Nobody wants to go back to Hogwarts ever again, but Mike Newell’s Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire is set there, and the one after that, Harry Potter and the Order of the Pheonix (due in ’07, with or without Mira Nair directing), is set there, I think. (Am I wrong?) Hogwarts is confinement…it’s a sentence for grand larceny. Burn it down, blow it up, ransack it, etc. Come to think of it, no one I know really wants to see another Potter movie. The actors love making them because they’re getting paid the big bucks, and Warner Bros. execs will keep making them as long as they keep making money…but nobody of any considered taste or perception wants to see these films anymore. They’re torture, and yet there are several more to come.

Time to grab that hitching post with both hands and bend over…with feeling. Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain, based on a short story by E. Annie Proulx and slated for release by Focus Features in October ’05, is about a couple of semi-closeted gay ranch hands (Heath Ledger, Jake Gyllenhaal) whose love for each other goes through some changes and challenges over a 20-year period (during the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s…around there). Pic began shooting last May and has presumably wrapped; the script is by Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana. The last time this particular “ride ’em cowboy!” aesthetic played on the big screen was in 1969, I think, when Andy Warhol’s Lonesome Cowboys opened in a few art houses. Does anyone remember this thing? It’s sloppily improvised and half-assedly hilarious in a lazy-dopey way. Joe Dallesandro dancing with Taylor Mead to the Beatles “Magical Mystery Tour”….cowboys leaning against hitching posts while doing their ballet warm-up exercises, etc. Not on tape or DVD, apparently…and about as far removed from the ethos of Lonesome Dove as a “western” could possibly be.

USA Today‘s Susan Wloszyna reports that the long-awaited filming of The Fantastic Four, based on the Marvel comic about three guys and a girl who acquire special powers after “getting caught in a cosmic storm in outer space,” is underway in Vancouver. The stars are Chris Evans (Cellular) as the Human Torch, Ioan Gruffudd (King Arthur) as Mr. Fantastic, Jessica Alba (TV’s Dark Angel) as Sue Storm and Michael Chiklis (The Shield) as the Thing. The director is Tim Story (Barbershop) and…whoops, there’s already a warning light flashing. It’s indicated by a sentence in Wloszyna’s story, to wit: “Alas, the Thing’s trademark stogie might be stubbed out, due to PC concerns.” An action-fantasy movie that’s afraid of cigars? What ass-clown decided to ban one of the central thematic acessories of the Schwarzenegger administration? This is the blade of grass revealing the mediocrity of the entire lawn.

The must-see reputation of that romantic zombie comedy Shaun of the Dead (opening 9.24) is a bit overblown, I regret to say. The first third has delicious wit and invention, but the second two-thirds don’t sustain this. The Ain’t-It-Coolers have been far too obsequious in kissing this movie’s ass. Director/co-writer Edgar Wright and writing partner Simon Pegg’s script is about two London slacker-somethings in their late 20s dealing with an onslaught of flesh-eating ghouls. The problem is that the zombies aren’t theatening enough. They walk and react way too slowly, so no live humans are in any kind of serious jeopardy (well, some but not enough) and so the story tension suffers and it all goes down a notch or two. “We are on the cutting edge of zombology,” Pegg claims. And they are, I suppose…in a sense. Especially if you equate “cutting edge” with “check your brain at the door once the second act begins.”

Open call to those interested in sending in VISITORS submissions: in typical fashion, I’ve allowed my haphazard work habits to affect my editing duties, and so I’ve mislaid at least one interesting submission and possibly two. Please send them in again, and to anyone considering sending in something fresh, please do!

False alarms have been sounded before, but Woody Allen’s Melinda and Melinda (Fox Searchlight) has struck at least one critic (Screen Daily‘s Jonathan Romney) as a seriously commendable comeback flick. An intriguing concept — i.e., cutting back and forth between comic and tragic versions of the same story — and a “career best” performance by Radha Mitchell (along with Will Ferrell’s appealingly low-key turn as a Woody-esque nebbishy sort) are the stand-out elements. “After a run of lightweight comedies that caused even hardcore supporters to lose patience, Woody Allen achieves a heartening return to form with his most idiosyncratic and substantial film in some time,” Romney proclaims. “[Pic] finds Allen stretching himself more, and clearly enjoying himself more, than in any film since 1999’s Sweet And Lowdown. Its complex structure and speculative seriousness mean that Melinda and Melinda is closest in Allen’s canon to such heavyweight ensemble pieces as Crimes and Misdemeanors and Hannah And Her Sisters.” Melinda was shown at the San Sebastian Film Festival, but won’t open in the U.S. until 3.18.05.

