osprey_archer, posts by tag: shakespeare - LiveJournal

One letter, six questions meme. evelyn_b gave me J, which is surprisingly hard! Or maybe any letter might have been difficult; I guess I’m just not used to grouping things alphabetically in my mind.

Something I hate: Man, this is hard. I thought the movie Judgment at Nuremberg was pretentious and not nearly as morally insightful as it thought, but I felt bored rather than filled with hatred.

Oh! Jelly beans. Jelly beans are the worst. They’re sticky and too sweet and they have a weird texture and just in general they are disgusting.

Something I love: Julius Caesar! The Shakespeare play! Have I told you about the tragic nobility of Brutus, who is only trying to do what is best for Rome, only it all goes horribly wrong because he allows himself to be led astray by that viper in the grass, Cassius? I think I’ve mentioned this before.

I also think that this is probably not the most nuanced understanding of this play, but I first read it when I was in ninth grade so, you know, nuanced was not the name of the game.

Somewhere I’ve been: Jacksonville, Florida.

Somewhere I’d like to go: Japan!

Someone I know:: One of my friends in elementary school was a Jessica. But she was a grade above me, so we grew apart when she went over to the junior high.

A film I like: I have some reservations on J. Edgar – I think they should have focused more on the politics of Hoover’s life and less on his mostly-sublimated love affair with his second in command, Clyde Tolson – but nonetheless I did quite enjoy that mostly-sublimated love affair.

I also retain a weird fondness for Josie and the Pussycats, even though I wouldn’t really call it a good movie.

Let me know if you'd like a letter!

I am so behind on movie reviews. I’ve been meaning to write about Downfall, but somehow I can’t get more coherent than Nazis! Nature of evil! Life as Wagnerian opera! Discussion of grimdark aesthetics! - and all my other reviews have been stuck in a pipeline behind it.

So I am skipping Downfall, for now.

1. A Very Long Engagement, a French movie starring the luminously beautiful Audrey Tatou, who has the saddest eyes in all of France. Everyone says that Mathilde’s fiance, Manech, died in No Man’s Land by the trench Bingo Crepescule, but Mathilde doesn’t believe it. In the early 1920s, Mathilde sets out on a quest to find out what really happened to him.

I’ve been meaning to see this for movie ages, because Audrey Tatou; but also putting it off, because the premise seemed doomed to end with disappointment. Either Mathilde will learn that Manech's just as dead as everyone says, which will drive home the message that war is terrible but make the movie seem rather pointless (all that work to get where we were in the first place?); or she’ll find him alive, which would totally undermine the message; or she won’t find him at all, which would be extremely frustrating.

But the filmmakers manage to solve this rather cleverly: ( spoilersCollapse )

2. The Iron Lady, a disappointingly unfocused biopic about Margaret Thatcher. It attempts to squeeze Thatcher’s entire life into less than two hours, giving roughly equal weight to each part, which means that the most interesting parts - her rise to power and time as prime minister - are hopelessly rushed.

This might not be a problem if the filmmakers didn’t waste a ton of time on their framing device: rather than simply tell Thatcher’s story, they set up the film as the elderly Thatcher’s reminiscences triggered by her hallucinations of her dead husband. If this was merely a framing story, that would be one thing, but they return to elderly Thatcher and her hallucinatory husband again and again and again, as if they believe these repetitive scenes are more interesting than actually delving into her political career. It’s vexing and rather cowardly: I came away with the strong sense that they were afraid to say anything substantive about her career.

3. Some Like It Hot (which, by the by, had an interesting Yuletide fic this year: Had to be you), a film about two men who dress as women in order to escape the Mafia (like you do) and fall in with Marilyn Monroe, a member of an all-female band.

This film does not star Monroe’s breasts quite as prominently as did The Seven Year Itch, but man, if Monroe’s directors had actually sat down with the intention of making a textbook illustration of the male gaze, they could not have done better than this.

4. Kenneth Branagh’s As You Like It, because somehow I had forgotten that I hate the play, which features not one, not two, but three extremely irritating romances: Touchstone mocking Audrey incessantly, Silvio following Phoebe around bothering her and refusing to take no for an answer, and of course Rosalind (dressed as a boy) abandoning her BFF Celia (who gave up everything for her) in order to bond with Orlando over the joys of misogyny.

