishing houses, the book was finally purchased by Barry Cunningham at Bloomsbury, for an advance of £1,500. Scholastic Books followed suit, a mere three days after its publication in Britain, and bid an unprecedented $100,000 to distribute Potter in the United States. The rest, as they say, is history. Rowling would never know poverty again.

... FOR "BEGINNINGS AND ENDINGS AND 'HARRY POTTER AND THE DEATHLY HALLOWS, PART 1'"

First off, we've already established that adapting children's books into movies can be a tricky business. There's a lot of padding involved in turning a 30-page tome into a 90-minute feature, and I'd hesitate to call any attempt at this (so far) an unqualified success.

The world of Harry Potter, meanwhile, is a completely different matter. J.K. Rowling's Witches and Wizardry series is so chock full of incident, so ripe with characters and fantastical creatures and iconic moments, that it's a struggle deciding what to leave out. This has been a great source of frustration for fans loyal to the books, especially after the first two entries in the series, Harry Potter And The Sorcerer's Stone and Harry Potter And The Chamber Of Secrets, which were short enough (at 300-340 pages) that director Chris Columbus and his team could follow Rowling's narrative without deviating from it too much. As the books expanded, though, subplots had to be dropped, character beats fell to the wayside, and it’s been fun listening to Potter-philes express their growing exasperation over what didn't make the cut.

... FOR "MARKETING PLOYS AND 'THE DEATHLY HALLOWS'"

A short one today. This week Warner Bros. debuted the first trailer for their upcoming Harry Potter two-fer, The Deathly Hallows. It doesn't disappoint. Here you go:



As you might have read in last week's post, I've been a fan of the Potter movie series ever since Prisoner Of Azkaban opened in June 2004. This newest trailer teases a great deal of the characters' ultimate fates (I especially like the overwhelming sense of dread that runs throughout), but that "Presented in 2 Parts" bit's galled me ever since I heard they were doing it.

... FOR "THE BEST FILMS OF THE DECADE" - PART 6

Genre:

FAMILY/ANIMATED

Defined:

Fairy tales. Fantasies. Good old-fashioned family values. The kid-centric films of the Noughties were dominated by CG animation, performance capture, and Harry Potter. G- and PG-rated entertainment grew scarce, as did traditional hand-drawn animation (revived again, to mostly glorious effect, for 2009's The Princess And The Frog). And while Disney/Pixar continued to capture the imaginations of cinema-goers worldwide (with Monsters Inc., Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Cars, Ratatouille, WALL-E, and Up), their chief rival, DreamWorks, fancied in-jokes over genuine storytelling (Shrek, Madagascar). The ultimate Family flicks must not only do without the heavy profanity, violence and sexuality required of other genres, they must also engage adults and children alike.

The Top Five:

5. Enchanted (Kevin Lima, 2007)

Disney satirizes itself to such a spectacular degree you'd be hard- pressed to look at any of their animated classics the same way again. It's a canny twist on an age-old formula, complete with wink-wink nods to past studio successes and hummable song score from Alan Menken and Stephen Schwartz ("That's How You Know," their centerpiece ballad, is a genuine crowd-pleaser). The whole thing actually plays like an answer to DreamWorks' Shrek, with jokes that poke fun at storybook conventions only to succumb to them, proudly, at the end. And while the 12-or-so minutes of featured animation are as sublime as anything Disney's done before, the movie really comes alive during its live-action sequences, with a game cast led by Amy Adams in the very definition of a star-making performance. She's delightful enough all on her own to make you believe in the corniest of fairy tales.