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dragonlady7Our DVD collection is now up to four.
It tends rather strongly away from Hollywood, which is kind of amusing, and unintentional.
In the order we got them, our DVDs are:
Tampopo
The Price of Milk
Fear & Loathing In Las Vegas
Scotland, PA
The first three I bought (the third with a gift certificate), and the last was a gift.
We watched the last one last night, snuggled up in bed with the flannel sheets pulled up, laughing and laughing. It was interesting to compare it with Throne of Blood, but I don't think Dave's ever seen a straight production of it either, so we still lack a good background to compare them. Certain things that I had thought were kind of odd little additions in each movie turned out to be obviously derived from the same source (the original play), and I felt a bit like a Biblical scholar dedeucing the contents of the hypothetical source Q (Matthew and Luke both use Mark as a source, and then both use a second source in common, the original of which has never been discovered, but which is referred to as Q and can be reconstructed from what Matthew and Luke have in common that is not in Mark. There you go: Intro to New Testament, REL 102, freshman year of college. What a fascinating class that was).
Anyhow. There you have it: goofing off as a more-entertaining substitute for doing actual research. This is why I am not an academic.
Macbeth is far from the most fucked-up of Shakespeare's works. I had to watch Titus for a class and i tell you, there is a movie for which they didn't give a shit what their mpaa rating was. You can't go into a production of Titus Andronicus and expect to make a family production out of it. (Hands get chopped off, tongues cut out, and a woman is fed the meat from her murdered sons' bodies.)
And I haven't even started in on King Lear, which by all accounts is screwy as hell.
We watched a little interview at the end with the director, where he spoke about why he made a Macbeth movie. He said he's been astonished at the intensity of the response from the play's fans-- how upset they are at certain omissions, how excited they are at certain inclusions-- and I thought, hmm... that's how fans are. [myself, I love the bit where one of the witches says, "Kill McDuff's entire family!" and the other says, "Oh, that'd work."]
But really, he wrote it for the kids like himself, who read the Cliffs notes and got stoned.
! Suddenly I remember. I have seen a straight production of Macbeth. How could I forget? I was at St. Leonard's, on my exchange year, in St. Andrews Scotland, and we went up to Dundee for a trip to the theatre. I ate something weird at the restaurant in the theatre-- the appetizer was these tiny fish, breaded and fried whole, and I had never been so squicked but everyone else was eating them so I did too and they were ok-- and then we watched the play. It was strange, performed with almost no props or settings, and when the characters died they just went and sat quietly in a chair at the edge of the stage for the rest of the act.
I don't remember a thing, I must confess. Except that the Scottish accents were probably the most genuine you'd ever hear.
Yeah, it was Shakespeare, and a bunch of people got killed. This happened in 1997 and the only other thing I remember about that trip to Dundee was someone telling me the tragic story of the Bridge of Tay (the bridge over the Firth of Tay, a big fjord-like thing between St. Andrews and Dundee-- one night, apparently, the bridge washed out and nobody noticed, so half a dozen different travelers went off it to their deaths before somebody finally noticed it was out and closed the bridge. I guess it was night and the bridge wasn't lit, so they just kept going and by the time they noticed, it was too late. Anyhow, tragic, and it gave me the creeps for the rest of the night.
That's more vivid than the play was.
You know, I think I've seen more Shakespeare than I've read... Lucky me. (I recommend the Stratford Festival in Ontario, by the way, to anyone. I saw an excellent Hamlet there with the actor from Due South, and I saw a hella-creepy production of Medea that haunts me still.)
It tends rather strongly away from Hollywood, which is kind of amusing, and unintentional.
In the order we got them, our DVDs are:
Tampopo
The Price of Milk
Fear & Loathing In Las Vegas
Scotland, PA
The first three I bought (the third with a gift certificate), and the last was a gift.