Moreover, though the production is very pretty, I’m not sure why Branagh bothered to set it in nineteenth century Japan when he didn’t really bother to engage with the setting beyond having some sumo wrestling and a couple of geishas.

5. And also Gone with the Wind! But that will need it's own post, I think.

The university screened Joss Whedon’s Much Ado about Nothing for freeeeeeeee, so of course Emma and Rick and I went to see it.

I liked it! As much as I am ever going to like Much Ado about Nothing, anyway. I love Beatrice and Benedick (and how hilarious were they, sneaking around trying to listen as their friends and relations discuss how in love with each other they are? The physical comedy here is great), but Claudio will always be an unmitigated ass.

He’s less physically violent in Whedon’s version than Branagh’s, but he still shames Hero so badly - at the altar, no less! In front of the whole city! - that her only recourse is to pretend to be dead.

I’m always kind of gunning for Hero to throw him over at the end.

However, that is Shakespeare’s fault and not Whedon’s. And, in fact, I think Whedon did mitigate Claudio’s horridness somewhat. In the play, after Hero’s “death”, her father Leonato suggests that he and Claudio should repair their alliance by having Claudio marry Hero’s cousin Beatrice, and Claudio is all “AWESOME,” because apparently women are interchangeable to him provided they are pretty.

And in Whedon’s version, he does agree; but you can see by his acting that he doesn’t really want to. He thinks he has to agree to it in order to make it up to Leonato and head off a feud between their families.

Now, I still think that if Claudio and Beatrice married under those circumstances, it would go badly - well, it would go badly under any circumstances; she would talk rings around him, and he would hate that. But “wanting to avoid a blood feud” is more sympathetic than being happy to marry any pretty and rich girl offered to him.

Otherwise this is a charming and stylish production - although I couldn’t tell if this was the film itself or just our projector, but the characters’ heads kept getting lobbed off by the top of the screen. The modern setting is lovely, although it’s ultimately just set-dressing that’s good for a few gags: there’s very much a sense that these are period people in modern dress.

Possibly that’s necessary for any adaptation of Much Ado about Nothing that hews closely to the last two acts of the play. While there are definitely modern American parents who might tell a daughter they wished she was dead rather than losing her virginity before marriage, I just can’t see a modern American parent being all, “My daughter is dead, but here, marry her cousin instead!” We don’t - even very conservative people like members of the Quiverful movement don’t - see marriage in terms that would make that proposal seem anything but preposterous.

How would you update Much Ado about Nothing to be modern in attitude as well as dress? What could Don John frame Hero for that would make Claudio's publicly shaming her at her own wedding seem like an appropriate response, a mistake that their relationship could recover from? Or - and I am sort of leaning toward this - would you have to change the last two acts so much that the resulting story could hardly be called an adaptation anymore?

Or maybe you could just adapt it so Hero does throw him over at the end. I would be okay with that.

What I Just Finished Reading

Katherine Applegate’s The One and Only Ivan, which I found unexpectedly compelling. Ivan is a gorilla who lives in a little cage in a mall circus that is slowly going bankrupt. The keeper decides to bring in a new attraction: a baby elephant, Ruby, to join Ivan’s ailing elephant friend Stella in an elephant act.

”A good zoo,” Stella says, “is a large domain. A wild cage. A safe place to be. It has room to roam and humans who don’t hurt.” She pauses, considering her words. “A good zoo is how humans make amends.”

A good zoo is their goal: they want to save Ruby from living this tiny cage life. It’s an economical book. Ivan writes short sentences and leaves a lot of white space on the page, but there’s a lot of story packed in those few sentences.

Humans waste words. They toss them like banana peels and leave them to rot.

Everyone knows the peels are the best part.

What I’m Reading Now

Back to Les Mis! Houston, we have an Eponine!

Also we have creepy stalker Marius. He doesn’t know Cosette’s name yet, but he stands under her apartment window at night and swoons when he sees a shadow on the wall that might be hers. Also he sees her in the park every day, and gets mad when the wind blows up her skirt. The hussy! How dare she stand in the wind so anyone could see her legs!

