http://trailers.apple.com/trailers/disney/ozthegreatandpowerful/

Finally we are getting the back story for the Wizard of Oz.  James Franco appears to be playing a small-time illusionist who aspires to greatness–he wants to be more than a “good man.” Remember the great line from the book: “I’m really a very good man; but I’m a very bad Wizard”?  But the “very good man” turns out to be a serious magician, as we learn in Chapter 16 of the book (“The Magic Art of the Great Humbug”), when the Wizard uses the sorcery of words to give the Scarecrow brains, the Woodman a heart, and the Lion courage.

I’m wondering how much the success of Gregory Maguire’s prequel, Wicked (the first in his Oz series), had to do with the development of the script–a lot, I’m betting!  That the Wizard has very little on-screen time in the MGM film leaves much room for imagination.  The mimicking of MGM’s black/white frame for a film in color  looks great in the trailer and augurs well for the entire film.

“I think there is a through-line,” Rowling said. “Mortality, morality, the two things that I obsess about.” “The Casual Vacancy” is not a whodunnit but, rather, a rural comedy of manners that, having taken on state-of-the-nation social themes, builds into black melodrama. Its attention rotates among several Pagford households, in the Southwest of England: a gourmet-grocery owner and his wife; two doctors; a nurse married to a printer; a social worker. Most of the families include troubled teens.C

Barry’s civic influence is revealed by his departure, rather as George Bailey’s is in “It’s a Wonderful Life.” The story is driven by the long-standing frustration that some of Barry’s disagreeable and right-wing neighbors have about the town’s administrative connection to the Fields, an area of public housing and poverty on the edge of a larger, nearby town. Historically, children from the Fields have had the right to attend primary school in Pagford, a place of flower baskets and other middle-class comforts, and the town has also supported a drug-treatment clinic that serves the neighborhood. In the absence of Barry’s righteous influence, the anti-Fields faction sees an opportunity to rid Pagford of this burden. This is a story of class warfare set amid semi-rural poverty, heroin addiction, and teen-age perplexity and sexuality. It may be a while before we’re accustomed to reading phrases like “that miraculously unguarded vagina” in a Rowling book, and public response to “The Casual Vacancy” will doubtless include scandalized objections to the idea of young Harry Potter readers being drawn into such material. “There is no part of me that feels that I represented myself as your children’s babysitter or their teacher,” Rowling said. “I was always, I think, completely honest. I’m a writer, and I will write what I want to write.”

From the web site HYPERALLERGIC

http://hyperallergic.com/

Lady Gaga hosted the last big party of fashion week on September 14 by creating “Sleeping With Gaga,” a performance that has uncomfortable similarities with Canadian-Ukranian artist Taras Polataiko’s recent Sleeping Beauty. After drawing a lot of international press and attention, his modern-day fairytale closed at the National Art Museum of Ukraine in Kiev on September 9, five days before her one-night-only performance took place at the Guggenheim Museum in New York.

Fairytales are continually updated to comment on the current times. Gaga used “Sleeping Beauty” to discuss the state of celebrity in the internet age, whereas Polataiko commented not only on the political state of “sleeping” Ukraine post–Orange Revolution but also on the possibilities of a queered fairytale.

I’m not so sure that Tara Polataiko has a monopoly on re-enacting Sleeping Beauty, especially since it’s a logical move for installation art to put a real-life Sleeping Beauty on display.  Polataiko’s Sleeping Beauty stands in a long tradition of cocooned women, swathed in white, looking like beautiful corpses.  Gaga, by contrast, looks more like those wonderful 19th century odalisques, and she goes for the voluptuous look, inviting viewers to touch her through the faux bottled perfume portal.  Is this really the first black perfume, as ads claim for a scent that is “black like the soul of fame, but invisible once airborn.”  Who knew?

http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/childrens/childrens-industry-news/article/53937-new-study-55-of-ya-books-bought-by-adults.html

Publisher’s Weekly reports on a study about readers of YA fiction.  55% of buyers are 18 or older, and 78% of those are purchasing the books for their own reading.  The study, Children’s Book Consumer in the Digital Age, was undertaken by Bowker Market Research.

“The investigation into who is reading YA books began when we noticed a disparity between the number of YA e-books being purchased and the relatively low number of kids who claim to read e-books,” said Kelly Gallagher, v-p of Bowker Market Research. “The extent and age breakout of adult consumers of these works was surprising. And while the trend is influenced to some extent by the popularity of The Hunger Games, our data shows it’s a much larger phenomenon than readership of this single series.”

Yes, much of the uptick can be attributed to The Hunger Games and Harry Potter, but there is also The Fault in Our Stars, a book that contains within it my reason for not previously advertising my affection for it:

“My favorite book, by a wide margin, was An Imperial Affliction, but I didn’t like to tell people about it. Sometimes you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read the book.  And then there are books like An Imperial Affliction, which you can’t tell people about, books so special and rare and yours that advertising your affection feels like a betrayal.”

When I read the book, I had the same protective impulse I felt as a teenager reading Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye.

That’s the last line in this trailer for “Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters”

http://www.traileraddict.com/trailer/hansel-gretel-witch-hunters/trailer

and looks like there is trouble ahead for the Witch Hunters:

http://www.neontommy.com/news/2012/09/hansel-and-gretel-witch-hunters-already-doomed