Archive for July, 2007
We now interrupt our Potter coverage to bring you geek news of another flavor:
First Star Trek casting announcement made at Comic Con!
Zachary Quinto plays the sinister brain-eating Sylar on Heroes (which Courtney and I got ourselves hooked on last year) and does a marvelous job of creating an utterly creepy character you love to hate. This year we’ve seen Sylar as a somewhat nerdy watchmaker, a distressed son (he’d fit right in at the Bates Motel), a brilliant but raving lunatic, and a scheming arch-villain. I figure somewhere in that range, he can do Spock. He looks just right, too, so I’m pretty excited.
Plus, Leonard Nimoy is coming back to play an older Spock. Please let this one be good…we’re due a good one, right?
Categories: Star Trek, movies
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I only took part of The Leaky Cauldron’s massive prediction quiz, but I looked back today at what I had guessed. Of minor interest, but I thought I’d stick it up for the heck of it. The link isn’t working anymore, so don’t click there, click here:
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Categories: Harry Potter
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Ohhh, I cried.
And laughed. And cheered. And loved every minute of it.
What a fantastic send-off for Harry Potter. I found Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows entirely satisfactory and continue to be completely in love with all my favorite characters. Ms. Rowling has my heartfelt respect.
But following this cut lies a discussion of the people and plot of Deathly Hallows. If you don’t want to be spoiled, read no further!
YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!
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Categories: Harry Potter, books
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Why yes, I was at a bookstore at midnight last Friday. (Again.) How did you guess?
My dad and I had been planning to find a release party of some kind since I decided when I was going to come home this summer, so the only question (and not one we were quick to answer) was which bookstore to go to. We learned that B. Dalton in the mall would open at midnight only to sell the book; that all Books-a-Millionses were opening at 9p.m. with various festivities, etc. So we picked a Books-a-Million in town. At the last minute, Middle Brother decided he wanted to come too, and Youngest Brother suddenly caved in to peer pressure. We all caved a little more when my mother (who was not going) suggested that we should go in costume. I hadn’t been planning to, but we pulled out gowns from a couple of college graduations (mine and my cousin’s) and the accessories from a Harry Potter costume Mom made for one of the boys sometime in the last decade. We looked quite fetching.
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Youngest Brother’s choice of headgear reflects his personality and the back of his shirt has a Dumbledore quote about how music is a magic greater than anything taught at Hogwarts.
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Categories: Harry Potter, books, home
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How to Spell the Spells. NPR’s Talk of the Nation interviews the Cheryl Klein, continuity editor for the American editions of Harry Potter. I think that would have been an amazing job! (I also offer this as a little look into the editorial world I’m hoping to join.)
The Voice of Harry Potter Knows All. The New York Times talks to Jim Dale, the actor who has done all of the HP audio books.
Categories: Harry Potter
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Poke took a small mallet to my stubborn skull last night and managed to convince me that this perhaps isn’t a Really Great Movie. It might not even count as a good movie. But golly gee, it was a lot of fun!
My low expectations helped PotC 3 a great deal. The first movie is so good and the second so bad that it was hard not to imagine a downward spiral. On the contrary, #3 manages to take the tangled plots it inherits from #2 and, if not untie the knots, at least it pulls them into a more intriguing sort of disarray.
Of course, nothing can be resolved until it gets a little more tangled, but where #2 helps #3 is in conditioning the audience to expect everyone to betray everyone else at regular intervals. Everyone makes deals with the devil — usually represented by the capitalistic face of the East India Trading Company. Even the sea-demon himself, Davy Jones, is in their control.
Thankfully, the two biggest monsters from #2, the kraken and the possibility of a Jack-Elizabeth-Will love triangle are both shown to be dead. The latter is barely mentioned, though Elizabeth strongly implies that she kissed Jack only as a diversion while she cuffed him to the sinking Black Pearl. The big tension between Will and Elizabeth turns out to be the strain of keeping secrets (about their various betrayals, naturally) and general mistrust (natural consequence of said betrayals) rather than romantic infidelity — which puts the emphasis on whether they can continue to love each other, not on whether she might like Jack better. I found this considerably more interesting.
As for Cap’n Jack Sparrow
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Categories: movies
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In the tradition of HP flicks, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix is good fun, not great cinema. It isn’t Lord of the Rings a la Peter Jackson, and it isn’t Star Wars in 1977. But as entertainment goes, it’s not bad.
The star-studded adult cast are in fine form, led by Imelda Staunton’s loathsomely perky Professor Umbridge. A vision in pink, she makes a fantastic stand-in for every teacher you ever wanted a centaur herd to trample. Alan Rickman plays the overbearing bat with his usual gusto; McGonagall, Trelawney, and Hagrid are spot-on.
The snake-like face of Ralph Fiennes’s Voldemort appears briefly in a number of dream sequences, but not until the final battle does he get anything that could be called a scene — those who find him utterly hideous don’t have to look at him for long. (And trust me, water and glass and any number of distractions are flying in all directions by the time Voldemort shows up.)
Helena Bonham Carter’s cameo as Bellatrix Lestrange has been well over-publicized, but she chews the scenery nicely.
Michael Gambon’s Dumbledore continues to bother me. The problems with the character are mitigated because this is the book in which Harry can’t figure out why Dumbledore is avoiding him. The flailing and yelling I objected to in the last film aren’t an issue here (perhaps due to the change in directors), but the presence, the voice, and even the costume (not Gambon’s fault, I concede) are all wrong. The half-moon spectacles that are synonymous with the character don’t even put in an appearance — I will need my memory jolted on whether they have been used since the part was re-cast.
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Categories: Harry Potter, movies
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