I just finished up with the scene where Grantaire goes to a tavern to Talk Revolution, and Enjolras walks by later and discovers that Grantaire is playing dominoes and not talking revolution at all. carmarthen, did you ever write that story where Grantaire (presumably after Enjolras drags him out of the tavern by his ear) waxes eloquent about the noble history of strip domino?

I’m also reading Jaclyn Moriarty’s I Have a Bed Made of Buttermilk Pancakes. Despite my devotion to Moriarty’s work I hadn’t heard of this book till recently, and I am beginning to suspect this was for good reason. Also, it seems to be the same book as The Spell Book of Listen Taylor? Like, parts of it were adapted to make Listen Taylor.

What I’m Reading Next

I am hoping to settle in and steamroll through the rest of Les Miserables, because I have only six more weeks of French class and one measly book is not a very good summer overview of French literature.

Plus of course I have more Newbery books. Except I forgot to bring Susan Cooper's The Dark is Rising sequence with me when I visited my parent's house! Noooo, those were totally going to be my early morning tea books.

It is ridiculous that I have not read The Dark is Rising yet, I know. I did read Cooper's King of Shadows and The Boggart - I loved The Boggart ridiculously and rather turned up my nose at the inferior boggarts in Harry Potter.

King of Shadows and The Shakespeare Stealer are probably responsible for the fact that I automatically assume all things Shakespeare are cool. Also Becoming Rosemary, which quotes him liberally. I think possibly there is a children's book conspiracy to acclimate the young into an appreciation of Shakespeare - and a longstanding conspiracy, at that, stretching back to Laura Elizabeth Howe Richard's 1892 Captain January.

So I have finally come up with my fantasy casting for Brutus, if someone decided that they were going to make a film adaptation of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar! James McAvoy, because I have seen him in two movies where he excellently portrays young idealists cruelly betrayed by reality, which is clearly the most important quality in any interpretation of Brutus.*

I say this because I have just recently seen The Last Station, where McAvoy reaches the acme of idealism undercut by reality in his part as Valentin Bulgakov, who is an infatuated convert to the doctrines of Tolstoyanism: pacifism, vegetarianism, celibacy, living in general peace and harmony. Driven by the fire of his convictions, he becomes Tolstoy’s secretary near the end of Tolstoy’s life.

Unfortunately for idealistic young Bulgakov, Tolstoy’s estate at Yasnaya Polyana is a hotbed of acrimony. Before he even arrives at the estate, Tolstoy’s acolyte Chertkov gives him a journal to write down, oh, things that Tolstoy’s wife Sophia says, things like that... a request soon bookended by Sophia’s request that Bulgakov should report to her about Tolstoy’s conversations with Chertkov.

Sophia and Chertkov, Bulgakov eventually realizes, are battling over the posthumous rights to Tolstoy’s work: Sophia wants the family to retain them, while Chertkov wants Tolstoy to sign away his copyright so his works can be distributed free to breed converts to Tolstoyanism (which will, of course, increase Chertkov’s prestige).

McAvoy is good, and Helen Mirren is particularly affecting as Sophia, balancing histrionics and pathos to remain a sympathetic character. (It helps that the moviemakers seem to be not-so-secretly on her side. I have the impression that they feel they are settling a score against Chertkov sympathizers.) It’s an excellent period piece.

***

*Apparently most of my fellow Julius Caesar fans ship Brutus/Cassius, which I cannot fathom. Cassius is clearly not fit to kiss the hem of Brutus’s toga, while being simultaneously so prideful as to believe that kissing the hem of Brutus’s toga would be a degradation rather than an honor to which he should aspire.

I am sure the moment when Brutus realized that Cassius had convinced him to assassinate Caesar not for the good of Rome and the saving of the Republic, but to salve Cassius’s own miserable pride, was one of the most terribly disillusioning of his noble life.

...As you may have guessed, I first read this play in ninth grade, and I had ~feelings~. Brutus was forced, forced by the dictates of his conscious to kill his beloved friend Julius Caesar, who had become a danger to the ideals of the republic! It was so sad and glorious and gloriously tragic.

Another foray into the world of Shakespeare in film! This time, I've watched the Emma Thompson version of Much Ado about Nothing, which has exquisite, exquisite, probably not-even-slightly historically accurate costumes, beautiful Tuscan scenery, and trademark harebrained Shakespeare plots.

