Reading, Writing, Rowling: Lethal White!

January 18, 2019 by 2 Comments

 

The Reading, Writing, Rowling podcast about Robert Galbraith’s Lethal White that I sat in on last month with host Kathy McDaniel and special guests Beatrice Groves and Louise Freeman has been posted on MuggleNet.com. It may not be the best of this program’s podcasts — how does one compare the quality of such things? — but it has my vote. Why?

I’m all but certain that the guests on this show are among the most serious Strike readers on the planet, I know because I was there that the conversation was fast, fun, and challenging, and the host kept us honest and the discussion rolling at a nice clip.  For Cormoran Strike fans, this is essential listening.

Check it out through the link embedded in the image above — and let me know what you think by clicking on ‘Leave a Comment’ up by the post’s headline. One good conversation should jump start another! I look forward to reading your opinions of this gang’s thoughts, predictions, and interpretations.

Filed Under: Cormoran Strike, Reading Writing Rowling Podcast

Crimes of Grindelwald: DVD 7 Minutes?

January 17, 2019 by 1 Comment

As you can see to the left, ‘Univers Harry Potter,’ a French fan site has tweeted the scene coupee or deleted scenes we’ll be seeing in the DVD of Crimes of Grindelwald coming out in February, 2019, as a download and in March as a disc. These ten scenes may or may not be the extra ‘seven minutes’ of running time this version is reported to have; usually a Deleted Scenes’ package is a DVD ‘extra’ that is separate from the running film. Whether the cut scenes are integrated or not, they will provide us with a much better idea of what the actual shooting script was, i.e., what Rowling wrote and her collaborators agreed to shoot before their editing the daylights out of her story in the cutting room, because none of these scenes appear in the published Original Screenplay. This screenplay-book is with important exceptions (black vs blue Grindelwald fiendfyre, etc.) mostly the film-as-cut transcript.

So what have we got?

It looks like we’re getting two scenes from the end of the first film as starters, those depicting Credence’s survival of the attack from the MACUSA Aurors in the NYC subway and his boarding the boat to Europe, perhaps in the company of Circus Arcana. David Heyman told us about those scenes soon after the first movie was released.

The next eight scenes are: ‘Newt’s Basement,’ ‘Ballroom Dance,’ ‘Tina and Skender,’ ‘Murmuration,’ ‘Newt and Jacob walk to Yusuf Kama’s,’ Nagini and Credence in an Alley,’ and ‘Dumbledore and McGonagall.’

We already have a scene in ‘Newt’s Basement,’ but it seemed to have been shoe-horned in to provide us with a Niffler set-up to pay-off at the finish and to introduce Newt’s menagerie and devoted helper. I hope we get a better idea of why these scenes were introduced in the revealed parts that were deleted; if not, we’ll have to assume the Kelpie will return in FB3 or FB4.

‘Ballroom Dance’ was featured in the trailers and promises to give us a better idea of Leta Lestrange’s internal struggles vis a vis her feelings for Newt and Theseus and her possible role in the Grindelwald-Dumbledore conflict.

‘Tina and Skender’ promises an extended confrontation between the MACUSA Auror and the owner of Circus Arcana. All we got in the film was a short exchange about Credence in scene 45.

The next four scenes? No ideas, really. I don’t recall pictures of them in the trailers or mention of them in interviews with the players and film makers. Check out the list of the deleted scenes we know about and ask yourself: why won’t they give us these scenes that they shot from Rowling’s shooting script?

To which scenes, you might add one more: the twitter account ‘Fantastic Beasts Film Series’ tells us that the book Crimes of Grindelwald Movie Magic says “297 wands were stolen from the shop of wandmaker Cosme Acajor during the film. Could this be another deleted scene? Is that why we’ve seen the inside of the shop but not on-screen?” (Hat tip to Kelly for the deleted scenes tip and the tweet news.)

I’m guessing Fantastic Fandom is going wild with speculation about ‘Murmuration,’ et cetera. I think I can wait until the downloadable DVD is available. But feel free to share your thoughts about the deleted scenes and the bizarreness of not being able to get an honest copy of the shooting script, the Rowling text for Crimes of Grindelwald.

Filed Under: Fantastic Beasts

Crimes of Grindelwald: BluRay, DVD, Etc

January 16, 2019 by Leave a Comment

The tool we need for scene-by-scene breakdowns and discussion of the released Crimes of Grindelwald film (versus the so-called Original Screenplay) will be available for digital download next month and on Blu-Ray or DVD in March. The story from ComingSoon.net:

Welcome back to Hogwarts when Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald, the second of five all-new adventures from the Wizarding World created by J.K. Rowling, arrives on 4K UHD Combo Pack, Blu-ray Combo Pack, DVD Special Edition and Digital.

