A LOT has happened since the screenwriter Steve Kloves began working on his adaptation of the very first Harry Potter book, “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone,” in the late 1990s.
The three central characters — Harry (Daniel Radcliffe), Hermione (Emma Watson) and Ron (Rupert Grint) — have grown up on screen, enduring the twin horrors of Voldemort and adolescence before our very eyes. The stories have become progressively darker and more complicated. And Mr. Kloves has immersed himself so deeply in the world of Harry Potter that by the time J. K. Rowling’s seventh and final volume, “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,” came out in 2007, he said, he knew the characters almost as thoroughly as she did herself.
Adapting the stories for film has been a delicate process all along, as faithfulness to books adored by millions has always had to be balanced with the conventions (and length) of Hollywood blockbusters. (Mr. Kloves is the screenwriter for all but one of the movies, “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.”) But “Deathly Hallows” was perhaps the most difficult of all. More than 700 pages long and crammed with quick-moving plot developments leading to an apocalyptic finale, the book ultimately proved too dense to make into a single film. So it has been split into two.
Part 1, to be released on Friday, covers the first half of the novel, a kind of prolonged road trip in which Harry, Ron and Hermione become nomads in hiding, sorting out their feelings for one another while eluding capture and searching for magical objects that must be destroyed before Voldemort (Ralph Fiennes) can die. Part 2, which builds to a final battle between good and evil inside the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, ...
PALO ALTO, Calif. — For more than two decades, e-mail has been the killer application of the Internet. But Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Facebook, believes that e-mail is antiquated.
On Monday, Mr. Zuckerberg unveiled a new unified messaging system on Facebook that allows people to communicate with each other regardless of whether they are using e-mail, text messages or online chat services.
“We don’t think a modern messaging system is going to be e-mail,” Mr. Zuckerberg said. He said that e-mail is too formal, too slow and too cumbersome, especially for young people who have grown up communicating using online chat and text messaging systems. The new Facebook service, which will allow users to have @facebook.com e-mail addresses, intends to integrate the three forms of communication into one inbox that is accessible from PCs or mobile phones.
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You Me At Six frontman Josh Franceschi joined Paramore on stage at London's O2 Arena on Saturday (November 13) to lend his vocal talents to the band's 2007 breakthrough hit, Misery Business.
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Green Day frontman Billie Joe Armstrong says that the US punk titans owe much of their recent success to one thing and one thing alone - alcohol.
Speaking to Kerrang!'s sister magazine, Q, Armstrong says Green Day's live performances have improved over the years because they're usually drunk on stage.
"Around Insomniac [in 1995] we became a shitter live band. ...
I never play games twice. But Call of Duty: Black Ops has made a very happy liar out of me .As soon as I finished Black Ops the other night on my PC, I got up, walked out of my computer den, went into the living room, fired up my Xbox 360, plopped down in my big, overstuffed chair and started all over again.
I wanted to try to assassinate Fidel Castro during the Bay of Pigs invasion again. And break out of a Soviet prison camp in the Arctic again. And pilot a gunboat through the Mekong Delta again, shooting up sampans while listening to “Sympathy for the Devil.” Black Ops glistens with such moments. The cold war was never so much fun.
Exciting, intense and engrossing, Black Ops has immediately become the definitive contemporary first-person shooter (although if you want to shoot aliens rather than Russians, Halo: Reach is your game). Black Ops, published by Activision, does not really innovate, but it doesn’t have to. Rather, it reflects a keen intelligence and a rigorous, disciplined understanding of each individual element of modern game design and production. Just as important, it then executes and delivers on each of those elements in a way that demonstrates how well oiled a game-making machine Robert A. Kotick, Activision’s chief executive, has created.
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Yasmin Alibhai-Brown suspected trouble was brewing when her teenage daughter grew testy on the evening of Nov. 10. As Alibhai-Brown recounted to the BBC: "She was incredibly distressed before she went to bed and said, 'Why do you have to be a journalist, mum? Every time you open the door I think somebody is going to shoot you.'" It was only after a family friend directed Alibhai-Brown to a post on Twitter that she understood her daughter's concern: someone in the Twittersphere seemed to want her dead.
Earlier that morning Alibhai-Brown, 60, a columnist with London's Independent newspaper, had appeared on radio and questioned whether any British politician was morally qualified to comment on human-rights abuses, including the stoning of women. That prompted Gareth Compton, a Conservative city councilor in Birmingham, to post the following message on his Twitter account: "Can someone please stone Yasmin Alibhai-Brown to death? I shan't tell Amnesty if you don't. It would be a blessing, really."
Speaking to reporters the following day, Alibhai-Brown compared those comments to "incitement to murder" and suggested they could be racially motivated, as she is a Muslim of Indian descent. Compton, 38, removed the message, posted an apology for his "ill-conceived attempt at humor" and defended himself by saying that Twitter was a forum for "glib comment." Police didn't get the joke: they arrested him for violating the Communications Act of 2003 on suspicion of sending an offensive or indecent message and released him on bail pending further investigation. The Conservative Party added to the chorus of hisses by suspending Compton until that investigation is complete.
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Hayley Williams was interviewed by Nate Ruess of fun for Fueled By Ramen.
Not many people know this about you....but you're illiterate. That means YOU CAN'T READ. Ah who am I kidding. All you're seeing are squiggly lines. What's that all about?
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Moving along...you've spent a lot of time in cyberspace talking about ...