This line, spoken in a film I was half-watching an hour ago, sunk in: “Whereever there is greatness, great government or power, even great feeling or compassion, error also is great. We progress and mature by folly. Perfect freedom has no existence. The grown man knows the world he lives in.”

It’s mildly pleasing on some level to report that Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2 (Warner Bros., 7.15), which I saw this morning, is a tightly-scripted, action-heavy, relatively satisfying finale to a franchise that, for me, had worn out its welcome many years ago. When it ended I didn’t just say, “Well, that‘s finally over!” I also said to myself, “Not half bad.”

I wasn’t exactly tingling with pleasure, being a confirmed Potter-franchise hater and all, but neither was I scowling or groaning or taking e-mail breaks. It’s quite all right for what it is. Okay, maybe even better than all right. I was actually following what was going on and being said, which is saying something for easily distracted (and frankly bored-from-the- get-go) me. But there really is something to be said for finally tying together loose ends and being done with the damn thing already.

And the epilogue, which is set 19 years after final mano e mano showdown at Hogwarts between Harry and Ralph Fiennes‘ Lord Mumblecore Elsinore whatevermore Voldemoort, is genuinely nice and sweet and satisfying. It puts an agreeable ribbon on it. Hollywood Reporter critic Todd McCarthy was exactly and precisely right when he said “it ends well.”

Let’s let it go at that. Nobody wants to hear from a hater who’s been suffering from this franchise for the last several years and is now in a forgiving…well, an eased-up frame of mind.

I have one complaint and one observation that no other film critic, I suspect, will bring up. It is profoundly displeasing to see Hermione (Emma Watson) and Ron Weasley (Rupert Grint) end up as romantic lovers and then as husband-and-wife with kids. Hermione deserves better and can do better. She’s too cool, too spirited and too alluring to end up with a red-haired, freckle-faced second-rater who’s been whining and shivering with terror in the face of each and every threat in every Harry Potter film from the beginning. A hot and brave lady should end up with a brave and strapping lad who’s earned her favors, i.e., not Grint.

On top of which Grint is becoming a bit of a pudgebod, and he’s only 22 now — 21 when the final film was shot. He’s developing a bit of a belly and the beginnings of a Uriah Heep look. It’s easy to imagine him having a kind of Shrek-like appearance by the time he’s 28 or 30. I don’t know if he’s been drinking along with Daniel Radcliffe but he’s clearly been leading a dissolute life.

Most of the dreaded 405 freeway, a nightmare under normal conditions except in the wee hours, will be closed for 53 hours next weekend between the 10 freeway and the 101. The shutdown will begin late Friday evening, 7.15, and end at dawn on Monday, 7.18. Leave town or stay indoors or go into a coma, but forget driving to or from LAX on the 405 or going to the Valley for any reason, because north-south canyon traffic is going to be well beyond description.

I had a brief, enjoyable chat with the radiant Octavia Spencer (a.k.a. “Minny“) at last night’s press gathering for The Help (Touchstone, 8.10) at the Beverly Wilshire. Tate Taylor‘s period drama might have seemed like a liberal do-good fable to some were it not for Spencer’s level-straight performance as an African-American maid with a fully justifiable chip on her shoulder. (And for the equally formidable performance of costar Viola Davis, who didn’t attend last night’s event.)

The Help star Octavia Spencer — Saturday, 7.9, 8:05 pm, Beverly Wilshire hotel.

Best known for her comedic acting (and particularly for her ongoing role as Constance in Ugly Betty), Spencer has been working it since the mid ’90s. Her first feature role was in Joel Schumacher‘s A Time to Kill (’96). As far as I can tell her performance in The Help is Spencer’s first major dramatic lead in a feature. “An overnight success after 17 years,” is how she laughingly put it last night.

