You Can Take Your Teenage Wizard…
…and stuff him where the sun don’t shine. Courtney has finally driven me mad with her Harry Potter fetish. I don’t think she’s uttered a single sentence in the last week that hasn’t started with “Dumbledore,” “Snape,” or “Rowling.” I swear I will destroy any copy of the book I see, other than Courtney’s prized UK edition which arrived in the mail today. If I destroy that, she destroys me.
As an antidote, I was very glad to read J.G.Ballard’s article in the Guardian about Michael Powell. What’s especially amusing is that the article was written to promote a season of Powell’s movies at the National Film Theatre, an institution that Ballard blew up in his 2003 novel Millennium People.
During my degree I saw a perfectly preserved print of Powell & Pressburger’s wartime movie The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp. It was the first time I’d seen an early colour movie in the same quality that it would have originally been shown. Even better, Blimp was shot in colour at a time when colour film stock was strictly rationed. The immediacy of the movie was striking. Suddenly 2002 and 1943 were not so far apart as I had previously thought.
Have you seen their Canterbury Tale? I’ve long wanted to see it after hearing it sampled on Dreadzone’s first album.
I was particularly disappointed that my predictions regarding Potter6 did not come to pass, but then Marxist revolutionary theory doesn’t really have a place in kids’ fiction, I suppose.
Seen it? Have it on DVD, old boy. Really rather lovely. There’s a scene shot in what is now Starbuck’s. Back than it was a rather lovely old tea shop. There’s also a scene in which a train pulls into Canterbury West. The train moves somewhat quicker than the trains do today. You also get to see that the old police station was right near the Westgate, and a whole ruined section at the top of the high street near the bus station, which was clearly freshly bombed.
Asides the obvious geographical-historical interest, it’s a very good movie, even if it shows its age a little more Col. Blimp or Black Narcissus. I’ll see if I can get something in the post.
Ooh… lovely. Good man.
If you don’t want me to destroy you (too) then you won’t be laying a finger on my lovely new copy of HP6 either, young man.
Keep it hidden then!
I don’t think anyone who hasn’t worked in a bookshop (more specifically,
Methvens in Canterbury) could quite share the same exhaustion at the very
mention of the bespectacled, scarfaced little scrote.
Luckily, the burden of responding to myriad variations upon a singularly tawdry theme (“Yes, there are two covers. No, they are no different inside. No, we don’t have it in paperback. No, I don’t know who, if anyone, dies. No, I don’t know when the next one’s out. I told you, THERE’RE NO DIFFERENT! IT’S JUST A COVER!” etc.) is no longer mine. My final shift at our former place of ritual belittlement was on August 13th! Proper length e-mail to follow.
Life and Death of Colonel Blimp – Liam your ex-local arts cinema, “Cinema 3” had a superb Powell-Pressburger season on. I wangled the rights to selling books over the season (0, that’s Zero books sold. Obviously Powell-Pressburger Canterburyite fans are cheap S****S!), and snuck into some of the films (noone can buy the books outside while watching). Very impressed by Blimp especially (restored version), mature and sophisticated considering it was made at a time when most people just wanted George Formby, Arthur Askey and Norman Wisdom films because they numbed your brain nicely. Strangely Norman Wisdom is a national hero in Albania. Odd people. Like the Germans adoring david Hasslehoff.