Word: wizards
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...seconds past the wizarding hour of midnight Saturday, the most annoying and unnecessary marketing campaign in publishing history finally delivered the goods. J. K. Rowling's "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire" (Arthur A. Levine Books/Scholastic Press; 734 pages; $25.95) would have sold millions of copies had its U.S. and British publishers simply dumped them in bookstores, unannounced, and then got out of the way as word of mouth spread among stampeding Pottermaniacs. That is pretty much the way the first three books about the boy-wizard so phenomenally caught fire among young readers and then their parents...
...some summer suffering at the home of the Dursleys, his dreadful Muggle (nonmagical human) relatives; transporting him and his two best friends Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger to the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry; and then exposing the hero to another threat from Lord Voldemort, the fearsome Dark wizard who murdered his parents but mysteriously failed to kill the one-year-old Harry at the same time...
...past books, Rowling introduces new elements and characters to keep readers on their toes. This time the trip to school on the Hogwarts Express does not occur until Harry and friends attend the 422nd Quidditch World Cup, pitting Ireland against Bulgaria, in front of a crowd of 100,000 wizards and witches, all of whom managed to assemble unseen by any oblivious Muggles. Back at Hogwarts, the students learn that something called the Triwizard Tournament will take place during the school year, involving competitors from two other magic-training establishments, Beauxbatons Academy and Durmstrang Institute. (Guess, from their names, where...
...your freshman year of college ("The Real World"), or be confronted by "Cops" (we all know somebody), or be stranded with the cast of "Survivor" (can you say "Family Vacation"?)? True imagination is that a children's book might have Bob the Lawyer seeing himself as be a famous wizard...
Fangmeier, like Petersen, hails from Germany and both speak with hefty accents, but the director didn't hire the f/x (Hollywood parlance for special effects) wizard out of Teutonic solidarity. Petersen tapped Fangmeier because of his impressive, all-digital work on Twister. Still, there were no guarantees; while water has been digitally drawn before (notably in Titanic and Waterworld), The Perfect Storm would require a level of simulation that had never been attempted. On Warner Bros. soundstage No. 16, a shipping vessel doubling for the Andrea Gail was harbored in a large tank 22-ft. deep (the same tank where...