Harry Potter Grows Up
So the kid that plays Harry Potter is appearing in his birthday suit in some play in London. Apparently, there are a lot of Mrs. Lovejoys out there, saying, "Won't somebody please think of the children?!" (DJ: that's a Simpsons reference.)
Here's the link. (Warning: although the pic doesn't actually show his stuff, there is a certain level of nudity, enough to convince me that he is definitely too old to play young teenager Harry anymore...)
http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/showbiz/article-23383624-details/What+will+Hermione+say%2C+Harry/article.do
I'm starting to form an opinion that, in the same way all women's roles used to be played by men, there should be no child actors. It hardly ever ends well. I mean, Diff'rent Strokes. Need I say more?
Has anyone seen the play they are talking about here? It sounds like a 1960s piece of crap. But then, I'm prejudiced - I hate most modern lit - pretty much anything from 1950 on...
Unless it's a murder mystery!
Here's the link. (Warning: although the pic doesn't actually show his stuff, there is a certain level of nudity, enough to convince me that he is definitely too old to play young teenager Harry anymore...)
http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/showbiz/article-23383624-details/What+will+Hermione+say%2C+Harry/article.do
I'm starting to form an opinion that, in the same way all women's roles used to be played by men, there should be no child actors. It hardly ever ends well. I mean, Diff'rent Strokes. Need I say more?
Has anyone seen the play they are talking about here? It sounds like a 1960s piece of crap. But then, I'm prejudiced - I hate most modern lit - pretty much anything from 1950 on...
Unless it's a murder mystery!
posted by The Big Seester | 1:38 PM
6 Comments:
At risk of sounding like a prude, if there's an extended (20 minute) nude scene, I probably wouldn't like the play very much. I could count on one hand the number of nude scenes I thought really added something to the movie/play/TV show they were in. In fact, off the top of my head, I can only think of one, and that was in some obscure artsy Israeli movie that I saw at the DFT and will probably never remember the name of. Even that one wasn't NECESSARY, strictly speaking, but it worked in the context and with how it was done.
That said, I'd be really leery of having a LIVE nude scene if I were a guy. The thing about film is, if the guy involved gets out of character and doesn't think about baseball quickly enough, you can just re-shoot the scene. With a play, you can't.
Especially a 17 year old guy.
I don't know the play, but it sounds like it's of the same ilk as that piece of crap Andre Gide novel I had to read for Francais in kollege...in which pedophilia was glorified.
I guess my larger question is whether there should be 2 standards: 1 for guys and 1 for girls. When Jessica Biel posed for some semi-nude pics a month before her 18th birthday, she got fired from 7th Heaven. Is it somehow worse when it's a girl?
Well, Seventh Heaven was sort of a special case - I mean, think about the content. Harry Potter does have a large children's audience, but it's not the squeaky-clean goodness that Seventh Heaven was.
Plus, didn't Biel pose for very suggestive pix in Maxim or Playboy or something? Seems to me there may be some reasonable distinction between doing a nude scene in a play/movie (nudity as a portion of a larger whole) and doing nude or semi-nude pix in a magazine that by its nature is intended to titillate.
Nekkid is nekkid. "Nekkid for art" is not more worthy than nekkid for anything else, IMHO.
I have yet to know of any case in a play or a film where nekkid added to the situation instead of detracting from it. People who get nekkid (or plays where people get nekkid - what's the one I'm thinking about? Hair?) always seem to be saying, "We are nekkid and you are uptight for not liking that fact." The whole thing just smacks of the kind of self-conscious crap that teenagers pull all the time. (Which is of course what he is).
My question is why an underaged boy getting nekkid isn't a problem but an underaged girl is. Neither of them are over 18.
And my point is that the situations are not necessarily parallel. If Emma Watson (the girl who plays Hermione) gets nekkid somewhere and gets fired, then we'll talk. But Seventh Heaven was, I think, a uniquely 'clean' show, and having one of their actors pose nekkid or semi-nekkid (whether a man or a woman) would definitely have been in conflict with that. The Potter series, despite its large child following, doesn't have that.
I think another factor at play here is that Dan Radcliffe is practically irreplaceable as Harry Potter, and WB probably has goes faint at the thought of trying to recast the part or give up the beaucoup bucks the remaining movies will undoubtedly rake in. And honestly, I think that it's probably considered more scandalous for a man to pose nude, which is why a movie with full-frontal female nudity gets an R rating by the MPAA, but a movie with full-frontal male nudity would get NC-17 or X. I've never understood why that works that way, except maybe that we're so darned used to seeing nekkid women that we're desensitized.
Oh. I get what you're saying. I was focusing on the gender and you were focusing on the medium of the show. You're right, 7th Heaven is very much a family show. Absolutely.
I still think that nobody under 18 should be getting naked for a camera under any circumstances.
Unless we're planning to change the laws about when one becomes "an adult."
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