Catching up on lots of topics

[GulPlum]

Apologies, I'm a bit tired this evening and perhaps I shouldn't be posting 
under the circumstances. Apologies if my comments may appear a little 
terse, but I'll post them anyway before I get too behind...

Kyle Longbottom wrote:

>I dont think movie actors would stay on for T.V actors!  The cast of Big Fat
>Greek Wedding the boyfriend never stayed on!!

Yeah well, John Corbett thinks he has a movie career going, There's no way 
he's going to sign on for a TV series under the circumstances.

(BTW Kyle, do you REALLY have to use so many exclamation marks? It's 
getting just a little annoying. Or should that be "Just a little 
annoying!!!" Also, could you - and other people - please follow this 
group's guidelines and crop text from posts not germane to your reply and 
add your comments *below*. Thanks.)

I'm not Joan, but to comment on another of Kyle's posts:

>Hell yeah!!  So your telling me lets not have the same cast??  We need a new
>Draco, Hermoine, Harry etc etc???

Joan has never said that she *wants* the cast to be changed. I doubt anyone 
does. The point is, what's more important: having a decent director who 
might decide that the cast is no longer appropriate, or a crap 
paint-by-numbers director who's milking a cash cow?

jodi_dgn wrote:

>Hi everyone, I just watched the COS DVD for about the umpteenth time
>after a friend pointed out something unusual at the end and thought
>I'd come out of lurkdom briefly to post here as I have not seen it
>mentioned anywhere else yet.

<snip>

Err...actually, it's been mentioned here several times on a regular basis 
over the last four months. Most recently by me, in a post about 24 hours 
ago, in which I included a link to a screenshot 
(http://plum.cream.org/HP/misc/23458.JPG)...

Audra wrote regarding my new CoS widescreen/fullscreen page:

>I just have one comment to make.  On the clock at the Weasley house, 
>Richard says the clock clearly shows only 8 hands, but I think I see all 
>9.  In the fullscreen capture, I see Fred, George, and Ron at "Lost", then 
>2 at "Quidditch," and I see 4 at "Garden."  3 + 2 + 4 = 9 Weasleys.  I 
>think you might be missing the 2nd one in the "Quidditch" position.  It is 
>pretty obscured by the opposite ends of the hands of the family members at 
>"Garden."

I stared at that picture long and hard while I was putting the page 
together (and in higher resolution than appears on the site) and couldn't 
discern another hand/person at the Quidditch position (or the other end of 
a "hand" at the opposite side of the clock).

In any event, the numbers and positions don't actually make sense. Assuming 
Charlie is the one at Quidditch (he is, after all, the family's great 
Quidditch player), Ginny and Molly are clearly in the Garden position, and 
assuming Percy is one of the others in the Garden (incidentally, what's he 
doing out there if his appearance at the breakfast table makes it clear 
he's just got out of bed - neither his hair nor attire make coming from the 
garden reasonable), that leaves Bill and  Arthur to account for.

Arthur enters through the front door a while later (there's a cut between 
Molly's "have a bite" line and their sitting down to breakfast - for 
starters, Harry, Ron, Fred & George have had the opportunity to sit down), 
so he was hardly in the Garden. From his dialogue, he wasn't playing 
Quidditch either. So I would maintain that the missing hand is Arthur's, 
and for some bizarre reason, Bill has been placed in the Garden.

I would've preferred it if two unidentified hands (Arthur's and Bill's) 
were pointing towards the bottom somewhere, at positions as yet 
unidentified (both at "Work", for instance?). The clock hands as they 
appear don't allow for the possibility of any other hand being at any other 
position.

I know I'm nit-picking, but hey, isn't that what we're here for? :-)

Audra again, on the subject of Accents:

<snip>

>My boyfriend pointed out the fact that so many upper-middle class kids 
>here in The States try to use slang and talk like they're from the streets 
>just to sound cool, and maybe that's what Draco is doing.  He definitely 
>has a point about American kids doing that. I don't know about British 
>kids.  Does that go on over there too?  If so, maybe that explains it.

Yes, it does go on here in Britain. There are several famous people 
(adults) who deliberately disguise their "posh" accents to give them a more 
populist persona (Ben Elton, for one; and even various members of the Royal 
family have tried it on occasion), and for youngsters, speaking as if 
you've been brought up in the streets is certainly a shortcut for "street 
smart", which is always and everywhere a badge of honour.

