Word: mckellen
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...explain the promotional muscle being flexed behind yet another translation of Homer's Odyssey, this one provided by Princeton professor Robert Fagles (Viking; 541 pages; $35)? Why expect people to pay $45 for a boxed set of tapes (issued by Penguin Audiobooks) on which the British actor Ian McKellen reads the text of Fagles' translation over a listening time of some 13 hours...
...Miami-esque beach town; the other, Love Is All There Is, set in the Bronx and retold by writer-directors Joseph Bologna and Renee Taylor. Royal Shakespeare Company alumnus Trevor Nunn has a Twelfth Night starring Helena Bonham Carter and Nigel Hawthorne. Richard III, recently modded up by Ian McKellen, gets the Al Pacino treatment in Looking for Richard...
Richard III, as conceived by actor Ian McKellen and director Richard Loncraine, is one bold customer. Here is Shakespeare's upper-class mass murderer reimagined as a clever fascist in the court of Edward VIII. The 1930s was a decade of ruthless strongmen, in both European politics and Hollywood movies. Gangsters, mesmerizing in their amoral ambition, were the men of the moment; they lent a sick thrill to the front page and entertainment section. This Richard is such a fellow, Hitler as Scarface. From the opening titles, which explode in a blast of artillery, to the closing image of Richard...
...sort-of girlfriend Margo Lane, Penelope Ann Miller manages to be both sexy and sharp, using her spotty telepathic powers to help out Cranston. Lane's father Reinhardt is the classic absorbed-in-his-work scientist (who can't tell the difference between red and green), but Ian McKellen gives the character a subdued charm...
Hopkins, of course. No other actor of his generation need apply. Alan Bates, Albert Finney, Ian McKellen, Derek Jacobi -- each brings the handsomely monogrammed baggage of an outsize personality. They would be too big for the role, tell too much. Hopkins is just the man for this. For much of his career, as a prissy Richard the Lionheart in The Lion in Winter (his first film, 1968) or the Rupert Murdoch-like press baron in the 1985 play Pravda, he had his own suitcase of mannerisms: the clipped elocution, the run-on sentence, all the pensive ahhs and umms...