terratogen wrote:

Don't these guys have better things to do or critique? Maybe they want to kill the bastard themselves... I'm having trouble picturing Stephen King having a soft spot for Harry Potter.

In his memoirs, published in 2000, King included a book list. He explains:

These are the best books I've read over the last there or four years ... As you scan this list, remember that I'm not Oprah and this isn't my book club. These are the ones that worked for me, that's all. But you could do worse, and a good many of these might show you some new ways of doing your work. Even if they don't, they're apt to entertain you. They certainly entertained me.

The list contains approximately 90 books, nearly all of them fiction; it includes all three Harry Potter books that were "in the zone" for consideration at that time.

RE: Don't kill Harry Potter, authors urge Rowling - Yahoo! News

In a jubilee year, when all the old Mozart myths come rising out of the ground where scholars have tried to bury them, the usefulness of “Don Giovanni” is that it puts a stake through the heart of the chocolate-box Mozart, the car-radio Mozart, the Mozart-makes-you-smarter Mozart. If the opera were played in bus stations or dentists’ waiting rooms, it would spread fear. It would probably cause perversion in infants. No matter how many times you hear the punitive D-minor chord with which the opera begins, or the glowering diminished seventh that heralds the arrival of the stone statue of the Commendatore (“Don Giovanni, you invited me to dinner, and I have come”), it generates a certain mental panic. Mozart’s harmonies of disaster are all the more terrifying because they break through the frame of what purports to be a saucy comedy about an aristocratic seducer -- a successor to “Figaro.” The fact that “Figaro” is actually quoted in the score -- “Non più andrai” is one of the airs that the Don enjoys at dinner, just before the Commendatore arrives -- suggests that Mozart is consciously subverting his reputation as a supplier of ambient musical pleasure.

THE STORM OF STYLE

Mr. Bloom, as is his custom, leaps about, trying to overcome his incurable blandness.

I haven't seen this film, but this line was amusing.

Review of 'Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest'

Opens on Friday in NYC, LA, SF, Boston, and Seattle. Opens in more cities on 14 July and even more on 28 July.

Variety didn't care too much for it during the Cannes screening. Various others seem to be relatively ambivalent, saying it's destined to be a cult classic despite its talkiness, its density, and a general failure to satisfy the expectations attendant upon any Dick adaptation. And yet, according to the 300-plus votes on IMDB to date, it gets a rating equal to that of Minority Report.

Hollywood Reporter said:

Audiences compelled by professional obligation will be this film's most likely outreach, with those sitting in the middle of the aisles most likely to last through the duration. Commercially, "A Scanner Darkly" should be quickly remaindered to video.

They also noted that:

This film involved a painstaking animation process that required up to 500 hours to create one minute of screen time.

This is egregious, not unlike the recent comments about the rendering of "Cars." If this were being done serially, that works out to nearly six years of continuous processing. If IMDB's data on filming dates is correct, and the scenes were filmed in May-June 2004, then clearly there was some parallel processing going on.

They might as well have gotten 150,000 286's and spent two years generating every frame in parallel.

More likely, the figure does reflect serial processing, except that "up to 500 hours" reflects an extreme outer bound, when in fact the average processing time was closer to 150 hours per screen minute.

A Scanner Darkly, from Warner Independent Pictures

Especially in his westerns, Ford loved to create bustling, busy interiors full of life and feeling, and he was equally fond of positioning human figures, alone or in small, vulnerable groups, against vast, obliterating landscapes. Shooting from the indoors out is his way of yoking together these two realms of experience — the domestic and the wild, the social and the natural — and also of acknowledging the almost metaphysical gap between them, the threshold that cannot be crossed.

Ernest Hemingway once said that all of American literature could be traced back to one book, Mark Twain's "Huckleberry Finn," and something similar might be said of American cinema and "The Searchers."

'The Searchers': How the Western Was Begun

How did a show with almost universal critical support, a star creator and a fan base strong enough to force HBO's hand end up on the chopping block in the first place?

Reached at home on Monday, Mr. Milch sounded tired of talking about the whole thing. But then, typically, he did, arguing that the entire idea of bringing closure to a series was egotistical, paraphrasing a William James idea: "The world does not begin or end with the expiration of any living thing. It just becomes an exercise in bitterness or self-congratulation."

'Deadwood' Gets a New Lease on Life

The book is replete with fascinating, if fearfully context-dependent, travel tips. If you are forced to lie about being a Muslim, claim you're from Indonesia, a Muslim nation few non-Indonesian Muslims know much about. Open land undefiled by sheep droppings has most likely been mined. If you're taking your donkey to high altitudes, slice open its nostrils to allow greater oxygen flow. Don't carry detailed maps, since they tend to suggest 007 affinities. If, finally, you're determined to do something as recklessly stupid as walk across a war zone, your surest bet to quash all the inevitable criticism is to write a flat-out masterpiece. Stewart did. Stewart has. "The Places in Between" is, in very nearly every sense, too good to be true.

'The Places in Between,' by Rory Stewart

Stanley Kauffmann could see what was wonderful about Antonioni's "L'Avventura." So could I, at the time; but later, after suffering through "Blowup" and "Zabriskie Point," I started to forget what had once thrilled me. Here is the reminder: "Obviously it is not real time or we would all have to bring along sandwiches and blankets; but a difference of 10 seconds in a scene is a tremendous step toward veristic reproduction rather than theatrical abstraction." (And, he forgot to add, it gives you 10 more seconds to look at a veristic close-up of Monica Vitti, who did to us in those days what Monica Bellucci is doing to a new generation of horny male intellectuals right now.)

'American Movie Critics' - The New York Times Book Review

I was a college student when I saw "L'Avventura" for the first of many times, and it changed my life.

Antonioni's Nothingness and Beauty

It's not my preferred way to go, but were I to die chasing a shirtless thug in a French action movie, I'd want to do it with all my might, like the anonymous goons in ``District B13." When a body plummets down a stairwell or is hurled against a slot machine, it does so with conviction. Like its stunt work, the movie is both ridiculously hyperactive and a muscular feat of absolute confidence. I don't expect to have a more adrenalizing time at the movies this summer.

District B-13 (Banlieue 13) Movie Review | The Boston Globe