Just a few more quick news blurbs before bedtime.
1. The Associated Press reports that William Shatner is still upset that he won’t be in Star Trek XI, and he says his exclusion from the film is a bad “business decision.” So was allowing your character to be killed in Star Trek Generations (1994; my comments) without setting up an obvious mechanism for his resurrection, Bill.
2. There has been no shortage of items on the Dumbledore-is-gay brouhaha. Here are two bits that particularly caught my eye. First up, David Thewlis — who plays the werewolf Professor Remus Lupin in the Harry Potter movies — tells CityNews.ca:
O.K. but what about the revelation that Albus Dumbledore is gay? Thewlis concedes that threw him for a loop, but not for the reasons you might think. “The funny thing when Alfonso Cuaron directed “The Prisoner of Azkaban, the first film that I appear in, he had the idea that Lupin was gay and he described my character like a ‘gay junkie’ .And of course Lupin turns out not to be gay because he marries Tonks and has children.”
Meanwhile, Rex Murphy of the Globe and Mail comments:
Ms. Rowling is pioneering here, fleshing out her characters off-page and after their story has ended. Dumbledore is gay is real People magazine stuff, and now we can look forward to updates on Hermione’s party schedule. I think this is a really great thing. Limiting what we really know, or can reasonably speculate about, a fictional character to the words on the pages of the book that contains him, and the already told story of which he is a part, is so old-fashioned and bookish. . . .
I would far rather learn what Hamlet was “really” like from some chat-show author interview after the play was written (slept with Gertrude till he was 9, joined a pack of minstrels and wandered around Denmark during his early teens, fervently anti-globalist, despised Claudius even before the murder, for his exploitation of the serfs – that kind of stuff) if such a thing were possible with poor dead Shakespeare. The play itself, with all those words and speeches and images, is so … constricting. Who wants those golden soliloquies when we can have buzz or gossip?
Now, with living authors, this kind of thing is not only possible – as Ms. Rowling’s example demonstrates, with the great news of Dumbledore’s authorial “outing” – it presents unlimited opportunities to “fix” the weak characters, or connect to the trendy issues of the day without ever so much as having to (so to speak) put pen to paper or warm up the tired laptop. Isn’t Dumbledore more interesting, more mod, now that he’s been released from the casket of the author’s own prose? . . .
Literature is so much more elastic, so much more liberating, when it is unshackled from the actual business of writing. Prose is a prison. Interviews, post-publication, are the wave of the storytelling future.
3. Variety says “political films” are struggling to find an audience in Europe, just as they have been struggling in North America.
4. The New York Observer picks up the story concerning how George Hickenlooper, co-director of Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse (1991), is upset about being shut out of the DVD release of that film. Hickenlooper backtracks a bit, though, at Hollywood Elsewhere, the blog run by Jeffrey Wells; he writes: “I’m making a mountain out of mole hill. It’s not that big a deal. I’m just hoping no editorial changes were made…”
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