Critic David Bordwell on Dante's cheerful purgatorio — Occasioned by a New York retrospective of director Joe Dante's films, including a marathon screening of his pop-culty mashup The Movie Orgy, Bordwell elegantly reflects on Dante's body of work. "Dante, impresario of the comic grotesque, finds his inspiration in popular culture, the more wacko and inept the better. The comedy may come from childhood silliness, the grotesque from childhood fears. They say we baby boomers will always be just big kids, and Dante accepts this with a grin and a darkly cheerful eye."
laurel-and-hardy.com: Film Preservation - Another fine mess — A thorough four-part look at a difficult but necessary curatorial artistry. "How could movies like these, so widely seen for so long, be at risk of disappearing forever in first-class quality copies? Because they were too popular. Too many prints and negatives wore out, is the simple answer."
As a somewhat more than armchair Shakespeare buff with teeth-gnashingly strong opinions about the moronic, counterfactual "authorship controversy" recently given the thud of a movie it deserves in Roland Emmerich's Anonymous, I have considered blogging about it at Open the Pod Bay Doors, HAL. But I fear such a post would devolve into a spittle-flecked Hulk-smash rant (on the Internet?! No way!) on the "Oxfordians'" logical fallacies and their absurd Creation Science/Birther/Moon Hoax-style pseudo-intellectualism. So instead I heartily recommend more clear-headed authorities such as Holger Syme (start here), Paul Edmonson, Ron Rosenbaum, and Bardfilm's KJ.
Having seen and been equivocatingly enthralled by Von Trier's bleak yet beautiful newest, Melancholia, I've been curious to read a review of the film from someone with first-hand experience with depression. Dean Treadway at Filmicability rewards my quest here.
Ferdy on Films: Marilyn Ferdinand, one of the more thoughtful and interesting movie bloggers going, also helps me see Melancholia more clearly.
The Girl With the White Parasol: Citizen Kane Takes the Stand - "The reason I watch films is so that I can find those moments of beauty, whether they come from a Technicolor image or from the throb in an actor's voice or from a string chorus. That's why I named my blog, 'The Girl with the White Parasol.' That's why I love film. And that's why I love Citizen Kane."
Music: Oscar Peterson
Near at hand: Yellow Submarine figures
I can't let the confluence of Leslie Nielsen's death and tomorrow's opening of Julie Taymor's The Tempest go by without at least a nod to the film that starred the young Nielsen in the most well-known (albeit very loose) screen interpretation of Shakespeare's swansong play.
It's also one of my "desert island" films. Three various Robby the Robot figurines on my office shelves look upon me as I type this. Recently I traded in my old DVD edition for the new Blu-ray disc. A poster, framed, looms large in my movie room. I have visited Seattle's Science Fiction Museum and stood before their life-sized talking Robby and gone "Wow!" That's also where I spotted one of Anne Francis' costumes from the film and exclaimed, "Holy cow, she was tiny."
It's the classic that, although more than fifty years old, is still my favorite spaceships-rayguns-and-alien-worlds movie to come out of Hollywood. Them's fightin' words in some quarters, but I'm standing by them.
In 1956 with Forbidden Planet, MGM did for pulp science fiction yarns what it had done for musicals four years earlier with another personal fave, Singin' in the Rain. The studio took the stuff audiences loved, gave it that high-polish MGM razzle-dazzle, and produced an enduring best-of-breed favorite, a CinemaScope spectacle that's terrifically entertaining, smartly written, memorably cast, briskly paced, and production-designed to the hilt.
Instead of Gene Kelly's tap shoes or Debbie Reynolds' pertness, here we get Nielsen as a proto-Captain Kirk, plot points lifted with an Amazing Stories spin from Shakespeare's The Tempest, special effects photography that still knocks our socks off, Hollywood's most famous robot before Star Wars' less interesting droids, and (the stuff space kids' dreams are made on) leggy Anne Francis ably modeling miniskirts a decade early.
