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In the previous 13 installments of this series, Harry has had to learn tough lessons on his way to otherworldly wizardry. Now, however, as we begin the next eighteen-part chapter of this long awaited series, Harry emerges as the ensorcelling hocus-poser we’ve all been awaiting. And in one mystic movement, he points to his lightning bolt birthmark, winks at his classmates, and conjures Marm Ugglidty-Bugility into a Blood Prince.

A Blood Prince, for those living in a cave, is much like the Prince of Tides, except of blood. It is an extraordinarily powerful being, with a head, arms, legs, torso, eyes, and teeth all made of blood. Unfortunately for Harry, he forgot to cast the containment spell, so Marm Ugglidty-Bugility quickly starts to drain away.

A little abracadabra later and Harry and friends have half the Blood Prince, formerly Marm Ugglidty-Bugility. At this point, Republicans and the Wiggles are very mad. They begin to protest all the occult and witchcraft. Harry and friends are simultaneously faced with the diabolic armies of Wormawort and the insidious bobos listening to a man named Rush over his spooky black-arts invention: the radiator.

Do Harry and friends find the other half of Marm Ugglidty-Bugility ? Do the legions of Wormawort and Rush join forces? Do the Wiggles put out another album? This review can’t give everything away, but it is fair to say that in time Harry and friends learn some important lessons, spend a lot of time pondering their fate, particularly the question of Harry’s mortality in the 50^th and final part of this movie saga, and make lots of whooshing noises with their magic wands. You’ll be bewitched by this charming and wonderful tale. And you’ll come away with an uncanny prophecy of your own: Harry’s tricks will be back for more next summer!<–>

Pulao, Jayu, and I saw the worstest of worst movies at a friend’s house the other night. I saw the box at the movie store and picked it up of my own free will, even though the title was I’m Reed Fish, which should have told me all I needed to know. I saw the funny kid from the short-lived TV show Undeclared and the girl from Gilmore Girls, arm in arm, smiling up at me from the cover. They looked so happy, but it was all a lie.

The IMDB Plot Synopsis reads “This plot synopsis is empty” which turned out to be a scarily accurate description. You learn, after about a half hour, that the film you are watching is really a film within a film, directed and screened by the main character, Reed Fish, to an audience of characters in the film, some of which play themselves, and some of which are played by each other. Yeah.

There’s a “zorse,” which is a striped horse–half horse, half zebra–and the zorse really stole the show–although it was only onscreen for 24 seconds, he elicited a pleasant “huh,” and then a slight intake of breath that almost led to a chuckle, which was the emotional highlight of the film.

I’m Reed Fish is the recipient of two awards too many, by which I mean the U.S. Comedy Arts Festival Film Discovery Jury Award in two categories–Best Actor and Best Actor Award. So that’s one award too many. It also grossed 3,130 dollars too many, if you know what I mean. If what I mean is that it grossed $3,000, which is one of the greater scams of the century.

I’m Reed Fish proves Einstein’s special theory of relativity, which shows there’s no absolute measurement of time, but that time depends on an observer’s position, speed, and on the soulless quotient when measuring the delivery of inane dialogue, so that the 93-minute running time advertised on the box easily stretched to 6 or 7 hours in the space-time fabric of the couch where we sat.

Anybody seen any bad movies lately? Worst. Movie. Ever?

P.S. More I’m Reed Fish reviews: “Compared to “Princess Diaries 2″, another PG movie I saw this weekend, “I’m Reed Fish” was easily the more enjoyable film.“

The show was spectacular and high, high energy. I danced my butt off. M.I.A. rhymed from atop the speakers, crowd-surfed, and, at one point, climbed from the stage to the balcony without missing a beat.

For the song “20 Dollar” M.I.A. said, “Turn off the lights! I’m going to take you to Africa.”