The harebrained romance in Much Ado about Nothing features naive, sweetly flirtatious young Hero and her lover Claudio, played by tiny!Robert Sean Leonard when he was still young and beautiful.

Claudio is the worst romantic hero ever. First he repudiates his lady-love Hero on their wedding day, at the altar - in fact, he flings her against the altar, before tossing her off the dais, while shouting accusations of infidelity at her. All this, in front of everyone of any importance in the whole land of Italy, just to ensure that she cannot possibly have a second chance at happiness after ruining his life with her unfaithfulness.

But then! But then! After Hero pretends to commit suicide, in one of Shakespeare's patented "everything will be fine if someone pretends to die" plots (don't worry, it totally works out this time) - right after this pretend-suicide, which Claudio thinks is totally real, Hero's father is all, "Hey Claudio, you can marry my niece Beatrice!"

And Claudio, who but hours before was professing undying love for Hero and shedding everlasting tears over her supposed infidelity, is all, "Forsake my beloved Hero? Marry someone else? This very weekend, you say? Sure!"

And not in a "I'm sad about Hero's death, but I'm glad you forgive me, and if I have to marry someone purely for politics, then at least Beatrice is a nice person" kind of way. No, Claudio is all "This is AMAZING! I just drove my last girlfriend to kill herself (and now I know she's innocent, but it was an honest mistake, you can hardly hold it against me!), but I still get to marry a hottie with tons of political connections and loot! Woot woot!"

Yeah, his ruined life? Apparently lasted for about three days. Now he's ready for wedding bells!

Then of course they swap Hero in for Beatrice at the altar, so the lovers are reunited, happy end! Insofar as Hero marrying the man who repudiated her at the altar and then was so little effected by her suicide that he was ready to marry someone else within the week is a happy end, anyway. Okay then, Shakespeare!

The movie is nonetheless totally worth seeing for its sun-drenched cinematography, the aforementioned beautiful costumes (the men's coats are epic!), and Emma Thompson as Beatrice; but it really helps to tie up your critical faculties before going into it.

***

Next up on my Shakespeare adaptation list: carmarthen put me onto a version of Twelfth Night starring Parminder Nagra, who played Jess in Bend It Like Beckham, so of course I have to see it.

DID YOU KNOW that there's a movie version of Richard III set during the 1920s? There is! There is! So many of my favorite things all in one place: the British nobility behaving badly, and Shakespeare, and story retellings, all wrapped up in Jazz Age trappings!

The movie has a jazz version of Marlowe's "The Passionate Shepherd to his Love!" (Modern musicians, I think you should consider this "setting Renaissance poetry to music" thing. It could be epic!) And splendid twenties-style clothes! And Ian McKellen as a delightfully vile Richard III; and of course Maggie Smith plays the Duchess of York, because she plays all the steel-spined dowager ladies. (If I were her, I'd want to play a weeping and pathetic granny, just for some variety.) The scene where she curses Richard? A++.

I tend to like the women in Shakespeare's history plays more than the ones in his comedies. (But I haven't read Twelfth Night, which everyone tells me is the best.) The presence of historical fact seems to constrain him to portray them as braver than he otherwise might.*

Like the scene near the end, where Richard is trying to convince Elizabeth Woodville to marry her daughter to him. She seems to be caving, which I found exasperating when I first read the play - why do all the women say yes to Richard when he's so obviously evil? Is Shakespeare having one of his exciting "the inherent weakness of being female" moments?

But the movie makes it clear that she has no intention of getting her daughter to marry Richard. She's trying to convince him that she will, because he tends to shoot people who don't do what he wants; the scene shows great guile and bravery.

And by this point, Richard is so high on his own success that he totally buys her charade. A victim of his own success, that's our Richard. Evil Overlord tip for the day: if you find yourself contemplating taking your supporters' children hostage to ensure their loyalty, know that this is a good way to lose all the supporters whose children you haven't gotten to yet.


*Although this doesn't help poor Portia, Brutus's wife in Julius Caesar. The classical historians have her killing herself after Brutus died, thus making her a heroine - and yes, I realize it's totally problematic that most of the classical heroines prove their heroism by killing themselves - but still, committing suicide with great classical dignity, in the tradition of Cato and Seneca, is a thousand times better than having Portia kill herself, as Shakespeare does, because she can't stand the suspense of Brutus's absence!