The 4K UHD Combo Pack and the Blu-ray Combo pack include an extended cut of the film with more than seven minutes of deleted scenes added, available as a digital download. Also featured is an audio introduction by director David Yates and over an hour of fantastic special features.

You can pre-order the film in four different packages (links to Amazon from SnitchSeeker.com):

— Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald DVD
— Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald Blu-ray + Digital Download
— Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald Blu-ray 3D + Blu-ray + Digital Download
— Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital Download

Blu-Ray DVD pre-orders can also be made at Target.com for $25 rather than $30. 

No doubt we will learn more about the seven minutes of deleted material in the run-up to the release. Hat tip to Kelly for the news!

 

 

Filed Under: Fantastic Beasts

Re-Writing of Introduction to Pillar Posts

January 15, 2019 by Leave a Comment

I hope in the New Year to make twice a month updates here about our ‘Pillar Post’ project. Consider this Report #1.

As you may have noticed, I collapsed the almost forty listings in the left Pillar Post sidebar down to eight. This has the downside of making the subjects within the larger files impossible to see on the home page, e.g., ‘Literary Alchemy’ is hidden inside KEYS FOR INTERPRETATION, and ‘Crimes of Grindelwald’ inside INDIVIDUAL ROWLING WORKS, but the list was so long it seemed unlikely to me that a reader would scroll through them all and sense anything but a grab bag rather than a coherently organized collection of posts. File this decision under ‘Lamentable but Necessary Trade-Offs.’

I also put together a new introduction to the project that now heads the list, the only subject not in ALL CAPS: The ‘Why’ and ‘How To’ of Pillar Posts. Let me know what you think of the new explanation by writing a comment beneath that post or this one — and please share the items and points of organization that will help you most. The whole idea is to make the HogwartsProfessor blogpost collection much easier to use — and only you can tell me what needs to be done to make sure that happens.

Thanks in advance for your feedback, and, as always, for your stopping by and joining in the conversation!

Filed Under: Hog Pro Notes

Agatha Christie’s Eleven Missing Days

January 14, 2019 by 4 Comments

Happy St Basil’s Day! It’s the ‘Russian New Year’ (at least that’s what it was called in Pennsylvania years ago) and the beginning of 2019 on the Church calendar. I’m excited about the coming year and projects on hand from the Pillar Posts and podcasts to speculation and research into the clockwork guts of Fantastic Beasts and Cormoran Strike. Thank y’all for joining us in the past year and in advance for joining the conversation in the New Year. Maybe I’ll find time this weekend to put up a Greatest Hits of 2018, a very busy year indeed for Rowling Readers.

I managed to read a book that had been on top of my pile of things to read (apart from the PhD thesis mound of ‘Must Reads’) in the first week of the twelve days of Christmas, and, as I expected, it was both a delight and a revelation. I rush to share the three things I learned from Agatha Christie and the Eleven Missing Days by Jared Cade. Two points are in order as introduction, though, for the Harry Potter fan out there who may not know the basics about Agatha Christie.

We joke that only God and Chairman Mao have sold more books than J. K. Rowling and that Mao had help with his Little Red Book’s sales and distribution. Rowling’s sales, though, while unprecedented on a per volume basis at least with the Hogwarts Saga parts, fall far short of the hard to fathom book sales of two English women writers, Enid Blyton and Agatha Christie. Christie is not only the ‘Queen of Crime Writers’ by common acclamation, her Poirot and Marple novels have been translated into more languages and sold more copies than any other writer of fictions in history with the possible exception of Shakespeare. Big Bill, much as I love the Bard, except for his place in the English canon and consequent forced readership in schools, would only be read by thespians and antiquarians. Christie’s mysteries still sell millions of copies annually to readers who delight in them for their own sake.

Agatha Christie was a very private woman, however, and would be happy, I think, that the reading public today knows very little about her life. One event in that life, however, that is well known and Christie worked her whole remaining time on earth trying to downplay (it was a condition of every one of the rare interviews she granted that the topic not be raised) was her disappearance for eleven days in 1926, which vanishing act was the occasion of a national woman-hunt. She turned up in a spa at Harrogate; she claimed to have suffered an attack of amnesia, a story from which she never broke in all the remaining decades of her life.

Jared Cade in his  Agatha Christie and the Eleven Missing Days demonstrates what has always been suspected, namely, that the amnesia story was a deliberate fabrication and that Christie disappeared in order to punish her husband who had just told her he wanted a divorce so he could marry his mistress, a mutual friend of theirs.

Why should a reader of J. K. Rowling care? Three things in this short biography of an author whose work Rowling knows well struck me as meaningful, even important. Join me after the jump for those eye-openers!

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Hog Pro Notes