It has aged remarkably well, and any dated elements — that great flying-saucer design of the starship, the crew's baseball-cap uniforms, the terrific "electronic tonalities" score, the opening narrator ballyhooing mankind's "conquest" of space, the casual Rat Pack-era sexism — add a quaint yesteryear charm to the film's robust retro-future vibe.
The contact points with The Tempest are at best cursory, but they're not immaterial. Shakespeare's Prospero becomes Walter Pidgeon's Prof. Morbius, stranded on an island (planet Altair 4) that he has shaped into his own private dominion. With him is his beautiful and educated yet "terribly ignorant" daughter Altaira (Anne Francis) — obviously Shakespeare's Miranda given a glossy fan-mag update. Having known no human beings besides her father, she delivers a rewrite of Miranda's lines upon encountering her first other humans:
O, wonder! How many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world, That has such people in't!
Altaira turns the analogous moment into a breathy, purring approbation:
"I've always so terribly wanted to meet a young man, and now three at once.... You're lovely, Doctor. Of course, the two end ones are unbelievable." (TCM clip)
Rounding out the dramatis personae, quasi-magical Robby takes the position of Prospero's servant spirit Ariel. Shakespeare's antagonist "monster," the native Caliban, gets supersized here into the murderous Monster from the Id, whose power literally emanates from the planet itself. Earl Holliman's "Cookie," the ship's lowbrow, conniving cook and connoisseur of genuine Kansas City bourbon, stands in for Shakespeare's drunkard clowns Stephano and Trinculo.
Nielsen's by-the-book space skipper is an analog for The Tempest's young Ferdinand in only one way — he falls hard for Morbius-Prospero's daughter, sailing away with her at the end of the tale — but it's a big enough point of contact to carry us through. Unlike the shipwrecked survivors in The Tempest, the "unbelievable" men aboard United Planets Cruiser C-57D arrive at Morbius' planet with purpose and under orders, not tempest toss'd by Morbius-Propero's willful magicks. However, later in the story, the Id Monster — a manifestation of Morbius' psyche — smashes vital equipment aboard the ship, effectively marooning the crew until repairs are made (meanwhile, several crewmen are slaughtered). So that's something.
MGM's top brass never considered Forbidden Planet an A-list project. Nonetheless, the art department (headed by the mighty Cedric Gibbons), in cohoots with the film's writers (Cyril Hume from a story by Irving Block and blacklistee Allen Adler) and director (Fred M. Wilcox), treated the material and their potential audiences with respect, all in the name of creating something better than the zipperback monster fare so common at the time. Ten years before Star Trek used Forbidden Planet as a template for an entire franchise of boldly-goingness, and 21 years before Star Wars microwaved Joseph Campbell and Saturday matinee shoot-em-ups, here's a movie that proved you can do good things with "that outer space stuff" without dishing up more invading aliens or other fast-turnaround juvenilia.
The down side of that extra effort was a budget that made a big busting kaboom! sound at nearly $2 million during a year that already saw plenty of red ink in the studio's balance books. Add the fact that Forbidden Planet didn't come close to, say, Singin' in the Rain's boffo box office, and you can see why the film stands out as a uniquely lavish one-off for science fiction at the time.
Today, after two post-Star Wars generations that have seen science-fiction become as mainstream as westerns in the '50s, this one continues to rank in the top tier of Hollywood's contributions, arguably besting other period watersheds such as The Day the Earth Stood Still and The Thing from Another World. It impresses us with its scale, its relatively grownup plot, and its determination to employ its wall-to-wall visuals and sure-footed cast to the service of crackerjack storytelling. Forbidden Planet balances the tawdry with the sublime, mixing its color-comics gee-whiz sci-fi tropes with aspirations more thoughtful and engaging than most "sci fi" films before or after.
Forbidden Planet sure has served its duty as an inspiration to fifty years' worth of subsequent filmmakers. It's a safe bet that if Forbidden Planet had never been made, there would be no Star Trek, any generation. And without the Star Trek pop phenomenon to prove that voyages to "strange new worlds" had audience appeal, would Star Wars have ever seen frame one? Robby became the standard-bearer for screen robots for decades, and he (or at least big pieces of him) was a recognizable touchstone for a generation of TV-addled genre junkies. No Robby, no C-3PO?
