Reel Life- Flim Review: Harry Potter-Prisoner of Azkaban

ZZZZZZ, Hmmm, yawn oh the movie is over, gee I didn't even know. What an excercise in boredom.

Like most other film series, “Harry Potter” just doesn't get better. The now internationally renown Warner Bros. movies of J.K. Rowling’s best-selling fantasies have become darker, gloomier and lessy funny over a period of three and a half years. This show diverges from the fun that Dobby brought to the last.

The third installment, “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban,” is the least satisfying to date. At 145 minutes, it is also the shortest and somehow manages to seem like the longest ever. This one is also a bit divergent from the book... which I'm not clear is a good or a bad thing... making the movie longer may have continued my boredom or it may have included better aspects of the book. The picture has a grimier feel with duller, and realistic(gloomy london) colors. This plummets the audience and the film in a reality, as opposed to the flights of magical fancy that the first two took viewers on. Personally I have beef with that corny rasta dead dread head crap on the bus... hmmm once again using my Jamaican culture to make wholesale commercial garbage. During its final and ever so predictable third, the script script toys with the paradoxes of time travel and the mystery of déjà vu.

“Azkaban” opens with Harry the 13-year-old boy wizard (Daniel Radcliffe) being tormented by the vile Aunt Marge (Pam Ferris), who insults his dead parents (“bad blood will out”) and announces that she’d like to send him to an orphanage. Although he’s forbidden to use magic at home, Harry can’t abide the verbal abuse. He punishes Marge by transforming her into a helium-like balloon that escapes into the sky. All the exposition is dealt with briskly. The two major scenes – the pub talk and the Syrius Black revealled – move quickly(thank the lord). But yet it all seems to lack a certain zest and appeal, one is not brought into or enthralled in Harry's world at all, hmmm no escapism here.

Anyway the kids are getting big, the girlies are getting busty and before we know it Harry Potter may well be Harry Pothead or some magical British version of "Dawson's Creek"(shudder).