The Darjeeling Limited, Hotel Chevalier, & Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

The Darjeeling Limited & Hotel Chevalier should be taken together, although there really is no big point to Hotel Chevalier besides being an excuse for a naked Natalie Portman (not that there's anything wrong with that) and getting Peter Sarstedt's Where Do You Go To (My Lovely) stuck in my head whenever I think about this movie. But it's an effective enough mood piece, and completely unnecessary to the plot. Speaking of unnecessary, the main movie, The Darjeeling Limited, frustrates me to no end. Wes Anderson is a very talented guy, but maybe he really does need someone to rein him in with reasonable plots and remotely likable characters, of which there are fewer and fewer in his movies. And with the fewer likable characters, they become much harder with which to identify, and I like the movies less. It's basically been a downhill slide from Rushmore. It's frustrating because he's a talented guy, but he is just too busy distancing himself from reality. Maybe The Fantastic Mr. Fox will be better.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is the sixth movie in the series, and the second directed by David Yates (he of the awesome State of Play and the less awesome but still good The Girl in the Café). As a Harry Potter film, it was pretty good, up with The Prisoner of Azkaban as the best, and far, far better than the Chris Columbus abortions. Oh, man, maybe I should use a different word... Anyway, I really didn't like the ending they chose, as it really lessened the emotional impact, but I bet they move some of it to the next film. And I knew that jump scare was coming, and it still got me. Kudos to you, David Yates, for one of the best ever jump scares. The movie focused a lot on the relationships, which was nice, but it could have stood to have a little more plot with the actual Half-Blood Prince, as the reveal itself just felt extremely perfunctory.