Trivia that makes me go boing!: According to his Wikipedia page, the voice talent who "spoke" for Robby, Marvin Miller, is the voice of the film's trailer, was Narrator for the Oscar-winning cartoon Gerald McBoing-Boing, a PA Announcer in Robert Altman's MASH, and the Narrator in the 1982 TV comedy Police Squad, which starred — boing! — Leslie Nielsen in his first outing as Detective Frank Drebin.
The movie's plot hangs on a simplistic but effective interpretation of Freud's theory of the Id, the primal brute we all carry inside us no matter how evolved our so-called civilization has become. Soon after Commander Adams plants his ship on planet Altair 4 — the most beautiful spaceship landing ever filmed, by the way — what's supposed to be a routine rescue mission turns into a nightmare of destruction and murder. The cause is an all-powerful monster, a giant roaring beast that's visible only when engulfed in a force-field blaze and the energy bolts from the crew's ineffectual blaster guns.
At the center of the mystery stands Dr. Morbius, one of the lone survivors of an expedition decimated by the malevolent force twenty years earlier. Imperious, arrogant, and relishing his solitude on "his" world, Morbius lives alone on the planet with his robot manservant, Robby, whom Morbius "tinkered together" like "child's play" with knowledge far beyond "Earth's combined sciences."
Also sharing his isolation is his daughter, Altaira.
Altaira is beautiful and brilliant, but socially inexperienced. So her naiveté on matters of "basic biology" is more than just a pheromonal attractor for the spacemen suddenly surrounding her. And it's clear that after being "locked up in hyperspace for three hundred and seventy-eight days," these "eighteen competitively selected, super-fit physical specimens with an average age of 24.6" step out of the ship a mite horny. Hey, seriously, after more than a year who wouldn't be?
Naturally, after some token resistance a romance develops between the protective, virile commander and Altaira.
To a degree that would have Freud himself reaching for his pipe, her heretofore innocent maturity is also the catalyst for subconscious energies Morbius is teasing from the vast subterranean machines left behind by the alien Krell, an enigmatic super-race whose miles-wide cavernous machines apparently contributed to their overnight annihilation thousands of centuries ago. (TCM clip)
Morbius' testimonial for his "beloved Krell" is worth repeating:
"In times long past, this planet was the home of a mighty and noble race of beings which called themselves the Krell. Ethically, as well as technologically, they were a million years ahead of humankind. For, in unlocking the mysteries of nature, they had conquered even their baser selves. And when, in the course of eons, they had abolished sickness and insanity and crime and all injustice, they turned, still with high benevolence outward toward space. Long before the dawn of man’s history, they had walked our Earth, and brought back many biological specimens."
That bit about how they "conquered even their baser selves" stands out. Not to go all Post-Colonial Theory or anything — but let's just say that the whole plot turns on how even the mighty Krell's "baser selves" refused to stay "conquered" once the Krell "instrumentality" set them free.
The exemplar of Morbius' own hubris is that he, even with his artificially boosted intellect, can't recognize (or at least consciously accept) the bald truth — that his own baser self, his subconscious possessiveness of his own "little egomaniac empire" that includes Altaira, has given form to things unknown. His "twin self" has reincarnated the Krell's destroyer, "sly and irresistible and only waiting to be re-invoked for murder." Morbius can't accept the reality even when it's literally burning down his door. Only Commander Adams sees clearly enough to explain to Morbius, in his most Shatneresque moment, that he may have high benevolence piled to the adamantine steel rafters, but that means exactly diddly-squat to the "mindless primitive" that's "more enraged and more inflamed with each new frustration" to the point of killing even his daughter to "punish her for her disloyalty and disobedience."
Adams' words sink in. Morbius submits to the evidence. "Guilty! Guilty!" he cries. "My evil self is at that door, and I have no power to stop it!" That is to say, as Prospero says of Caliban, "This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine."
Hoo boy. So much for 'Take Your Daughter to Work' Day.
In the film as we've known it for years, Altaira's alluring influence on Adams and his crewmen — not to mention on her father — is handled with precisely tuned between-the-lines understatement.
