[NOTD] News Of The Day - 13/07/2007

Radcliffe leads the way in ITV1's dramatic autumn schedule

Published Thursday 12 July 2007 at 17:55 by Matthew Hemley

ITV1 is pinning its hopes on a number of new dramas to secure ratings in its autumn schedule, including a one-off about Rudyard Kipling's son.

Daniel Radcliffe in Equus at the Gielgud Theatre, London earlier this year Photo: Tristram Kenton

Harry Potter star Daniel Radcliffe will join Kim Cattrall in My Boy Jack, an Ecosse Films production, which tells the story of how Kipling used his influence to get his 17-year-old son in the Irish Guards.

Other dramas in the channel's autumn schedule are Sold, a comedy-drama set in an estate agents starring Kris Marshall and Anthony Head, and A Room With A View, featuring real-life father and son, Timothy and Rafe Spall.

Elsewhere in the line-up, Frankenstein gets reworked with Dr Victor Frankenstein reborn as a 21st century female biologist and Charles Dickens' The Old Curiosity Shop gets brought to life with a cast featuring Derek Jacobi and Toby Jones.

Entertainment shows include a new series of The X Factor, with new judge Dannii Minogue and Grease is the Word's Brian Friedman joining as the show's creative director.

Pop star Elton John also features in the line-up, with a programme about his life and Harry Potter author J K Rowling shares her experiences writing the last book in the series with a documentary that follows her over a year.

Source: The Stage, UK

Movies News

Trailer for Daniel Radcliffe's December Boys

We have added a link to the trailer for Warner Independents, December Boys starring Daniel Radcliffe in his first lead role since Harry Potter.

Based on the classic Michael Noonan novel, "December Boys" is the story of four orphan teenagers growing up behind the closed doors of a Catholic convent in outback Australia during the 1960s. As the boys watch younger kids get adopted by loving families, they begin to realize that as they get older, their turn may never come. When the convent sends the boys to visit the seaside one summer, they finally have something to look forward to.

While at the seaside, the boys meet a young couple unable to have children, who would make the perfect parents. The eldest of the boys, Maps, finds himself drawn to Lucy, a beautiful girl from down the coast. Competing to be the most adoptable, the rest of the boys, Sparks, Misty and Spit, severely test their friendships as long gestating feelings of rejection explode to the surface.

The bonds of friendship eventually overcome the rivalries, sealing forever the strong ties that bind the December boys as they learn the real meaning behind friendship, family and love.

"December Boys" is directed by Rod Hardy, adapted from Noonan's novel by Marc Rosenberg, and stars Daniel Radcliffe as Maps, Christian Byers as Spark, Lee Cormie as Misty, James Fraser as Spit, Teresa Palmer as Lucy, and Jack Thompson as Bandy McAnsh.

Source: Monsters & Critics

Radcliffe 'not too old' to play Harry

'Deathly Hallows' published secretly in Indiana town

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Casting the Next Harry Potter Movie

Now that David Yates's hot-blooded and handsome adaptation of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix has opened — setting box-office records already, no less — it's time to start looking forward to the sixth film in the series, which begins filming in September in anticipation of a fall 2008 release. Yates, who is directing this one as well, has not made any casting announcements yet, so we can only speculate about who might play the new characters introduced into the story in Book Six, Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince.

Speculate … and campaign! Unless Yates follows our wife's advice and just makes a seventeen-hour movie directly transcribing every scene in the book, some of these characters may not make the cut, but let's pretend they all will and find roles for the six or so British and Irish actors who haven't already been employed by the Harry Potter series.

As Horace Slughorn, the fat, influence-peddling new Potions professor at Hogwarts, who better than Topsy-Turvy's Jim Broadbent? J.K. Rowling describes Slughorn as having a "shiny pate, prominent eyes, [an] enormous silver, walruslike mustache." Broadbent looks exactly like Slughorn and can play forced jollity like no one else. We're already giggling thinking about Jim Broadbent proudly showing off the boxes of candies he receives from one of his former students, now working at Honeydukes.

Rowling describes the sixth book's new Minister of Magic thus:

Rufus Scrimgeour looked rather like an old lion. Keen yellowish eyes … a certain rangy, loping grace … an immediate impression of shrewdness and toughness.