However, Draco is not someone who would want to give himself street 
credibility. He considers himself superior to pretty much everyone else, 
and certainly his class-mates, and he would never, ever, let anyone forget 
it. For him, adopting "streetwise" speech patterns would indicate dropping 
his standards. Speaking "posh" is as much a part of his supercilious 
personality as calling Hermione a Mudblood. For Draco to drop consonants is 
as likely as cheering Gryffindor. :-)

JenD wrote, in a separate thread on Accents (re: the Masons', replying to 
Nicholas:

>That's what Northen English accents sound like? Do you know American
>accents? Did they sound even faintly American at all to you?
>I really am astonished. Either my ears are really letting me down or
>my, we (as in two peoples not sharing a common language...) have more
>in common than I ever guessed.

I must admit that the first time I heard them speak, I assumed them both to 
be southern American. However, on reading Nicholas's comments, I listened 
again, and although Mr Mason still sounds that way to me, Mrs Mason has a 
definite Yorkshire drawl (Pam Ferris's natural speech is pretty much RP, 
with a little je ne sais quoi mixed in, which I ascribe to her 
multi-national upbringing - born in Germany and raised in Wales and New 
Zealand).

BTW yes, southern American can sound very much like some Yorkshire.

A couple of nit-picks on Steve's (strictly speaking, OT) rundown of 
(American) child stars who did or didn't make adult careers:

Re: Wil Wheaton: His struggle to find work after ST:TNG had little (or 
nothing) to do with his appearance, but the circumstances in which he left 
that show as a regular. Gene Roddenberry gave him a "you'll never work in 
this town again" line after they had a disagreement when Wheaton was fired. 
Roddenberry was in a position to make good on the threat until his death, 
after which time his widow Majel tried to do her best to make life 
difficult for Wil.

The fact that US casting directors suffer from typecasting as much as the 
population at large (if not more so) didn't help. Ensign Crusher (Wheaton's 
character) was almost universally hated by the Star Trek community (I used 
to participate in a popular light-hearted newsgroup called 
wesley.crusher.die.die.die which kept coming up with ever-more gruesome 
ways of killing the character) and the antagonism rubbed off onto Wheaton 
(a scary moment was the creation of a newsgroup entitled 
wil.wheaton.die.die.die, which was NOT light-hearted!). During his first 
appearance at a Star Trek convention, Wheaton was famously pelted with 
rotten fruit.

It's therefore little surprise that he sought other avenues to make a living.

A small correction on Macaulay Culkin's London stage play: that play 
wrapped some time ago, and he was in it only for a short time. There has 
been a trend in London commercial theatres over the last couple of years to 
employ big-name Hollywood stars for short runs which gives the productions 
massive publicity, and the stars some kind of "credibility". Although the 
reviews of Culkin's performance were generally positive, plenty of people 
weren't all that impressed. As for his believability as a teenager, yes, 
it's true that his appearance has changed very little over the last ten 
years or so. Nevertheless, his unemployability over that time hasn't *only* 
been down to his personal problems. Most casting directors have decided 
that he's actually not a very good actor. (Nevertheless, I can't wait for 
his latest film, "Party Monster", to get a UK release - word from the 
Sundance Festival was that he's meant to be pretty good in it.)

Returning a little closer to on-topicality, I'd like to comment on several 
suggestions about Terry Gilliam as an HP director. I think I've said before 
that although I admire his work greatly, and Twelve Monkeys in particular, 
I don't think he'd be appropriate for HP. Certainly not now, at any rate. 
He could only do his job at the end of the series, after all seven books 
have been published. He certainly wouldn't allow himself to be in the 
position Kloves and Columbus have put themselves in, where they don't know 
where a multi-movie franchise is headed.

Furthermore, Gilliam is not (how can I put this?) the most collaborative of 
film directors. I absolutely do not see him allowing himself to be hemmed 
in by JKR's vision of how the Potterverse looks and works. He would, to put 
it simply, change too many things to leave JKR and the books' fans happy. 
Whilst I think that Columbus and Kloves are playing it *too* safe (it 
remains to be seen what Cuaron manages to do), Gilliam would go *way* over 
the top to make the films *his* vision, and not JKR's. In itself, that is 
perhaps not a bad thing, but it would make the set hell to work in, and the 
movies quite possibly a bigger mess than Columbus's efforts have been.

Oh, and may have a little moment of crowing and in view of that German 
interview, may I state that I have always maintained that the removal of 
Wood does not necessarily equate the removal of Quidditch from PoA? :-)

--
GulPlum AKA Richard, who has now caught up with all the posts on this list 
and now has only almost 300 on the main list to plough through...