However, the deleted footage available on the DVD and Blu-ray discs makes it clear that originally the undiscovered country of her virginal womanhood received more direct attention. Snipped from the final release print was dialogue between Doc Ostrow (Warren Stevens) and Capt. Adams, with the good Doc trying to explain Alta's seemingly magical rapport with her animal friends on Altair 4. He references the myth of the unicorn and the girl's "maiden purity." Well.
Later, Doc points out that she possesses an "exceptionally fine human brain in a totally unawakened female body." Adams replies, "Of course, it'll be a pity when the time comes that she has to lose a gift like that." Gift schmift. Were it not for the editor's scissors, the tropes of Fifties-era female "virtue" would have collided with the hormonal imaginations of every male in the audience already picturing the "awakening" of that female body.
Suddenly the film's sense of wonder takes on a whole new prurient vividness. Had those lines remained, Forbidden Planet might have ushered in a generation's puberty — or boosted enrollment in the space program — years before America was ready.
Music: John Lee Hooker Near at hand: A gift for Wendy.
I'm both a movie buff and a Shakespeare fanboy, so this one hits me with both arrows in its quiver.
Taymor's Titus remains one of the boldest and, to me, most exciting and faithful (in a "purity of essence" way) adaptations of a Shakespeare play for the screen. Titus Andronicus was one of William's earliest productions for the London stage, first performed well before the Globe Theatre was even a twinkle in Richard Burbage's eye. Now Taymor applies her uniquely stylized vision to the playwright's final work as a solo author. It's also one of his very best, endlessly fantastical and rubbery and tunable to our, or any, times. (Curiously, Taymor's Across the Universe left me cold and grumpy, although it too seemed made just for me, a hardcore Beatles aficionado. Then again, its failure for me was at the story level, a problem not likely repeated here.)
Much is being made about the gender-swap of Helen Mirren playing "Prospera" rather than the original, traditionally male Prospero. Pointing out that casting choice as a significant issue just sets my eyes, to borrow a phrase, "in a fine frenzy rolling." It's much ado about bugger all. It's Shakespeare ... with Helen freakin' Mirren! Oh brave new film that has such people in't!
A few years ago a college literature textbook reprinted a novelette of mine set in Shakespeare's time. The story opened with Prospero's "We are such stuff / As dreams are made on" speech. As public final bows (well, nearly) go, Shakespeare began his career's exit with a doozy.
There's a bit more about it at the fine Bardfilm blog.
April 23 marks William Shakespeare's birthday. Okay, fine, we know he was baptized on April 26 and it's likely he was born three days earlier, so his birthday is traditionally observed on the 23rd. Screw it. Whatever the actual birth date, it was sometime this week, so let's all raise a flagon of ale and wish a happy 446th to one of our favorite screenwriters.
Sure, the Western canon's greatest playwright may have lived centuries before movies came along, but he has proved himself time and again as one of our most prolific and popular writers for the big screen. So to commemorate his birthday, let's find a few of our favorites that ask "What light through yonder movie break?"
Kenneth Branagh's Henry V (1989)
With gritty realism and lavish production values, this directorial debut of 29-year-old actor Kenneth Branagh reinvigorated Shakespeare's great play of history and warfare for a new generation — and made Branagh a darling of critics and audiences on two continents.
The Bard's dialogue remains largely intact, and the strong top-to-bottom cast — including Brian Blessed, Ian Holm, Christian Bale, Paul Scofield, Emma Thompson, Robbie Coltrane, and Judi Dench — are fully equipped for the task. There's something about Branagh's delivery of the famous St. Crispin's Day speech — issued to his battle-weary troops in the French countryside, as king and soldiers alike are covered in sweat, blood, and earth — that sends a thrilled shudder up my spine every time.
