Bow and arrow update! Juan Carlos Guzmán-Betancourt, the Robin Hood who steals from the rich (in London hotels, for example) - but refrains from giving to the poor - has been caught. Sucka.
Juan Carlos Guzmán-Betancourt: Robin Hood EPIC FAIL.
Totally unrelated: There is a musical called Austentatious. It is about a community theater putting on a production of Pride and Prejudice.
I am in love with this song about how their production is going to be the best production of Pride and Prejudice ever.
Jane Austen in musical form. That's like...taking a bath in marshmallows and chocolate sauce. Just decadent.
Speaking of Pride and Prejudice, ITV has some kind of weird plans to do a mod production that will air on 240 consecutive nights in 30-second clips. Hawt or nawt? We shall see.
My money for ITV's "explosive yet compact" P&P is on the heaving bosoms.
Probs not related to any of the above: Stephen Fry's alter-ego, Mrs. Stephen Fry, has a fab Twitter page. DO NOT FOLLOW IT. Mrs. Fry updates more than you can possibly imagine until you've witnessed the insanity first-hand, and you will NEVER see updates from any of the other celebs you're creepily stalking on the Interwebz. Instead, just bookmark her page. You'll thank me later.
OK, so I'mma just get this out the way, right off the bat: Daniel Radcliffe is hawt. It was at the opening night showing of Order of the Phoenix that I first realized it, and by the end of the movie, I had two burning questions:
When did Harry Potter get buff? and
When did I become a pedophile?
At least he's not a teenager anymore. (Is he? I think he's in his twenties now. You know what? Don't tell me if he isn't. Let's just say he's in his twenties now.)
All of that said, he's also an excellent actor. In rewatching any of the Potter films, I'm always a little disappointed by the emphasis on action content—I'd like to see Radcliffe doing all of that shouting Harry does in the books. (I'm not seeing HBP until Friday night—so no reaction on that front just yet!) But when I finally got around to seeing Equus (which I had been putting off on account of going to see Radcliffe naked made me feel like a dirty pedophile), I got to see him shouting his head off, and it was amazing. (The nudity, which was very much essential to the traumatizing scene it takes place in, was tastefully done—and the play was extremely good.)
Now, to the point: December Boys. The movie (which is actually Australian) is OK. Radcliffe's character, Maps, has a really engaging storyline (and gets in some good shouting, too), but it's held back till very late in the film, which focuses instead, and often not very interestingly, on four orphans (Maps included) frolicking at the seashore and vying for favor from potential adoptive parents. Still, on the whole, it's quite engaging. (Also, Radcliffe, who was maybe 15 at the time, is looking hotter than usual. So that adds a whole other level of appeal slash creepiness.)
And then there's the music. The score is god-awful and emotionally manipulative—all melodramatic strings during life-threatening situations and suspended cymbal swells at emotional climaxes. Which is to say that this movie about orphans (plus a fatal illness or two) did not make me cry.
Um. Yeah. Just to put my lack of weeping into perspective:
Avenue Q (yes, the parody of Sesame Street with songs like "The Internet Is For Porn" and "Everyone's A Little Bit Racist") makes me cry.
Reading about Jane Austen succumbing to Addison's disease makes me cry.
Seeing Mary Tyler Moore cry makes me cry.
A movie about orphans that doesn't make me cry = Epic Fail. No matter how hot or talented Daniel Radcliffe is. (Sorry, Daniel!)
So. Back to that. As with Equus, the media attention focused much more on his "sex scene" (which consists of some fully clothed making out—the Deed takes place offscreen), which wasn't as important as the shouting scenes, and now I'm quite ready to see him in more post-Potter work. More shouting, if you please!
Hey, guys! I accidentally went to a British play last night. Happy surprise! The 39 Steps is a spoof of Hitchcock's The 39 Steps, and probably everyone but me knew that Hitchcock was English. I don't cope well with frightening films, or frightening books, for that matter, and I may or may not have had a few (ahem, several) Lord Voldemort nightmares. Suffice to say that Hitchcock isn't really my bag.
But Hitchcock parodies certainly are! Arnie Burton's portrayal of Professor Jordan is officially my new favorite evil mastermind ever: And instead of ending by covering the audience with confetti, as happened when I saw Clay Aiken in that other little Brit parody, Spamalot, bubbles rained on us at the finale. Fun! The best bit of all of this is that, per the IMDB synopsis, all of the absurdity in the play is lifted pretty directly from Hitchcock's thriller. That's kind of awesome. Oh, and there's this: the cast of 4 plays 150 characters, as seen below:
Result: I'm a fan!
And now, for the superimportant Harry Potter news: The Kiss between Ron and Hermione has been filmed, and it was, unsurprisingly, exceedingly uncomfortable for all involved. But mayhap that won't come across on the big screen. I hope the basilisk fangs are included! Daniel Radcliffe has also offered some commentary on the kiss between Harry and Ginny Weasley (which we will be seeing in Half-Blood Prince NEXT WEEK!):
"I saw the film again a couple of nights ago at the premiere and…my God, my lips are like the lips of a horse, kind of distending independently away from my face and trying to encompass the lower half of hers," Radcliffe, 19, said.
"So I apologize for that," he said.
OMG. Radcliffe is so consistently fabulous. I still can't tell whether he is intentionally hilarious in all of his interviews, or if he is just overwhelmingly, Britishly self-conscious. It seems to be the former, but as long as he continues to describe himself as having the lips of a horse, I really don't care either way.
And on the mom front, she visited the Frick Collection yesterday (frolicking about New York while I slaved away at work); last night, I made the mistake of asking her if she'd seen the Bronzino painting of the boy with the ginormo codpiece (in the room with the Veronese that looks exactly like Justin Timberlake, I believe). Unfortch, she didn't know what a codpiece is (isn't that part of Shakespeare 101 or something?), and I had to explain it. So that was awkward.
