Gandalf is Dracula!

Many of you probably know that Sir Ian McKellen played both Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings and Magneto in X-Men. But did you also know he plays Dracula in the Pet Shop Boys' 1988 music video Heart? I didn't, at least until I listened to the commentary on the new Pop Art DVD. You can check the video out for free on the Pet Shop Boys site -- go to the Pop Art Player page, click Videos, and then click Heart. It requires Flash and either Windows Media Player or Real Player.

As for the DVD, it contains all the Boys' videos (except for the newly-released track Miracles which you can see on the same website as Heart). Unlike their music (which is uniformly brilliant <g>), the videos are a bit of a hit-and-miss affair. There are the outstanding ones such as Being Boring, Domino Dancing, Single/Bilingual, and the award-winning Liberation (featured in the 3-D IMAX film Cyberworld (atrocious Flash-only site... grrrr)), but then there are the experimental / artsy ones like Left to my own Devices or Home and Dry that are truly only for the fans (or suitably interested film students). At one point Chris even jokes about how the video must have been designed to get heavy rotation on MTV. Not.

The commentary is pretty good at the start -- although it consists mostly of naming the labels of the clothes Neil is wearing, laughing at their poor dancing / acting skills, and pointing out how many videos feature them in cars -- but by the end the comments are pretty few and far between. The DVD is well worth it though if you are a fan, as it supersedes both Videography and Various and adds some new stuff in to boot.

Now I'm waiting for the Flamboyant single to be released...