Peter Sinclair: Modern magicians

By PETER SINCLAIR

As Arthur C. Clarke observed: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

Last week US Customs announced BodySearch, a low-power X-ray, which eliminates the need for hands-on searches by peering straight through clothing to reveal, unfortunately, a lot more than just sedated parakeets.

And modern magicians at the University of Texas have carried the concept a step further — they can make flesh temporarily transparent to a depth of 2mm. You can't even call your cells your own any more.

Yet even as we plunge into the future, ready or not, older magic continues to hold us spellbound.

The cauldrons continue to bubble in our mundane capital as it becomes Enchantment Central for Lord of the Rings. But the wizards of Wellington's Weta prefer to cast their spells in secret, like so many elves.

Every site on the Tolkien web-ring is bewitched by any crumb of fact or fantasy it can find on the New Zealand web for a while there Scoop, was making LOR secrets something of a cottage industry.

So ecstatic has been the excitement, so intense the scrutiny, that you'd have said it would be impossible to upstage Lord of the Rings.

But that looks like happening with the arrival of yet more movie magic — Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone.

After much debate, and to the righteous fury of some of its more seriously Christian parishioners, the Gothic spires and vaulted cloisters of Gloucester Cathedral have won out over dark, medieval Alnwick Castle as the location for Hogwart's School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.

It's inevitable that Richard Harris as headmaster Albus Dumbledore and Alan Rickman as shady Professor Snape, the potions instructor, will probably be outshone by three prepubertal stars: 11-year-old Daniel Radcliffe as Harry, Rupert Grint as his trusty rust-haired sidekick Ron Weasley, and Emma Watson as bossy Hermione Granger.

Author J. K. Rowling won a standoff with director Chris Columbus, so almost the entire cast will be British. But Columbus now says he'll shoot parallel versions of the movie for the sorcerers on one side of the Atlantic and the philosophers on the other.

Meantime the BBC has spent millions on the TV version of Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast, the work which defined 20th-century Gothic. Catch the fascinating final episode on TV One this Saturday at 9.30 pm.

With appearances by Spike Milligan, Eric Sykes and Warren Mitchell among Mervyn Peake's cast of grotesques, you really can't go wrong.

Two trilogies and a quartet ... which will prove to possess the greatest box-office magic? A year ago, without hesitation, I would have said LOR.

But an hour ago I finished reading Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, with its gripping crescendos of the unexpected, and I've changed my mind ...

Links:

X-ray search

Lord of the Rings

Weta

Tolkien webring

Scoop

Harry Potter Movie

Gloucester Cathedral

Alnwick Castle

Harry Potter cast

J.K. Rowling

Gormenghast

Mervyn Peake

Gormenghast cast

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

E-mail: petersinclair@email.com