Word: potter
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Welcome to the world of English writer Dennis Potter: a nightmare realm of domestic violence, scored to the haunting lilt of pop standards. His output embraces dozens of television plays, half a dozen screenplays and two novels. But the range of Potter's work is less impressive than its searing ferocity and compassion. His haunted characters dwell in the surreal land we all inhabit, as we float vagrantly from suffocating reality to liberating fantasy, from pessimism to possibility, from fear to hope -- and then back, always back again, when we realize that the conditional tense holds even more horror than...
...mood suffused Potter's 1978 BBC serial, Pennies from Heaven (in which Bob Hoskins played the music salesman), his 1982 film, Brimstone and Treacle (with Sting as the satanic young man), and the current Track 29 (starring Theresa Russell as the American wife). In October his novel Blackeyes (about the plagiarizing novelist) was published, to acclaim, in the U.S., and last month the BBC aired his new series, Christabel, a domestic drama set in '40s Germany. Masterpiece Theatre will show the series in February...
...Potter celebration reaches its climax: The Singing Detective, his 1986 masterpiece about a hospitalized writer, has begun a six-week run in Manhattan's Public Theater movie house. When this 6-hr. 42-min. serial was broadcast on PBS earlier this year, it attracted a rabid cult following, and New York Times film critic Vincent Canby called it "one of the wittiest, wordiest, singingest-dancingest, most ambitious, freshest, most serious, least solemn movies of the year." Now Detective, handsomely directed by Jon Amiel, is on the big screen where it belongs -- and where it looks marvelous...
Novelist Julian Barnes has described Potter as a "Christian socialist with a running edge of apocalyptic disgust." And Potter's works have provoked disgust in the more easily shockable segments of the British public. The tabloid press denounced the Detective series as pornography, and as Potter recalls, "one Member of Parliament got up on his hind legs and said that he'd counted the number of swear words and bare bums. But that's partly because television is taken more seriously in England, which means more seriously by the fools as well." One scene -- a flashback of a desperate encounter...
...sense, Potter is no Marlow. His works -- novels as well as plays -- are lionized, though the author is unawed: "I think novels are rather easier to write than plays. Years ago I loved the theater -- until television came along, until I really saw it, saw what you could do with it. I love what television could be if they left it alone." Exemplarily, British TV has left Potter alone to create his atonal rhapsodies, whereas Marlow suffers the impotence of creative failure. And yet, Potter knows Marlow well; the author's biography crosses his character's life at crucial points...