December 26, 2024

Tag: Ian McKellen

Arts and Culture

Happy 457th, Sweet Will

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The foul toad woos the regal lady

Sir Ian McKellen and Kristin Scott Thomas

William Shakespeare died on April 23rd. We do not really know when he was born. But his christening date implies it happened sometime during the same week, fifty-two years earlier. So, we celebrate it on the 23rd, which seems poetically suited to poet.

Kristin Scott Thomas is currently featured in the PBS series “My Grandparent’s War,” where she learns about her amazing grandfather’s heroic service during WWII.

Check out here! https://www.pbs.org/show/my-grandparents-war/

 

Film

Mr. Holmes Returns

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Ian McKellen as Sherlock Holmes

The Living Treasure of English Actors Portrays the Living Legend of English Detectives

July 2015 – Mr. Holmes comes to the cinema screen

Was “chuffed” indeed to learn that Ian McKellen was to portray an “aging Sherlock Holmes.” But in 1947???

Sherlock Holmes would have been 93 at minimum. Seems improbable that a man of his years and unhealthy lifestyle would even be alive in 1947, let alone functioning in society as the trailer suggests – not to mention dressing in Victorian garb. Ridiculous is more like it. A pity they did not set it in the ’20s or ’30s, which would have actually made sense.

Still, I will see it and probably love it. At worse it is sure to far surpass the insufferable comic book action movie rubbish that were the Downy Jr. films.

Arts and Culture / Review

Review – McKellen and Stewart joust in Pinter’s No Man’s Land

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Resurrected with new life, the two-act drama of misaligned memory that is Harold Pinter’s No Man’s Land provokes peels of spontaneous laughter, continually disrupting the unsettling tension that weighs upon the audience at the Cort Theatre, on 48th St. near Times Square.

Starring Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart, and staged by director Sean Mathias, theirs is an affectionate production, bringing together two of the greatest speaking voices of our age to revel in the language finely formed by that most deft of English sculptors, the late Harold Pinter.

And yet, it is the characters’ spontaneous human behavior that tickles the audience, even as they are denied the sort of artificial exposition provided by other playwrights. In No Man’s Land are found no bread crumbs laid down to help explain what is going on.

“Pinter’s insistence that the audience remain an outsider who becomes aware of lives and conversations well after they began, and which leaves them long before reaching any definitive conclusion, is nowhere more obvious than in this play. With immediate prior circumstance barely mentioned, but memories from long ago recounted in vivid detail, he creates four souls who interact in anything but perfect harmony, and with two of the roles requiring champion actors to subtly conjure the weighty icebergs floating just below their visible surface.”

The two knights of the English stage, McKellen and Stewart joust in Pinter’s No Man’s Land wonderfully.

Read the Full Review

Pinter's No Man's Land Beckett's Godot