Quote of the Day (Daniel Radcliffe, on Being Quoted Harry Potter Lines)

“The bad thing about Harry Potter being quoted to me is that it has now been long enough [i.e., 15 years this July since the last movie in the series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 2] that unless it is a really easy quote to remember, I’ve probably forgotten the context or who said it. So sometimes Harry Potter fans will come up to me and say something, and I will look at them blankly. I can see them look disappointed, and I’m like, ‘I’m so sorry.’”—English film and stage actor Daniel Radcliffe quoted by Lane Florsheim, “My Monday Morning: Daniel Radcliffe,” WSJ. Magazine (the magazine of The Wall Street Journal), Issue 170 (Spring 2026)

Quote of the Day (Aristotle, on the Multiple Benefits of Friendship)

“Without friends no one would choose to live, though he had all other goods; even rich men and those in possession of office and of dominating power are thought to need friends most of all; for what is the use of such prosperity without the opportunity of beneficence, which is exercised chiefly and in its most laudable form towards friends? Or how can prosperity be guarded and preserved without friends? The greater it is, the more exposed is it to risk. And in poverty and in other misfortunes men think friends are the only refuge. It helps the young, too, to keep from error; it aids older people by ministering to their needs and supplementing the activities that are failing from weakness; those in the prime of life it stimulates to noble actions-'two going together'-for with friends men are more able both to think and to act….Friendship seems too to hold states together, and lawgivers to care more for it than for justice; for unanimity seems to be something like friendship, and this they aim at most of all, and expel faction as their worst enemy; and when men are friends they have no need of justice, while when they are just they need friendship as well, and the truest form of justice is thought to be a friendly quality.”—Greek philosopher Aristotle (384 BC 322 BC), Nichomachean Ethics, translated by W. D. Ross (350 BC)

Is there anyone out there on Planet Earth who doesn’t know who these friends are? Very well, then: they are Harry Potter (played by Daniel Radcliffe), Hermione Granger (Emma Watson), and Ron Weasley (Rupert Grint), schoolmates through eight cinematic adventures in the super-profitable "Harry Potter" franchise.

Hopefully, none of us will ever have the harrowing confrontations with evil that this trio must endure. But friendship is indeed the balm and refuge that Aristotle describes, as I have rediscovered in the past couple of weeks in encounters with friends who go back with me nearly 60 years, to our first years in elementary school.

Maybe Harry, Hermione and Ron will be so lucky!

This Day in Film History (‘Young Sherlock Holmes’ Paves Way for New Special Effects Wizardry—and New Cinema Wizard)

Dec. 4, 1985—By the mid-1980s, Hollywood saw Steven Spielberg as having an uncanny instinct for what would excite the public. But as an executive producer rather than his more accustomed perch as director, his golden touch failed him with Young Sherlock Holmes.

Oh, he didn’t have a budget-busting box-office bomb on his hands. But, with a $19.7 million domestic box-office take barely covering its $18 million production cost, this movie was a disappointment.

That did not mean, however, that Spielberg hadn’t advanced cinema as a medium even now. This story—a speculation about the origins of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous Victorian detective and his friend, Dr. John Watson—took innovation in the still relatively new field of computer-generated imagery (CGI) to a new level: an entire character (a knight jumping from a stained-glass window).

CGI, first encountered onscreen in Westworld (1973) and revived later in Tron (1982), now steered special-effects specialists and the audiences that delighted in them away from old-fashioned matte painting and model building and towards a brave new digital world. This new form of razzle-dazzle put John Lasseter on the path towards becoming a legend in the animation field, and earned the film an Academy Award nomination for Best Visual Effects (which, unfortunately, it lost to Cocoon).

(Oh, did I mention the major minds behind this Paramount movie? Lasseter’s boss was Spielberg’s old friend George Lucas, in his role as head of Hollywood’s answer to Edison’s Menlo Park, Industrial Light and Magic. Henry Winkler, having wound up his longtime gig as The Fonz on Happy Days, served as a producer here. Screenwriter Barry Levinson, having directed someone else’s script on The Natural the year before, was doing the same now for young Goonies and Gremlins scribe Chris Columbus. So much for the auteur theory of cinema!)