The house lights went down, leaving M.I.A.’s sparkling podium and the screen behind her DJ, which was filled with simple pixels of arcade-game soldiers, at either end of the screen, shooting at each other. Their bullets were dotted white lines. The explosions, vintage Centipede. It looked like a more violent version of Pong.

The song itself is heavy, with electronically drenched guitar loops playing what sounds like a dirge (it’s actually a tricked out version of New Order’s “Blue Monday.”) The titular verse:

Do you know the cost of AK’s up in Africa?
20 dollars ain’t shit to you
But that’s how much they are

The chorus takes the lyrics, if not the melody per se, from the Pixies song “Where is My Mind?”: “With your feet in the air and your head on the ground . . . you’ll ask yourself: where is my mind?”

Put the sound, the lyrics, and the video together with M.I.A.’s palpable on-stage charisma and you get a lot of raw power. But to what use?

Okay, I get it, a little. I like taking the Pixies lyrics, which resonate with a lot of the audience at First Ave (and anybody who’s seen Fight Club or a number of other movies that use “Where is My Mind?” on the soundtrack), and take whatever Frank Black was talking about (drugs? the existential angst of life? fucked-upedness for fucked-upedness’s sake?) and turn it to a situation with more material consequences. “You know what’s really crazy?” M.I.A. seems to say, “Violence in Africa.”

But all that was really clear from the song’s performance was that Africa is dark, crazy, and violent. This is, I think, the generalized opinion of a lot of people anyway—I’ve heard water-cooler talk in the Twin Cities where co-workers said, “It’s all crazy tribes fighting each other in Africa, won’t ever stop.”

The stereotype works against what we might assume M.I.A’s point to be—to help stop the violence in a specific place like Sudan or Somalia. As one of my concert-going friends said afterward, how can you tell the difference between a critique of violence and an avowal of it?

Some of the lyrics clue you in: “And the leaders all around cracking up,” “looting just to get by,” “little boys are acting up.” You can get another hint when you visit her MySpace page and see that M.I.A.’s top friend, out of 21,000-some friends, is a fundraiser, “Education for Darfur.”

But maybe most importantly, something approaching awareness (even a vague awareness) could do wonders for the people in the crowd, myself included to the nth degree, who might be a hell of a lot more likely to surf Metacritic than read a NYT piece relating to the Darfur Conflict.

They were both amazing shows. But the venues were like apples and oranges, (literally) like downtowns and suburban malls. Specifically, like First Avenue and Myth the Nightclub. Going with the food simile again, more like apples (if you like apples) and something bad; let’s say spoiled milk.

Regina Spektor played at Myth, in Maplewood (a suburb 15 minutes north of St. Paul). Myth is next door to a shopping mall, has tall boxy walls, and looks, from the outside, like it used to be a Home Depot, a Home Depot with a giant Vegas-style sign showing a fiery “M.”

They frisked me on the way in, and though they were gentle, I wasn’t into it. Digital cameras were banned, we were informed. Before the show started, a girl in red was escorted out, why I don’t know. In the middle of the set, two burly bouncers pushed their way through the crowd on the balcony, where I was, and scanned the crowd on the floor, barking to each other: “Down there!” and “Third row!” Who they were after this time, I don’t know, but the cumulative effect was a lot like prison, with better décor.

I’d never been to First Avenue, the fairly-famous nightclub where Spoon played (it’s featured in Prince’s Purple Rain), but I liked the vibe a lot better. (For Minneapolitans, it felt to me like the CC Club with a stage.)

First Ave was dark, noisy, and relaxed. I can’t imagine that digital cameras or much of anything was banned, and as I stood on the balcony by the stairs, I could barely read the “Stairs must be kept clear for fire hazard” sign through the throng of people cluttering the stairs, hazarding fires. The drinks were good and more affordable. I think I recognized half the people there (although that could have been because we all seemed to wear the same rectangular glasses and Converse sneakers, which tends to make people look familiar in the dark). Tidy, I know, but First Ave felt like the opposite of Myth.

