Harry Potter
Jasper Rees
Wordsworth would not be happy. The bard of Grasmere once wrote a poem deploring the new-fangled habit of tourists wandering about the lakes with a book in hand. “A practice very common,” he harrumphed, before crossing out the whole poem. The preference, as he saw it, should be to engage directly with the landscape rather have one’s responses fed to us through the prism of literature. Writing Britain goes one better (or worse): a tour of the whole island and its islands as seen through its writers, you can travel from Daphne Du Maurier’s Cornwall to Dr Johnson’s Hebrides entirely through the Read more ...
theartsdesk
Over the year we have reviewed many a new film and television drama in theartsdesk's Disc of the Day slot. As our series of DVD recommendations comes round to the movies, we have chosen to concentrate not on individual titles but box sets. For completists we suggest everything from Harry Potter to Ken Loach, The Avengers to Tarkovsky. If you want more Chaplin or Eisenstein in your life, here, too, is a good place to start. These collections and collations are a worthwhile investment for serious and playful fans of film and drama alike. The great thing about a box set - be it three discs of Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Hollywood has turned the special effect into a birthright for a generation of movie-goers. “How did they do that?” is no longer a question you hear in the multiplex. In the theatre it’s another thing entirely. Whatever the reception for the show in its entirety, the musical version of The Lord of the Rings did contain one remarkable illusion in which Bilbo Baggins vanished before the audience’s eyes. Even Derren Brown had no idea how it was achieved. The architect of that effect, and countless others in a long career in the theatre, was Paul Kieve.Kieve’s newest challenge is also his Read more ...
Jasper Rees
So. That’s it then. It’s taken just shy of 20 hours to work through the lot, a gestation spread across a decade. Every British actor in the firmament has visited the Leavesden set to chew on some of the computer-generated furniture. Several trillion techie hours have been racked up on achieving SFX which wouldn’t have been even a twinkle in a geek’s eye when JK Rowling first conceived the seven-part tale of a boy wizard. And a trio of young actors cast before puberty have missed out on a decade’s worth of regular schooling. Instead they’ve been boarding at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Read more ...
Matt Wolf
That’s the question New York theatre folk are asking this morning, following the announcement of the 2011 Tony nominations, honouring the best of the Broadway theatre season just gone. Radcliffe was thought to be a dead cert for a nomination for his performance as the careerist window washer in the smash-hit revival of Frank Loesser’s How To Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, at the Al Hirschfeld Theatre. And there were many who thought Radcliffe would go on to win the trophy on 12 June, just as another visiting British film star, Catherine Zeta-Jones, did for her Broadway Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Harry Potter has devoured entire childhoods, swallowed adolescences whole. Not to mention swathes of many a middle age. There are those of us who have read all 2,765,421 words (I checked) of the seven-part saga out loud to their children. Adults who would sooner use diminishing brain-cell capacity to store more pertinent information can tell you who teaches Muggle Studies at Hogwarts, the uses of gillyweed and the difference between a grindylow and a blast-ended skrewt. There is of course nothing more to be said. Review Harry Potter? You might as well review global warming, or Bill Gates’s Read more ...
theartsdesk
There's a strong distaff presence in theartsdesk's third DVD round-up. The headline film is Kathryn Bigelow's superb war thrillerThe Hurt Locker, currently mopping up awards in the US and a hot favourite for the Oscars. Also in the mix: Audrey Tautou as the redoubtable doyenne of French fashion in Anne Fontaine's Coco Before Chanel and Julie Christie in Sally Potter's avant-garde 1983 debut feature The Gold Diggers. Fear not, however: a robust testosterone level is maintained by Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds, by the hit stag-party comedy The Hangover and by Antichrist, Lars Read more ...