Laurence Olivier's 1944 film adaptation struck a stirring nationalist note for an England at war:
In 1999, the superhero comedy Mystery Men joined the ranks of movies and TV shows that have riffed on that St. Crispin's Day speech. It cracks me up every time:
Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet (1996)
Of course we can't pair Branagh and Shakespeare together without giving a nod to Branagh's production of Shakespeare's most famous tragedy. The first unabridged theatrical film version of the play, the running time is just over four hours, but it is spellbinding and powerful cinema. (Although, honestly, there are a few strangely wobbly performances here, namely Jack Lemmon — !! — as Marcellus, who seems like he'd much prefer to be out hitting the links with Walter Mathau, and Robin Williams' shticky Osric.) Branagh is, naturally, the thoughtful prince out to avenge his father's murder, supported by Derek Jacobi as King Claudius, Julie Christie as Queen Gertrude, Kate Winslet as Ophelia, Richard Briers as Polonius, Nicholas Farrell as Horatio, and — in this clip — Billy Crystal as the gravedigger.
(Branagh's movie version of Much Ado About Nothing is pretty good too.)
Ian McKellen's Richard III (1995)
For some he'll always be Gandalf. For others, the evil mutant Magneto. But before Sir Ian McKellen was immortalized in a line of action figures, he was one of England's most respected Shakespeareans. His Richard III casts McKellen as the charismatic, murderous, clever, subtle, and often slyly humorous villain ascending to the throne in a Nazi-inspired 1930s England. In this brazen, fast-paced adaptation, the machine-gun pocked opening credits climax with McKellen driving a tank through a wall to kill King Henry VI and his son. One of the play's most famous lines — "A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!" — was recontextualised by the new setting: during the climactic battle, Richard's scout car becomes stuck, and his lament is cast as a plea for a mode of transport with legs rather than wheels.
In this clip, among the supporting cast we see Robert Downey Jr. as Lord Rivers, Annette Bening as Elizabeth, and Maggie Smith as the Duchess of York.
Perhaps no other title on this page better proves that Will Shakespeare would have loved writing for the movies.
Roman Polanski's Macbeth (1971)
Starring Jon Finch as He Who Must Go Unnamed, Polanski's interpretation of "the Scottish play" is as bleak and bloody as they come. You can feel the dank misery of the Middle Ages in every scene. But of course it's most remembered for the nude scene with Lady Macbeth (Francesca Annis) freaking out and looking for a really good bar of soap.
Julie Taymor's Titus (1999)
In Shakespeare's day, his early revenge tragedy Titus Andronicus was a hit "slasher film" of the era. This most gruesome of all Shakespeare's plays — a real "Itchy & Scratchy" of the First Folio — was a smash success that his company trotted out many times over the years to give the groundlings brutal, over-the-top thrills such as mutilations, beheadings, and even a mother tricked into eating her own children that have been baked into pies. (Step aside, Sweeney Todd.)
Director Julie Taymor adapted her own tricked-out stage version for a powerful and wildly weird film starring Anthony Hopkins, Jessica Lange, and Alan Cumming. As one of the unfortunate sons, also here is Jonathan Rhys-Meyers (now TV's Henry VIII in The Tudors). The setting is an anachronistic "all times, all places" world that uses locations, costumes, and imagery from many periods of history, including ancient Rome and Mussolini's Italy. This clip is from the "Iron Chef" scene:
Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet (1968)
Whoa. After all that death and debauchery, let's move to some lighter fare. This movie adaptation of Shakespeare's most famous romance was directed by Franco Zeffirelli, and won Academy Awards for Best Cinematography and Best Costume Design, with nominations for Best Director and Best Picture.
Shakespeare scholar Stephen Orgel describes the film as being "full of beautiful young people, and the camera, and the lush Technicolour, make the most of their sexual energy and good looks." Made at the height of the "British invasion" in U.S. pop culture, and aimed straight at the era's counterculture youth, a generation of teenagers thereafter grew up on this film. Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet is notable for being one of the first filmed versions of the play in which the main actors are near the ages of their characters — Leonard Whiting (Romeo) was 17 during filming, and Olivia Hussey (Juliet) was 15. Zeffirelli had to get special permission for Hussey to appear nude in the film. Hussey later recalled that she was not permitted to view the film because it contained her own nudity.