One last thing: although Myth had a stilted vibe for me, Regina Spektor was anything but. She was amazing, full of soul, once beating time on a wooden chair as she sang and played piano, the whole show an accomplished mix of precision and fun.

Myth the Nightclub
[where: 3090 Southlawn Dr., St Paul, MN 55109]
First Avenue & 7th St Entry
[where: 701 1st Ave N., Minneapolis, MN 55403]

Two episodes in, I unequivocally love this show.  Reaper makes Chuck pale in comparison.  The two share a basic concept—male underachievers who unwittingly enter a world of high intrigue and danger—but where Chuck rips off Alias hardcore, Reaper more gently takes off from Buffy International Airport.  On his twenty-first birthday, Sam Oliver (Bret Harrison) fends off his suddenly solicitous parents and heads to The Work Bench, where he punches a clock with his goonish best friend Sock (Tyler Labine) and love interest Andi (Missy Peregrym).  After a number of mysterious occurrences—Sam develops telekinesis and has odd visions of a burning house—a revelation appears, in the form of an unctuous managerial type (Ray Wise) who happens to be the devil.  Before Sam was even conceived, the devil says, his father was dying; to save his life, he and his wife promised the devil the soul of their firstborn.  Drafted by Satan, Sam becomes Hell’s bounty hunter, forced to track down escaped, malevolent souls in an entertaining fashion.

To return to the Chuck comparison:  The shows do share a concept, but whereas Chuck appears purchased into existence, Reaper is that concept as produced by Kevin Smith and the crew from Mystery Science Theater.  (By the way, Kevin Smith produced and directed the pilot.)  Reaper’s biggest asset is its ramshackle charm.  The special effects are delightfully cheesy, and the cast eschews high thespianism in favor of a laid-back, slacker camaraderie and charm.  Ray Wise has drawn attention, deservedly, for his turn as the devil, but my favorite character is Sock.  The character is pure stock (see Morgan on Chuck) and usually pure annoyance, but Labine manages to make me enjoy his presence.  Probably he got an assist from Smith, who in his movies did the same for Jay, but still, that’s quite a talent.  Reaper is my clear favorite this fall.

Journeyman grade:  C +

Of the two new shows that bracket Heroes on NBC’s Monday lineup, Chuck is the one that dares to ask, “What if Sydney Bristow didn’t mean to become a secret agent?”  Chuck (Zachary Levi) is a computer tech at Buy More who hasn’t gotten over the time his college roommate Bryce stole his girlfriend.  Eventually Bryce graduated to stealing government intel, and emails the goodies to Chuck just before dying at the hands of Jayne from Firefly.  Somehow the intel downloads into Chuck’s brain, and suddenly Chuck is the object of a frantic government search conducted by Jayne (here named Casey) and Sarah, who’s as badass as an Erika Christensen doppelganger can be.

Journeyman is the show that dares to ask…I don’t know, “What if you couldn’t pick a decade to live in?”  Dan Vasser (Kevin McKidd) is a newspaper reporter with a checkered romantic and family history.  His wife Katie (Gretchen Egolf) used to date his brother Jack (Reed Diamond), back before Dan’s wife-to-be Livia (Moon Bloodgood) died in a plane crash.  Or did she?  One day, with no warning, Dan starts shifting through time.  Livia may have something to do with it; she may not have died in the plane crash.  Dan saves the life of a guy named Neal, then saves the lives of Neal’s wife and son—from Neal, who was going to kill them.  Meanwhile, all the time shifting makes his family think he’s on drugs, and causes some tension at home.