Sounds like the leonine Bill Nighy (The Vertical Hour, Notes on a Scandal) to us! He's already friends with his State of Play director Yates, so it shouldn't be too hard to get him the role.

Marvolo Gaunt, the wild-eyed grandfather of Voldemort, is a vile hermit who lives in a shack in the woods. His "big brown eyes and wrinkled face," Rowling writes, give him the look of "a powerful, aged monkey." His volatile temper requires a fierce, dangerous actor to play him; we suggest Daniel Day-Lewis, who looks more and more like a hermit each year. He wouldn't even need to shave his beard!

Though Draco Malfoy's mother, Narcissa Malfoy, doesn't appear in the earlier movies, she does appear in the fourth book, where she's described as a pale blonde woman who "would have been nice-looking if she wasn't wearing a look that suggested there was a nasty smell under her nose." The role requires a combination of glamour, menace, and desperation, as Narcissa's big scene in the sixth book involves her begging for her son's life. Rumors have Naomi Watts in the role, but we think she seems far too nice. How about the aristocratic Kristin Scott Thomas?

Werewolf Fenrir Grayback is a child-menacing monster whose wolf and human characteristics are beginning to blur. "A big, rangy man with matted gray hair and whiskers," Rowling writes, also mentioning "a rasping bark of a voice." At first we thought of Nighy for this role as well, but then we hit on Deadwood's Ian McShane. Besides being a fantastic actor, he's definitely dangerous enough to play the role. In this photo, in fact, he looks remarkably like a guy who might have already eaten a couple of babies for breakfast.

The novel opens with a very funny scene between the Minister of Magic and the beleaguered Muggle Prime Minister, who can't believe that wizards keep showing up in his fireplace just as everything seems to be going wrong all across England. We find it hard to imagine that this bit will make it into the movie, which is a real shame, because The Queen's Michael Sheen would be perfect for it.

Source: NY Magazine

Can't Anyone Keep a Secret Anymore?

If you knew the ending of 'Harry Potter' before the book came out, would you tell? It's not the burning ethical dilemma of our time, but it's the question of the hour.

Freedman compares an early release of "Harry Potter" to other cultural criticism. Each time a new movie or Broadway play premiers, journalists are invited early to prepare reviews that can be released opening day (for that matter, anyone can attend a play while it is in previews). It is understood that theater critics will not review plays before opening night. The rules for movie previews are a little looser, but the movie studios hold all the cards, and if a reviewer continually reviews early, he or she could be barred from preview screenings. All plays are previewed—and again, anyone can attend a preview—but not all movies, and the assumption among most critics is that a movie that isn't screened early is probably a stinker. Book reviewers, like movie reviewers, get an advanced look at what the public hasn't seen yet. Or at least they usually do. With "Harry Potter," the rules are different for book reviewers and bookstore owners—anyone who usually gets an advanced peek. At author Rowling's request, her publishers release the books to everyone, reporters and reviewers included, at the same time.

In 2003, Scholastic Books and Rowling sued the New York Daily News for printing excerpts from the fifth novel in the series, "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix." The newspaper had obtained a rogue copy from a Brooklyn bookstore that wasn't following release-date rules and had placed the books, mistakenly, on their shelves. The case was settled out of court, and according to a Daily News spokeswoman, the paper is pleased with the settlement. At the time, the paper contended that it had done nothing wrong and was merely following news practices. After all, every media outlet deals with the pressure boiling up when bloggers, or anyone on the Internet, is given free space to voice their own speculations or personal scoops. Shouldn't traditional media outlets beat out these amateurs? "Part of this is more tawdry," Freedman says. "The Internet is driving everyone into print or broadcast." He remembers the finale of another cultural craze, "M*A*S*H." In pre-Internet times, audiences had no pulpit from which to guess the fate of B.J. and Hawkeye. Now that they do, journalists are merely playing catch-up.

That's the benefit of releasing leaked information about Harry Potter before it's available on the bookshelves. It's not illegal. It may be unethical. But there's absolute demand. "We live in a culture where people want information," says Susie Linfield, the chair of New York University's Cultural Reporting and Criticism Program. "It's a newspaper's job to give us the facts about what the situation is in Iraq. But in a book, there's no obligation to disclose the ending of an imaginative world." And if anyone does reveal the ending of "Harry Potter," they'd better count on retribution, and not the imaginary kind either.

Source: MSNBC/Newsweek

*Contain Spoilers*