Richard III! What a villain! Shakespeare’s play may be a pack of propagandistic lies, but what brilliant lies they are. What style Richard has, what wit, what a complete and utter lack of conscience; you love every minute he’s on stage (or on the page) but you’re still cheering when he dies. Now that’s good writing.

My very favorite scene is the one where he woos Lady Anne. Of course it’s ridiculous that she would say yes to him – she’s standing next to the corpse of her father-in-law, being wooed by the man who killed him AND her original husband - but at the same time…how could she say no?

(Of course later on he uses the exact same trick on Queen Elizabeth [the widow of Edward IV] and, as she is a female character in Shakespeare and thus completely useless, she falls for it too; that's somewhat less enthralling. The scene where everyone he's killed comes back to haunt him is pretty awesome, though.)

In the interest of fairness I visited York’s Richard III museum, which is almost as biased in Richard’s favor as Shakespeare was against him. (He was a scion of the house of York.) It did prove a few parts of Shakespeare’s play decisively wrong – Richard almost certainly was not a hunchback, for instance.

However, the fate of the princes in the tower remains a mystery. It’s not even entirely clear when they died, although it appears to be sometime after Richard left London. So…did he leave then send someone to do his dirty work for him, so he could claim clean hands? Did Buckingham, who was in London, do them in? (Could that be why Richard executed him without even granting an interview?) Or did they survive until Henry VII became king, and he killed them?

Josephine Tey wrote a book, which I’m told is quite good, called The Daughter of Time which explores those very questions. I may read that next: a nice light book to finish the term.

I have a problem with Shakespeare's comedies.

I really like Shakespeare's history plays: I think we've already covered How Much I Love Julius Caesar, and I'm reading Richard III and enjoying it a great deal. And although his tragedies usually leave me cold, I don't dislike them. (Except Romeo and Juliet. All-consuming love is silly whether it's Shakespeare writing it or Stephanie Meyer.)

But I don't like his comedies, and in particular I don't like As You Like It. I do not think Rosalind and Orlando make a cute couple. I don't think they make an interesting couple even when Rosalind is pretending to be a boy called Ganymede and Orlando is pretending that Ganymede is Rosalind and fake-courting him/her, which by all rights ought to be entertaining - but no. It's mostly an excuse for Rosalind disguised as Ganymede to have interminable discussions with Orlando about how awful women are.

I'm sure Elizabethans found this hilarious, and as a historical artifact I'm sure the play is fascinating. But I hate it. I hate Rosalind (no one else in the play develops enough individuality to be worth hating). I hate the LOL!misogyny. And I hate the play.

I went to Betty's for lunch/tea today - Betty's is a famous teahouse/restaurant in the center of York, which has been there since 1937, which is not quite as impressive as Sally Lunn's in Bath which has been there since 1680...but Betty's has better food.

I had rarebit! Which was delicious! And jasmine tea! Which was...interesting. I prefer my tea with milk, I think. But it was a lovely golden color. And hot chocolate spiced with cinnamon and nutmeg with cinnamon sugar sprinkled on top! (I've been meaning to write a post about the Comparative Hot Chocolates of York. I should do that. Tomorrow.) And a pear and almond frangipane tart with ice cream and chocolate sauce!

The chocolate sauce was TO DIE FOR. Mind, the tart was completely excellent too, but I would walk over a pit of burning coals to get to the chocolate sauce.

Also, my lunch companion was a Shakespeare nut from my medieval history class, who didn't think it was at all strange when I got histrionic about Brutus from Julius Caesar (because he's got so much integrity and courage and he's so idealistic and Cassius takes such cruel advantage of his ideals and it's SO TRAGIC), and even lent me her copy of As You Like It. (I haven't read any of the comedies, except Midsummer Night's Dream, because my school for some reason thought high schoolers would obviously prefer the tragedies. Or something.) So I can add Shakespeare to my British Classics project!

I'm having way too much fun with that project. I think I should do an American classics project when I get back to the States. I've always meant to read more F. Scott Fitzgerald...and finally get through a Mark Twain book. I feel bad about it, but I've never been able to read Mark Twain. I don't know why, because everyone else thinks he's so funny, but I find him boring. :( Maybe I've grown into him by now, though?

Anyway, it was an excellent day.