Word: potterized
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Almost inevitably, great exercises in style deteriorate, through imitation and repetition, into mere stylization. So it is with The Singing Detective. Yes, Dennis Potter wrote the screen adaptation of his famous mini-series, which may be the best television show ever made. And, yes, all concerned with the film have labored on it with obvious love and respect. And, yes, all the TV show's moves are honorably replicated. Potter's hero, Dan Dark, is immobilized, in searing pain, by crippling psoriasis (as the writer himself was). Dark escapes into a fantasy world, imagining himself the hero of a movie...
...somehow, by a narrow margin, the film doesn't quite make it. Potter recolored his work a little more sunnily, and it is, perhaps, too compressed; it needs TV's room to digress. And the director, Keith Gordon, doesn't really recapture '50s Los Angeles, where Potter reset his flashbacks. They feel perfunctory (and underbudgeted). Finally, Robert Downey Jr., who works hard as Dark, just doesn't have the weight, age and rage Michael Gambon brought to the role...
...Beth Potter and Adam Zagorin
MEANWHILE IN THE U.S. ... Spell of the Phoenix The latest Harry Potter book has had an unexpected effect on young fans. Pediatrician Howard J. Bennett, writing in the New England Journal of Medicine, reported an outbreak of headaches among children reading Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. Bennett attributed their ailment - which he dubbed "Hogwarts headaches" - to the eight-hour reading sessions the young enthusiasts put in as they plowed through the 870-page tome. Fortunately, the symptoms clear up a day or two after the patient finishes the book...
...Potter, Lillette and all their international players—I can’t even keep track of them!” Ruggiero says. “They’re a big, strong, imposing team, too. They’re a physical team, the same as Dartmouth. With Dartmouth and Duluth we know we’re going to get a physical game...