On the other hand, if you like your Romeo and Juliet with a modern pop edge, there's Baz Luhrmann's Romeo+Juliet (1996) starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Claire Danes, and a soundtrack that successfully targeted the MTV Generation.
Akira Kurosawa's Ran (1985)
Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa's Oscar-winning adaptation of Shakespeare's tragedy King Lear, moved to a sixteenth-century Japan of warloards and fierce battles, was the famed director's last great epic and remains one of the most gripping and beautifully made of all "Shakespeare movies."
With a budget of $12 million, it was the most expensive Japanese film produced up to that time. Ran was hailed for its powerful images and use of color — costume designer Emi Wada won an Academy Award for Costume Design for her work. Kurosawa loved filming in lush and expansive locations, and most of Ran was shot amidst the mountains and plains of Mount Aso, Japan's largest active volcano. Kurosawa was also granted permission to shoot at two of the country's most famous landmarks, the ancient castles at Kumamoto and Himeji. For the castle of Lady Sué's family, he used the ruins of the Azusa castle.
If you like Kurosawa's Ran, follow that film (after you recover) with his 1957 Throne of Blood, which transposes Macbeth to medieval Japan. It's one of Kurosawa's best films, and for many critics it's one of the best film adaptations of Macbeth, despite having almost none of the play's script. Washizu/Macbeth's famous death scene, in which his own archers turn upon him and fill his body with arrows, was in fact performed with real arrows, a choice made to help actor Toshiro Mifune display realistic facial expressions of fear.
And talk about pop culture cool — In an episode of TV's Smallville, Lex Luthor claims that a sword hanging on the wall of his study is a prop from Throne of Blood, his "favorite Akira Kurosawa movie."
King Lear with James Earl Jones at the New York Shakespeare Festival
There have been so many King Lears on film. There are versions set in post-Chernobyl Russia, at a Yiddish seder, and in the cornfields of Iowa. We've seen existential Lears, a Soviet Christian Marxist Lear, and a punk-apocalyptic Lear. Orson Welles was a fine screen king, and at 75 Laurence Olivier won the International and Primetime Emmy awards in a 1984 TV production co-starring Diana Rigg, John Hurt, and Stonehenge.
Then again, you may prefer your King Lear served straight up. In that case, I suggest the Broadway Theatre Archive DVD starring James Earl Jones (before he became Darth Vader), from a performance filmed before an audience in New York City's Central Park and broadcast in 1974 as a PBS Great Performances presentation.
The supporting cast showcases Raul Julia as the seductive villain Edmund, Rene Auberjonois as Edgar/Tom o' Bedlam, Rosalind Cash as treacherous Goneril, Lee Chamberlain's loving and steadfast Cordelia, Douglass Watson as loyal Kent, and Tom Aldredge (The Sopranos) as the Fool, Lear's voice of observant wisdom. (The only weak link is, oddly, Paul Sorvino's lackluster Gloucester.)
Here's a no-fripperies, full-speed-ahead King Lear that's accessible, exciting, haunting, moving, and crowd-pleasing in ways that merely reading the play in English class will never achieve.
Al Pacino's Looking for Richard (1996)
Al Pacino self-produced this terrific fly-on-the-wall documentary because, basically, he's a Shakespeare buff. In it, Pacino explores not just the gold and dirt within Shakespeare's text — we watch him also dip into the well of his own skill and craft as an actor to see if he has what it takes to make the vile (but layered and nuanced) Richard III live for modern American audiences.
Pacino embarked upon Looking for Richard by recruiting fellow actors — such as Kevin Spacey, Alec Baldwin, and Winona Ryder — and shooting small excerpts on film, be it conversations, debates, table-readings, or informal scenes in casual settings. Michael Mann lent some of his film crew from Heat to shoot the climactic Battle of Bosworth Field just outside of L.A.
The result is a meditation on the value of the play, and of Shakespeare in general. It's a master class in acting, with behind-the-scenes conversations illuminating how much thought and planning goes into this sort of production.
Shakespeare in Love (1999)
Okay, sure, it's not strictly speaking "a Shakespeare movie," but this romance-comedy-drama does a splendid job taking us back to the days when Will Shakespeare, just 29 years old with his career on the rise, might forsake it all for the love of a higher-born woman.