Octavia is a very serene presence and a good-natured pro. As I was chatting with her a tall blonde Valkyrie whom she didn’t know seized her, passionately hugged her and insisted upon the usual three to four minutes’ worth of excitable chit-chat plus photos. Spencer was as patient as anyone would be with an excitable five-year-old.

Mary J. Blige and her combo performed a song toward the end of the party, but the room was hot and stuffy. I couldn’t take it and excused myself after a couple of minutes. “Is it really going to be this hot?,” Blige asked as she began to perform.

The party was held in a large apartment — main living room, dining room, kitchen, large bathroom and bedroom — on the Beverly Wilshire’s eighth floor. The space is located across the courtyard from a nearly identical suite where Warren Beatty lived for a reported ten years during the late ’60s and early ’70s.

(r.) Octavia Spencer, (l.) Viola Davis in The Help.

All Adam Sandler comedies tend to be obvious and primitive and aimed at lowbrows, so I don’t see what’s so exceptionally heinous about Jack and Jill. At least it’s addressing a basic fact about sibling relations, which is that some brothers and sisters are an unfortunate fact of life (and in some cases an embarassment) whom you’d prefer to not to keep in touch with, thanks all the same.

I loved my younger sister and younger brother after a fashion, but I didn’t really seek out their company or friendship because they were both fairly undeveloped people, and I would run out of conversational fodder with them fairly quickly.

On 7.6 Bill Simmons said during an ESPN B.S. report with Chris Connelly that he’d caught a screening of Jason Reitman‘s Young Adult, which he says will open in December. Simmons said he thinks “it’s tremendous, and here’s what I really liked about it, other than the fact that it was just well done.

“Remember when we said earlier about Tom Cruise being Tom Cruise and how he needed Jerry Maguire [to do that], and how you watched for two hours…? This is Tom Cruise throwing 98 miles an hour. Charlize Theron has never had a movie like that. Monster shoudn’t be her defining movie…she gained 35 pounds and made herself ugly [for that], and she’s beautiful. She’s never had a really good movie that she was really good in in which she was also beautiful.

“And it made me reevaluate her career…that’s how good I thought she was in it. She knows that you know that she knows she’s beautiful. I’m glad she made this movie. People will feel differently about her after they see it.”

I had a brief chat yesterday afternoon with Tabloid director Errol Morris. Very brief. The principal topic was Joyce McKinney, who kidnapped a young Mormon guy she was in love with named Kirk Anderson in 1977 England, and chained him to a bed and had sex with him. Morris’s bemusing doc is a portrait of love, passion and never-say-die determination, among other things.

I reviewed Tabloid at last September’s Toronto Film festival. Here’s part of what I said:

“Who in Errol Morris’s Tabloid can you believe? Or rather, who do you want to believe? Or what slant on the Tabloid story do you feel better about accepting as probable truth? That’s the key consideration, I think. Apart from the fact that everyone should try to see this deliciously entertaining study of a spirited blonde wackazoid who lives on her own, self-created planet.

“I love that Morris almost ignores and certainly doesn’t emphasize the bottom-line motivational truth about the still-kickin’, real-life star of Tabloid.

“This blonde, once-fetching Wyoming gal with a very high IQ became cheaply famous for following her big-lug Mormon boyfriend Kirk Anderson (whom she expected would soon be her husband) to England in ’77 after he ‘disappeared’ (i.e., had been squired away by Mormon church control-freaks) and took him to a country cabin (apparently without much resistance on the big dope’s part) and had some kind of bondage-type sex with this bespectacled, guilt-ridden Mormon Baby Huey (whom you could also describe as a METAPHORICAL-DIAPER-WEARING DOUCHE) for three days.

“Joyce wound up becoming a huge media-sensation after London’s tabloid newspapers began reporting about the blonde hussy and ex-beauty-queen kidnapper and her ‘manacled Mormon.’

“The ironical bottom line is that while Joyce began her young adult life as a girl who wanted to meet a ‘special’ guy and live in a nice cozy house and raise kids, what she really wanted deep down was to be a dominatrix. She didn’t want a husband — she wanted a good dog.