We may have a winner, but only one.  Thus far, Chuck manages to capture all the goofy excitement of Alias without the overbearing angst or Byzantine plotting that crippled the series from season 3 on.  There’s a winning scene where Sarah (Yvonne Strzechowski) takes out several NSA agents on a dance floor while Chuck bops happily, unaware that malevolent forces are plotting his destruction.  As with Alias, the pilot focuses on the schism between Chuck’s daily life and his secret activities.  That daily life includes Chuck’s friend Morgan (Joshua Gomez); his sole function is to remind viewers that Chuck is a nerd, so I hope he’s the series’s second casualty.  As Chuck, Levi has a genial, earnest, slightly melancholy presence that lends itself nicely to the story of someone caught by forces beyond his control.  Chuck could stand to distance itself a little more from the Alias template, but I have high hopes from this first episode.

Journeyman doesn’t fare so well.  Look, I sat through 16 Years of Alcohol through Kevin McKidd, but for god’s sake, the guy has got to start reading scripts instead of contracts.  Dan shifts from 1997 to 2007, and somehow no one in 1997 notices that he’s suddenly ten years older?  What is he, Goldie Hawn?  And in 2007, Katie and Jack stage an intervention after Dan suddenly goes AWOL, twice.  Okay, he also caused a car wreck, but they could try taking him the hospital before assuming he’s on drugs.  (There had better be some history to explain Katie and Jack’s response.)  I like that we don’t learn everything right away—how Dan and Katie ended up together, why the time shifts are happening—but even with those questions unresolved, the breakneck plot pacing overshadows McKidd’s best attempts to lend Dan some individuality.  There are several good ideas here, many of them recycled from other shows, but the creator/writer, Kevin Falls, needs to juggle the plot points more adeptly before Journeyman will be solid sci-fi.

God, the WB lives.  Its teen-centric programming philosophy rises again in the form of Gossip Girl, a nighttime soap (based on a YA book series) about fabulously rich New York City teenagers who don’t get along, or have just met.  The hive’s former queen is Serena Van Der Woodsen, a (reformed?) bad girl who ran away to boarding school in Connecticut after sleeping with:  Nate, the boyfriend since kindergarten of Serena’s (now ex-) best friend:  Blair, the crowd’s reigning queen who is possibly opening her orbit to include:  Jen, the school’s new girl, daughter of a grunge-era rocker, and sister to:  Dan, who gets a crush on Serena at first sight.  Also featured:  Chuck.  Every show about high school has an obligatory psychotic jackass.  He’s this one’s.

The hook of this show is Gossip Girl, a faceless, nameless blogger who chronicles the main characters’ angst and posturing.  Gossip Girl is voiced by Veronica Mars herself, Kristen Bell, which is why I bothered tuning in, and now I can knowledgeably say it:  Bell’s talents are wasted here.  Gossip Girl had maybe ten lines, and though Bell gave it her all (check out her intonation on the show’s title if you care), it’s still barely a legitimate paycheck.

The rest of the show is just 09ers being 09ers, and though the writers try to give them some depth, I keep thinking of Paris Hilton.  Gossip Girl would probably be more interesting if its characters were in their twenties—a little more mature, capable of greater responsibility, and part of a social circle that didn’t exist just because they all went to the same school.  There’s some serious stuff here, including a sibling’s attempted suicide and not one but two near-rapes, but it’s all safely ensconced within the realm of spoiled-teen melodrama.  I like the idea of Gossip Girl’s meticulously blogging each power clash and petty victory as if they were regional defense pacts, but I’d like it more if those victories had consequences beyond a better seat at the lunch table.  Pass.

I hardly needed to watch Back to You to know what I thought.  Assembled on set from parts made elsewhere, this is the sitcom that unites Kelsey Grammer and Patricia Heaton as themselves…I mean, as a pompous local-news anchor who returns to his old station in disgrace, and a brittle local-news anchor who doesn’t like having her turf invaded.  (Respectively.)  The marketing pitch was probably “You know what you’re getting into.”