The witty script by Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard bubbles with in-jokes for Shakespeare fans and theater buffs. Shakespeare in Love left the 1999 Academy Awards with seven statuettes, including the one for Best Picture. Joseph Fiennes (Ralph's brother) is Will, and Gwyneth Paltrow (ah, my Gwyneth, shall I compare thee to a summer's day?) permanently entered by Must Watch list with this one.
Forbidden Planet (1956)
In 1956 with Forbidden Planet, MGM did for science fiction what it had done for musicals four years earlier with Singin' in the Rain. The studio took the stuff its audiences loved, gave it that high-polish MGM razzle-dazzle, and produced an enduring best-of-breed favorite, a CinemaScope spectacle that's terrifically entertaining, smartly written, memorably cast, briskly paced, and production-designed to the hilt. Instead of Gene Kelly's tap shoes or Debbie Reynolds' pertness, this time we get Leslie Nielsen as a proto-Captain Kirk, special effects photography that still knocks our socks off, Hollywood's most famous robot before Star Wars' less imaginative and interesting droids, and (the stuff space-kids' dreams are made on) leggy Anne Francis ably modeling miniskirts a decade early.
It has aged well, and any dated elements — that great flying-saucer design of the starship, the crew's baseball-cap uniforms, the casual Rat Pack-era sexism — only add a quaint charm to the film's robust retro-future vibe. Oh, and its plot points, and even some dialogue, come lifted with an Amazing Stories spin from Shakespeare's The Tempest.
Pulp Fiction, Shakespeare Style
And finally, it's not a video clip, but it's too good to not mention. Via Boing Boing, we now know that Livejournal's Ceruleanst has given Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction the Bardolator treatment. Forthwith, here's the "Royale with Cheese" bit as written by William Shakespeare:
ACT I SCENE 2. A road, morning. Enter a carriage, with JULES and VINCENT, murderers.
J: And know'st thou what the French name cottage pie?
V: Say they not cottage pie, in their own tongue?
J: But nay, their tongues, for speech and taste alike
Are strange to ours, with their own history:
Gaul knoweth not a cottage from a house.
V: What say they then, pray?
J: Hachis Parmentier.
V: Hachis Parmentier! What name they cream?
J: Cream is but cream, only they say le crème.
V: What do they name black pudding?
J: I know not;
I visited no inn it could be bought.
The site's left-hand navigation among scenes needs a numbering fix, so the Table of Contents is more useful. Of course, social networking being what it is, others have joined in and further passages have been appended anon. And on and on and on.
As I was putting this post together, I stumbled upon Bardfilm: The Shakespeare and Film Microblog. Its collection of rare (and sometime quite odd) clips, plus info and insights and connections both scholarly and amusing, is going to keep me occupied for days. If my own lengthy and scattershot post here kept you interested, go there and bookmark it.
Music: Tom Waits, Glitter and Doom Live Near at hand: program booklet: Seattle Shakespeare's superb Two Gentlemen of Verona
A Midsummer Night’s Dream has been updated for the 21st century with seven small robots playing fairies alongside carbon-based co-stars.
Beyond being a cool thing to do, researchers saw bringing bots to the Bard as a chance to introduce robots to the public and see how people interact with them. Their findings could influence how robots are designed and how they’re used in search-and-rescue operations.
I would love to be there to see this in progress. Then again, I suppose I could be, given that it's open to tourists at £12.50 for a look-see (plus "£11.50 for concessions"). Long way from Seattle to Stratford, however.
A further trench will explore the area thought to have been his pantry and brewery, and one quarter of the 19th Century knot garden will be dug – into what would have been Shakespeare’s backyards. This is where archaeologists believe they might find defunct wells, filled in with refuse and waste when they ceased to be used.
The notion of Shakespearean coprolites is a tad unnerving. Although that may finally reveal, whether we like it or not, what the great man did with those missing pages of Cardenio.
Music: Sondheim, Company (2007 revival)
Near at hand: Shakespeare bobblehead doll