“And so she became famous for tying up Anderson (who’s the size of Gort in The Day The Earth Stood Still, and who has the body of an out-of-shape Sumo wrestler) and having her way with him for 72 hours. And then for her past life as a prostitute-dominatrix in Los Angeles (exposed by London’s Daily Mirror) before the whole Kirk episode occured. And then for having her dog — an actual four-legged one — cloned by some South Korean geneticists.”

Imagine the journalistic standards and criteria that led the Los Angeles Times to go with a front-page banner headline on May 12, 1958 about Peter Lawford, then a 34 year-old moderately famous TV actor (The Thin Man), having possibly fractured his arm in an auto accident on Sunset Blvd. And I mean especially considering that Lawford wasn’t even hospitalized but “went to his personal physician for treatment.”

Imagine the newsroom conversation between the front-page, straight-news editor and entertainment reporter who covered the Lawford accident.

Entertainment reporter: “I’ve got something that might be a page-one headline…you tell me. Peter Lawford was sideswiped by some guy on Sunset and might have fractured his arm.”

News editor: “Good God, Peter Lawford’s been hurt? I watch The Thin Man every week. Is he okay?”

Entertainment reporter: “Yeah, he’s all right. Arm’s in a cast but he’s fine.”

News editor: “But he was…what, run over?”

Entertainment reporter: “No, his car was hit and the impact…”

News editor: “Oh, right…”

Entertainment reporter: “His car was hit by this other guy who fled the scene, and Lawford’s arm was hurt.”

News editor: “Well, we have to send flowers or something. What hospital is he in?”

Entertainment reporter: “He’s not in a hospital. We went to his doctor and had a cast put on and went home.”

News editor: “So he’s okay. So…wait a minute, I don’t get this. Why is this a page-one headline?”

Entertainment reporter: “Maybe it isn’t. I’m just saying Lawford got hurt and he’s….he was MGM’s biggest star in the mid to late ’40s and…okay, he’s doing TV now but he hangs out with Frank Sinatra and is married to the sister of Senator Kennedy from Massachucetts, who might run for president so…we might want to give it some play.”

News editor: “But he didn’t even go to the hospital!”

News editor: “I know, it wasn’t that bad, but…I’m just telling you what happened. If it’s not big enough, fine. We’ll stick it in the movie section.”

News editor: “Let me think it over.”

Last night Steve Coogan and journalist Greg Dyke tore into former News of the World deputy features editor Paul McMullan on “Newsnight,” a BBC talk show.

Yesterday morning In Contention‘s Kris Tapley and Indiewire columnist Anne Thompson briefly revived their Oscar Talk podcast. But it was just a one-off. They announce at the conclusion that they’re going on hiatus again and will return on 8.26.

Tapley and Thompson share some intriguing calls here and there. But Thompson, in my judgment, passes along what feels like contradictory sentiments.

Early on Tapley asks Thompson about the Best Picture and/or Oscar-nomination potential for Terrence Malick‘s The Tree of Life. Thompson mulls it over, hesitates, decides what to say. “I have to tell you that I’m assuming….that Terrence Malick is taken seriously by many of the crafts people in the Academy,” she finally says. “Because [The Tree of Life] is a work of considerable achievement…it’s very hard to call, very hard to tell…[but] the Academy will recognize the craftmanship involved.”

In other words, The Tree of LIfe hasn’t a snowball’s chance in hell of being Best Picture nominated.

Fox Searchlight will presumably push for this honor, and in a better world a movie that swirls around so imaginatively in the oceans of the past and present, like Life, deserves industry-wide praise. But Malick doesn’t make “Academy movies” and he’s never kowtowed to or schmoozed with the Academy membership, so forget it. Especially with mainstream boomer critics like Kenneth Turan and Marshall Fine being foursquare against his latest. The Tree of Life might have a shot at a Best Picture nomination if the ten-nomination standard was still in effect, but with the current system? No way.