I was surprised, though, that I liked it.  Or at least I was entertained.  It’s kind of like Ron Howard’s adaptation of The Da Vinci Code:  though it’s not very original and a lot of it is preposterous, it moves along with confidence and efficiency.  I could see the jokes coming about ten seconds ahead of delivery, but the fact that they always arrived on cue was impressive by itself.

Maybe I’ve just lowered my standards since watching K-Ville.

Anyway, the twist, which producers apparently asked TV writers not to reveal ahead of time, is not that Grammer and Heaton—I’m not even going to bother with the names of their “characters”—had sex, but that their one-night stand bore fruit in the form of a daughter.  I caught this one ten seconds ahead of delivery, but really, that’s slow on the uptake.  What else could it have been?  The chemistry that local-news anchors are required to feign with each other was always going to be the motherlode for this show, so it’s not surprising that Back to You wants to literalize that chemistry in the form of a moppet.  Grammer (or at least his character) meets the girl for the first time on the day of his return broadcast, and it looks like the revelation throws him for a loop.

It’s nice that Back to You wants to show the softer side of its unpleasant leads.  On the other hand—well, I’m with Entertainment Weekly:  there’s so much to be said about local-news hell that I’d rather the show skip the well-trod avenues of parental travails.  Still, the fact that I want this show to do anything at all besides leave the air as soon as possible?  A bit of a surprise.  Not a replacement Veronica Mars—oh, hell no—but if it makes it to syndication, I’d admit to watching an episode here and there.

Now that Veronica Mars is off the air, I have to rebuild my TV-viewing slate from scratch. What better way to do that than sampling all of this fall’s new series? And what better way to alleviate my pain—because, come on, most of those shows are going to suck—than by warning other hapless viewers away from the networks’ lesser offerings?

First up is K-Ville. Premiering September 17 on Fox, this procedural (strike one! Like we need to see any more from that genre) concerns the efforts of the New Orleans police to maintain law and order post-Katrina. Marlin Boulet (Anthony Anderson) saw his partner Charlie Pratt (Derek Webster) run off amid rescue efforts, and his wife and daughter decamp to Atlanta in the midst of rebuilding. Boulet is out to clean up his city, he’s determined to win his wife back, and he won’t let his new, attitudinal partner Trevor Cobb (Cole Hauser) or overbearing supervisor (John Carroll Lynch) slow him down.

If I could select one police procedural to represent that television genre to aliens from another galaxy…K-Ville would not be it. New Orleans circa 2007 is a topic that could carry a show on its own—no he’s-a-cop-on-the-edge-of-a-nervous-breakdown-who-doesn’t-play-by-the-rules bullshit required—but the pilot is so packed with information that the city’s history, culture, and current state of devastation are relegated to references of comic-book depth. (Boulet really likes gumbo.) Jonathan Lisco, the show’s writer-creator, must have taken the crash-and-burn of last year’s serialized dramas to heart; he refuses to defer any information beyond hour’s end. This makes it hard to get invested in the characters. From the start, Boulet suspects Cobb of lying about his past; by episode’s end, Cobb’s past is revealed, and while I won’t spoil the surprise, I’ll bet we can count on him to deliver cynical one-liners and self-lacerating judgments, which I’d rather just supply myself. Anderson and Hauser are okay actors (probably), but the writing is so flat (and the direction so ADHD) that they can’t invest these guys with any depth; they’re reduced to marks-and-cue-cards acting, which is probably all that K-Ville wants of them anyway.

Really, K-Ville (it’s short for “Katrina-ville”) is less a procedural than a shoot-em-up, but the action is awful. In the first of two car chases, the show cuts directly from Boulet and Cobb, roaring down the street after the guy who shot Boulet’s neighbor, to the scene where they find the shooter’s vehicle crashed and overturned. The whole point of a car chase is to see the vehicles crash and overturn; if you don’t have the budget to do your crash right, spend it elsewhere. Like, try pretending you’re serious about your New Orleans setting and investing some script dollars accordingly. This isn’t a keeper.