Word: stuffs
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...51ST SUMMER FANCY Food Show in New York City last week showcased more than 100,000 specialty foods and beverages from gourmands around the world. Now all they have to do is get people to eat the stuff. A few of the wackier delicacies. --By Lisa McLaughlin...
...found in every (presumptive) summer blockbuster you ever saw, especially the futuristic ones--or decided, upon mature reflection, not to see. To give Bay (Armageddon, Pearl Harbor) his due, there's a certain wit and splash (or should we make that splat?) in his action sequences--nice stuff with a flying motorcycle and a surprise-filled sequence in which the leads are hanging onto a skyscraper sign that's losing its moorings. But for all the menace of its techno-prattle, its implicit boosts for humanism and its swell production design, the picture is finally a bore...
Granted, Rowling's books begin like invitations to garden-variety escapism: Ooh, Harry isn't really a poor orphan; he's actually a wealthy wizard who rides a secret train to a castle, and so on. But as they go on, you realize that while the fun stuff is pure cotton candy, the problems are very real--embarrassment, prejudice, depression, anger, poverty, death. "I was trying to subvert the genre," Rowling explains bluntly. "Harry goes off into this magical world, and is it any better than the world he's left? Only because he meets nicer people. Magic does...
...questions her writing, reviewing it like a boxer watching tapes of his fights. "I think Phoenix could have been shorter. I knew that, and I ran out of time and energy toward the end," she says. She is worried that Goblet was overpraised. "In every single book, there's stuff I would go back and rewrite," she says. "But I think I really planned the hell out of this one. I took three months and just sat there and went over and over and over the plan, really fine-tuned it, looked at it from every angle. I had learnt...
...curious fact about Harry Potter's magic that it doesn't really look all that hard to do. You wiggle the wand, you say the words--"Lumos! Expelliarmus! Accio Car Keys!"--and if you're not a Muggle or a Squib, if you've got the right stuff or the midichlorians or whatever, you're in business. How hard is that? And that Hermione Granger is supposed to be some kind of genius...