We watched the last one last night, snuggled up in bed with the flannel sheets pulled up, laughing and laughing. It was interesting to compare it with Throne of Blood, but I don't think Dave's ever seen a straight production of it either, so we still lack a good background to compare them. Certain things that I had thought were kind of odd little additions in each movie turned out to be obviously derived from the same source (the original play), and I felt a bit like a Biblical scholar dedeucing the contents of the hypothetical source Q (Matthew and Luke both use Mark as a source, and then both use a second source in common, the original of which has never been discovered, but which is referred to as Q and can be reconstructed from what Matthew and Luke have in common that is not in Mark. There you go: Intro to New Testament, REL 102, freshman year of college. What a fascinating class that was).
Anyhow. There you have it: goofing off as a more-entertaining substitute for doing actual research. This is why I am not an academic.
Macbeth is far from the most fucked-up of Shakespeare's works. I had to watch Titus for a class and i tell you, there is a movie for which they didn't give a shit what their mpaa rating was. You can't go into a production of Titus Andronicus and expect to make a family production out of it. (Hands get chopped off, tongues cut out, and a woman is fed the meat from her murdered sons' bodies.)
And I haven't even started in on King Lear, which by all accounts is screwy as hell.
We watched a little interview at the end with the director, where he spoke about why he made a Macbeth movie. He said he's been astonished at the intensity of the response from the play's fans-- how upset they are at certain omissions, how excited they are at certain inclusions-- and I thought, hmm... that's how fans are. [myself, I love the bit where one of the witches says, "Kill McDuff's entire family!" and the other says, "Oh, that'd work."]
But really, he wrote it for the kids like himself, who read the Cliffs notes and got stoned.
! Suddenly I remember. I have seen a straight production of Macbeth. How could I forget? I was at St. Leonard's, on my exchange year, in St. Andrews Scotland, and we went up to Dundee for a trip to the theatre. I ate something weird at the restaurant in the theatre-- the appetizer was these tiny fish, breaded and fried whole, and I had never been so squicked but everyone else was eating them so I did too and they were ok-- and then we watched the play. It was strange, performed with almost no props or settings, and when the characters died they just went and sat quietly in a chair at the edge of the stage for the rest of the act.
I don't remember a thing, I must confess. Except that the Scottish accents were probably the most genuine you'd ever hear.
Yeah, it was Shakespeare, and a bunch of people got killed. This happened in 1997 and the only other thing I remember about that trip to Dundee was someone telling me the tragic story of the Bridge of Tay (the bridge over the Firth of Tay, a big fjord-like thing between St. Andrews and Dundee-- one night, apparently, the bridge washed out and nobody noticed, so half a dozen different travelers went off it to their deaths before somebody finally noticed it was out and closed the bridge. I guess it was night and the bridge wasn't lit, so they just kept going and by the time they noticed, it was too late. Anyhow, tragic, and it gave me the creeps for the rest of the night.
That's more vivid than the play was.
You know, I think I've seen more Shakespeare than I've read... Lucky me. (I recommend the Stratford Festival in Ontario, by the way, to anyone. I saw an excellent Hamlet there with the actor from Due South, and I saw a hella-creepy production of Medea that haunts me still.)
Supplemental Materials
Date: 2005-01-13 07:11 pm (UTC)The first two I bought, as a gift for your birthday.
I've certainly read it, and I'm pretty sure I've seen a straight movie production of it, but [as you can tell] it's been a while.
The most troublesome of the omissions from Scotland, PA for me was that the hippies didn't have any brilliant half-truths at the end to come true [eg, Birnham Wood to Dunsinane, no man born of woman, &c.], so for me the fight scene at the end wasn't as climactic as it could have been. On the other hand, it did involve Macbeth trying to shove a hamburger down Macduff's throat. As for Throne of Blood, I thought it was really interesting how they subtly implicated Banquo, too — because really, he had just as much to gain from Duncan's death as Macbeth did.
I never saw or read Lear. I have no idea what it's about, but I am nevertheless drawn to it like a tiny, breaded fish to a frying pan.
Mmm, smelt.
The Stratford Festival will, sadly, not be showing Macbeth this year. They are, however, performing Marlowe for the first time ever, with Edward II. Buffalo's Shakespeare in Delaware Park is also pretty decent, but they will also probably not be showing Macbeth in 2005, as they performed it in 2003, set in a nameless South American dictatorship.
- Z