Critics greeted the movie in the same restrained manner as audiences, with ratings more or less ranging from two stars (Leonard Maltin) to three (Roger Ebert). Even as they noted the significance of the CGI tricks, they questioned why Levinson inserted it into what was essentially a Victorian mystery, or why, following Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Spielberg had yet again paid politically incorrect homage to the famous scene in Gunga Din (1939) showing a group of European characters watching in horror a human sacrifice occurring in a secret temple.

For years, this represented the final judgment on Young Sherlock Holmes: revolutionary in cinematic craft, but decidedly same-old, same-old as far as storytelling was concerned.

That verdict needs to be revised, or at least put in a different context. When I watched it 35 years ago, I found it a very pleasant way to spend two hours at the theater—and given the pretentious tripe that has come from film-school grads since then, that is nothing to sneer at.

Moreover, Columbus’ chief fear as he created the screenplay—i.e., outrage from Holmes purists over a departure from sacred scroll (Doyle envisioned them meeting instead as adults, in A Study in Scarlet)—seems in retrospect rather overblown, given the violent liberties taken by Robert Downey Jr. in converting the master of ratiocination into a bare-chested martial-arts devotee in two films.

Furthermore, I’m surprised that, with the passage of time, detractors continue to harp on how derivative Columbus was rather than acknowledge that he was paving the way for a far bigger trend in one of his later projects. So consider: What other Columbus film (this time with him as writer-director) also featured:

*another young hero with special powers (so great, you might even call him a wizard), along with another nerdy but loyal sidekick and another cute girl?

*another English boarding school with more than the usual trials of that setting?

*another battle against powerful forces of evil, in which the young hero is launched on his life’s mission?

Yes, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (2001)—not to mention its 2002 sequel, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets—made studio execs forget in a hurry that Columbus was ever involved in an underperforming variation on Sherlock Holmes.

(For a fun summary of this film, see this post from the blog "Classic Film and TV Cafe" by "Rick29."

Theater Review: ‘Just Jim Dale,” From the Roundabout Theatre Co.

I’m really not a fan of one-man shows. To me, it’s a way of reducing one of Broadway’s sorriest long-term trends—smaller casts for the sake of trimming costs—to their logical conclusion. And somehow, for the average theatergoer, the price of a ticket, even without supporting cast members (in this scenario, regarded as expendable as spear carriers), remains unduly high.

But Just Jim Dale led me to lay aside, at least for awhile, my feelings about such shows. I hadn’t known what to expect going on, other than the fact that its star, Jim Dale, is a hardy—and celebrated—Broadway institution. His talents, I firmly believe now, were sadly underused in two other Roundabout Theatre shows that I saw several years ago, The Road to Mecca and The Threepenny Opera.  

But you owe it to yourself to catch this show before it closes August 10. Otherwise, you will be missing the chance to experience not just a half-century of life in the theater, but even a kind of Zelig of late-20^th century entertainment: someone who's engaged knockabout English revues, rock ‘n’ roll, composing for film, classical theater, Broadway, and audiotapes of famous—very famous—novels.

It helps that Dale is in one of the Roundabout’s most intimate venues, the Laura Pels Theatre, but you get the sense he would be comfortable anywhere. Much of this derives from the English music-hall tradition, which, he notes, lasted for 180 years, up to the 1960s. It seems obvious that he developed his talent for, in effect, shrinking the size of any theater from this form of entertainment, which placed a premium on audience participation and familiarity. (Fans would not only come out for the same shows year after year, he noted, but crave the exact same jokes each time.)

