thursday is no bad or nasty news day here in my hood

so let's start off with this film review (for cathy and jean and dottie and ok, me too). and oh, by the way, i LOVED the first two movies unlike this reviewer

'Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire'

After three attempts, the latest film in the series finally captures the magic that made J.K. Rowling's books such a phenomenon.
By Kenneth Turan
Times Staff Writer
November 17, 2005

It's taken them long enough, but the movies have finally gotten Harry Potter right. Despite the reported $2.7 billion earned by the series' three previous attempts, it's not until "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire" that a film has successfully re-created the sense of stirring magical adventure and engaged, edge-of-your-seat excitement that has made the books such an international phenomenon.Viewed as a whole, the Potter movies are shaping up to be a fascinating experiment in big-budget filmmaking. Using the same J.K. Rowling source material, the same screenwriter (the excellent Steve Kloves), largely the same cast but a variety of directors, the Potter pictures have ended up reflecting the sensibility of their filmmaker more than that of the author.With the reliably commercial Chris Columbus in charge, the first two Potters were soulless but safe-as-houses copies of the books. The gifted Alfonso Cuarón attempted to escape the bonds of the conventional in "The Prisoner of Azkaban" but succeeded only in part. It has fallen to the veteran Mike Newell, anxious, in his own words, "to break out of this goody-two-shoes feel," to make the first Harry Potter film to be wire-to-wire satisfying.Newell is an impeccable craftsman with four decades of cinematic experience, a veteran less concerned with projecting a lofty auteur sensibility than giving the best of his films, from the chilling "Dance With a Stranger" to the comic "Four Weddings and a Funeral," what they need from a practical point of view.The first thing Newell has added to the mix is a welcome sense of ownership of the book's setting. Having been a boarding school boy himself, Newell, the series' first British director, displays a comfort level with the world of Hogwarts that comes with knowing it in his bones.Newell works equally well with the preexisting cast and the film's new British actors, principally a convincing Ralph Fiennes as the dread Lord Voldemort, a comic Miranda Richardson as weaselly journalist Rita Skeeter and, best of all, Brendan Gleeson as the irrepressible Mad-Eye Moody, the latest in Hogwarts' notably eccentric series of Defense Against the Dark Arts instructors.The presence of Voldemort in the creepy-crawly flesh signals that this is the first Potter movie to have a PG-13 rating for "sequences of fantasy violence and frightening images." Fortunately, "Goblet" is not an R-rated movie trying to pass as something tamer but a genuine PG-13, pleasantly shivery but in no way savage or sadistic...........