I’ve heard a little something about Mike Nichols’ Closer (Columbia, 12.3), an eagerly awaited adaptation of Patrick Marber’s wonderfully written play about four romantically-linked Londoners in their 30s (Jude Law, Julia Roberts, Nathalie Portman, Cilve Owen). I personally can’t wait to see the Nichols film (Marber’s play reads like pure silk and seems to drill right into the heart of why lovers put each other through such hell), but it’s been seen and plays “a little cold.” I’ve also been told “it was supposed to be shown earlier but they’ve been tweaking it and tweaking it some more.” I didn’t want to hear this. “But the play is fantastic,” I said to the guy who passed this tidbit along. If you really liked the play, he answered, then you’re probably going to like the film.

New York Times reporter Sharon Waxman is said to be an admirer of I Heart Huckabees writer-director David O. Russell, but her portrait of him in Sunday’s Arts and Leisure section (9.19) didn’t do him any favors. A diary-like observation of what Russell went through during the Huckabees shoot, Waxman’s piece describes a guy who’s a little bit nuts, living on sheer moment-to-moment impulse and, the reader is led to believe, barely in control of himself. (The Chris Nolan headlock story alone will drive this impression home.) For what it’s worth, this is not the David O. Russell I’ve heard about for years and come to know very slightly. The view expressed during a luncheon for talent/press at the Sideways junket in Santa Barbara this morning is that Waxman’s piece was a friendly sandbagging.

Imagine sitting in a theatre and laughing in a half-chuckling, half-hysterical way. And mulling over some basic tenets of eastern mysticism at the same time. And also feeling amazed and throttled by the most relentlessly verbal machine-gun Hollywood comedy since His Girl Friday. And also doing that outboard-motor thing against your lower lip with your right index and middle fingers and going, “Bee, bee, bee, bee, bee…” To say that I loved I Heart Huckabee’s (Fox Searchlight, 10.1) is putting it inadequately. I did love it, yes, but it also freaked me out a tiny bit. About 15 or 20 minutes in, I was feeling relief that I don’t get high any more, because if I was stoned I might have been shifting around in my seat with my palms getting sweaty and going, “Whoa…uh-oh…oh, wow.” Huckabee’s is easily one of the biggest whack-job, out-there films ever distributed by a big studio. “The whole thing is an existential meditation,” Russell told the New York Times. You will go into this movie as one person, and come out a little less constrained, a little more free. In the final analysis any movie that makes you want to find spiritual clarity or satori is, I think, a pretty good thing. Or don’t you agree?

Did ya read that Todd McCarthy review of Shark Tale? Whoa. “The fish aren’t fresh,” he begins in his Toronto Film Festival review. “It has [recently] seemed all but impossible to miss with underwater cartoon fare, but DreamWorks’ latest in-house animated effort finds a way to do just that by basing almost all its ideas on old movies. The odor around this one will result in the wrong kind of b.o. for what was obviously intended as a blockbuster follow-up to the studio’s summer smash Shrek 2.” Will Smith’s lead character, a “hyper-active, jive-talking hustler” named Oscar “proves a tiresomely familiar figure,” he adds. The most amusing voice-actor in the whole enterprise, says McCarthy, is director Martin Scorsese, who “machine-guns his dialogue and whose puffer fish is even drawn with the director’s trademark thick eyebrows.”

In that participle-title chart submitted by Pittsburgh reader George Bolanis that ran last Wednesday, George forgot to include two participle flicks that pre-date all the flicks he listed: Killing Zoe (directed by that great Hollywood Wild Man, Roger Avary) and Chasing Amy (directed by my former boss). And this went right by me.

Peter Rainer has been canned as New York magazine’s film critic and replaced by Entertainment Weekly‘s Ken Tucker, as mandated by mag’s editor-in-chief Adam Moss. Tucker’s an excellent writer, but he’s not part of the monk’s order of sanctified film critics; he’s essentially a rock music critic. This hire follows a trend of bringing in non-monks to fill prestige berths, with examples like (a) Richard Roeper taking Gene Siskel’s place alongside Roger Ebert, (b) L.A. Times TV writer Carino Chocano taking Manohla Dargis’s slot as second-string film critic under Kenny Turan, and (c) a reported interest among Chicago Tribune editors in not wanting to hire a 40ish or 50ish white-guy monk (and to find a younger woman, perhaps) to replace re-assigned Chicago Tribune film critic Mark Caro.