Today’s specials:
- Twitch scoops an intriguing collaboration between The Brothers Quay and Terry Gilliam. Wow. Sounds promising indeed. Go here for news and stills.
- The trailer for Natalie Portman‘s new film with the makers of The Matrix: V for Vendetta.
- What did I say about The Island being built out of parts stolen from other movies?
I suppose that there wouldn’t be such a need on the part of writers like Gopnick (whose articles on being an American in France I quite enjoyed when I subscribed to the New Yorker) to “de-mythologize” Lewis if there weren’t such energy put forth on the part of certain American hagiographer’s to completely whitewash Lewis’s life and discredit the accounts of certain other of his biographers for the strangest, most prurient reasons.
The linchpin for me came when I came across a passage in a certain book on Lewis in which the author believed they had further demolished a certain biographer’s credibility due to his accounts of Lewis and friends regularly enjoying evenings drinking port and smoking cigars. The author’s dismissal of these accounts as guff was based entirely on the devastating testimony of an American college student who had apparently spent a semester or something at Oxford and claimed that the people there would never dare to ruin their enjoyment of port by smoking those foul, icky cigars. I think I actually laughed out loud in the bookstore, and decided I need never bother myself with this writer’s agenda again.
Re: “hagiographer’s”
D’oh. Nothing like leaving a stray apostrophe in a comment on a post with a link to a blog dedicated apostrophe abuse.
I meant to do that… yeah, it was *ironic*.
Yup, Jeff, we agree on most things Potter, I think.
FWIW, I don’t think I’m as bothered by the formula as you seem to be, since part of what makes Rowling’s books so much fun is the way she brings so many genres together (the Billy Bunter style of boarding-school story, the fantasy genre, the mystery genre, and probably others besides), and part of what made reading Goblet of Fire so much fun was trying to guess which of the good guys would turn out to be a bad guy this time, or vice versa.
As it turns out, I guessed correctly at a certain point in the book that is completely missing from the movie — it involved the Marauder’s Map, which never comes up in the film — but even then, the revelations at the end of the book still had their surprises. Alas, due to how severely the story has been compressed, the film doesn’t allow us to savour this mystery quite so much.