A short stint as a rock ‘n’ roll singer in the early 1960s led to one of the most surprising interludes of his career: writing the lyrics for the title tune of the movie Georgy Girl. In one of the most hilarious segments in an hour and 40 minutes filled with them, Dale recounted his bewildered of the song for two heavyset men in dark suits who complained that the song “just won’t woik,” because it had to be “a song that Frank [Sinatra] would do.” (Time would vindicate Dale and his composer partner, Dusty Springfield’s brother Tom, with the pair scoring an Oscar nomination.)

Most fans, however, came to know Dale when he moved front and center into the theater world. The show features his inspired dramatic soliloquys from Noel Coward’s Fumed Oak and Peter Nichols’ Day in the Death of Joe Egg; a ferocious tongue-twisting number on all the phrases created by The Bard, “You’re Quoting Shakespeare”; and descriptions of acrobatic performances in the likes of Scapino and Barnum.

While Dale has been recently inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame for his years of work in such shows, he has gained a whole new generation of fans through a very different source: narrating all seven audiobooks for the Harry Potter series, which required him to create more than 200 voices in J.K. Rowlings’ teeming fantasy universe. In one scene in this solo show, he recreates his first, agonizing day of appearing in an unfamiliar medium with its own unique demands.

From first to late, what strikes you most about Dale is his physical dexterity. When first contemplating getting into the entertainment business, he recalls, his father’s advice was short and simple: “Learn to move.” Seldom in show-business history has advice been better heeded. Even at age 78, Dale possesses the same kind of gift for transcendent physical comedy that Dick Van Dyke displayed 50 years ago on his sitcom. He shows, for instance, how his career began in earnest: when, as a youth, when his dancing partner missed a ballet competition, he impressed the judges, in spite of themselves, by performing the pas de deux without her, as much by laughing themselves silly as by the moves he executed.

The constant interaction with audience members might lead one to believe that the show is spontaneous, but the whole thing is carefully scripted, revealed director Richard Maltby, Jr. in one of the Roundabout’s “Celebrity” post-show “talk-backs” with audience members. Like his good friend, fellow theater legend Frank Langella, Dale has been “dining out” on favorite stories from his long career, with the tales improving with each telling. The show was an attempt to mold them into coherent order. 

Somewhat to his chagrin, Maltby achieved some of his greatest recognition in the theater with his work on two Tony Award-winning musical reviews: Ain’t Misbehavin’ and Fosse. Though he professes not to be a fan of the form, he has performed similar sterling work by developing a through line for one of the entertainment industry’s most multifaceted—not to mention charming and talented—performers. I can easily see its star taking Just Jim Dale on the road for as long as he wants.

Photo of the Day: Harry Potter’s School

Well, okay, don’t get excited….I know it’s not Hogswarts Academy. And technically speaking, the imposing building on the right wasn’t even where Daniel Radcliffe, the actor who played everyone’s favorite boy wizard, attended classes. No, Harry Potter—I mean Mr. Radcliffe—attended a red brick structure on Queen Victoria Street that superseded the one in this picture (which I took, incidentally, on a bus tour of London two weeks ago).

But for generations—a full century, if you want to know the truth—many of Britain’s illuminati walked through this particular set of doors of the City of London School. From 1883 to 1987, this handsome structure, done in high Victoria style on Victoria Embankment (naturally!), housed the boys’ independent day school on the River Thames. Through here, struggling with many of the same issues that have plagued plebeians like you and me, passed novelists Kingsley Amis and Julian Barnes, director Michael Apted, and Heaven knows who else.  

We Yanks might call graduates of primary or secondary schools alumni. Across the pond, however, they’d be termed “Old Boys” or “Old Citizens”—though, judging from the looks of him, Mr. Radcliffe would seem to be still a young person. Just another one of those reasons why a quote (popularly attributed to George Bernard Shaw) holds that the U.S. and Great Britain are two nations divided by a common language…

Quote of the Day (Frankie Boyle, Disputing Harry Potter’s Powers)

“If Harry Potter’s so magical, why can’t he cure his own eyesight?”—Comic Frankie Boyle, quoted in “Laugh!”, Reader’s Digest, June/July 2010