The contradiction, it seems to me, comes when Thompson applauds the Academy’s recent Best Picture rule change, which declared that for a film to be Best Picture nominated 5% of Academy membership must put it at the top of their nomination list. She says she’s “thrilled” with this new rule because the ten-nominee experiment of ’09 and ’10 was “a big mistake” because “Academy members were stretching to fill in those ten slots and putting in movies they didn’t love.”

The 10-nomination idea, of course, was to offer some seasonal nomination love to the widely admired also-rans (indie quality faves plus popular audience pics like The Dark Knight) that didn’t have a serious chance of winning. It was an equation that a mentally-challenged person could comprehend — five nominations for movies that members genuinely love, and five nominations for movies they seriously like. How difficult is that? At the end of every year I compose a list of excellent, very good and very respectable achievers, and it always comes to at least 20 if not 25 films. And Academy members couldn’t think of ten?

Thompson acknowledges that it’ll now be “tougher for independent films to get into the top five…consensus and mainstream titles will win the day.” And she’s “thrilled” with that? Yet she’s reluctant to call a spade a spade by declaring that The Tree of Life is exactly the kind of film that is out of the Best Picture race because of the new rules.

Tapley ask Thompson if Super 8 is an Oscar contender? What? Super 8 is a highly enjoyable, quality-calibre, Spielberg-referencing summer monster flick that was never expected to compete in this realm. And yet they go on and on. Tapley: “Could it get nominated?” Thompson: “I don’t think for Best Picture.” And yaddah yaddah.

Thompson also calls it “the ultimate boomer movie” No — Super 8 is the ultimate GenX movie. Apart from those who enjoy the revisiting-the-Spielberg-glory-days aspect, it’s primarily connecting with people who were tweeners and teens and early-college age in the late ’70s or early ’80s…people in their early to late 40s. Only the youngest boomers (a.k.a., the generational tweeners born between boomer and Genx, like President Obama) fit this demo. Most boomers started popping out in ’46 and throughout the ’50s, and are mostly aged 50 to 65.

Tapley asks about Lars von Trier‘s Melancholia, which Thompson calls her “favorite film at Cannes,” and whether Kirsten Dunst, winner of that festival’s Best Actress award, will get any awards action. Short answer: Nope — Von Trier killed Academy interest with his flippant Nazi remarks.

Right after the Melancholia discussion Tapley says that “we’ve got ComicCon coming” in a week and a half and Thompson replies, “From the sublime to the ridiculous!” Good one.

Jason Reitman‘s Young Adult is mentioned, and I don’t agree with their downbeat “uh-oh” tone. Tapley: “I’ve heard Margot at the Wedding comparisons.” (So have I.) Thompson: “That’s not good.” Tapley: “[Charlize Theron is playing] a character you don’t necessarily empathize with like characters in [Reitman’s] other films.”

Wait a minute — a troubled, somewhat curmudgeonly but (to go by the Diablo Cody script I read) highly unusual and interesting female character is “not good”? Why is that? Why can’t we sink into characters who are a little bit thornier than the usual-usual? Isn’t life-reflecting honesty what finally matters in a film? Shouldn’t our ultimate criteria be the quality of writing and directing and acting?

All you need to know about Steven Spielberg‘s War Horse is in this two-minute clip of John Williams‘ score. Gentle, quiet and fluttery. Perhaps a score with a bit less of that Spielberg + Williams emotional chain-pulling we’ve all known over the last 30 years? And then the French horns kicked in, and I knew for sure that this film will be shovelling it big-time.

Williams’ theme suggests pride, heart, struggle, conviction. More to the point, the use of French horns is movie-score shorthand that informs the audience of the following: “Something touching and stirring and triumphant is happening, so it’s time to let those suppressed tears well up and fall down your cheek. Rest assured our film is destined to move you in profound, Oscar-baity ways.”