[ Well, that was annoying. See updated post for the real story. ]
Author: duane
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Romeo and … Brittney? All Right.
These names – Romeo and Brittney – kept coming up on my newsfeeds over the last couple of days. Given how overused the name Romeo is these days, and attaching no special significance to the name Brittney, I skipped them. Most of them.
Turns out that Romeo and Brittney is to be a new “literate teen comedy” in the style of Ten Things I Hate About You (which, as we know, was based on Shrew – and was also quite a success, spinning off it’s own tv show).
Karen Gillan has landed a lead role as a time-travelling Juliet in David Baddiel’s directorial debut, Romeo And Brittney.
The Scottish beauty, best known for playing Doctor Who’s feisty companion Amy Pond, will play a high school teenager from New Jersey who finds herself travelling back in time to “mythical 13th-century Verona” in William Shakespeare’s Romeo And Juliet, reported Deadline.
That could be cool. I love the whole Dr. Who connection, what with David Tennant and all.
Review : Two Gentlemen of Lebowski
Two Gentlemen of Lebowski hit the scene in January 2010, and we were there. In it, Adam Bertocci masterfully retells cult movie The Big Lebowski as if it had been written by, well, you know who.
So in a true demonstration of just how quickly an online hit can go from viral to print, I hold in my hands the paperback version of the book which Simon and Schuster were nice enough to send me in thanks for my early support of the project.
I’ve sat here for awhile, reading it front to back, trying to decide how I’d review this one. Then I wondered, what am I doing? If you’ve got interest at all in this project, you’ve also probably got the movie memorized. And chances are that you’ve already read, or at least skimmed, the online version.
But here’s a little secret that I’m not sure I should admit — I’ve never seen the movie. Gasp! It’s true. I started it, once. I know the bit about the rug. And some early scenes in the bowling alley where John Goodman pulls a gun on somebody because his toe went over the line. That’s about it. So that put me in what was probably a fairly unique situation – reading the Shakespeare version as if it were the original. It helped that I could picture Jeff Bridges as “The Knave”, I’ll tell you that.
If you know the movie and you’ve read the online version, why should you get the book? For the annotations, mainly. They’ve done this one up like a traditional text, with the script on one side and a full page of footnotes and other annotations on the facing page. That means that Mr. Bertocci not only had to map the entire plot of the movie into a Shakespearean script, but he had to backfill all the notes as well. Pay attention, because often those are the best part!
7. lance: euphemism for penis; see also most nouns in Shakespeare.
Many variations on that theme, as you could imagine. 🙂
Is the original movie on Netflix streaming? I’m thinking I’ll watch the whole thing now, this book in hand, and see how it works out. Somebody should do an audio book, and then we can play the old Wizard of Oz / Dark Side of the Moon game where you put on the video, turn the sound down, and play the audiobook in sync with it. That’d be cool!
Ernie and Bert Are Dead
Oh my god how is this dated 2005 and I’ve not seen it? Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, done with Sesame Street characters. Tis just a textual piece – a script – not a video. But, still!
Curtain opens to show OSCAR standing on a balcony, staring glumly at a HAWK and a HANDSAW. A brass weathervane on the balcony is spinning; it stops at north-north-west for a moment, but ends up pointing southeast. ERNIE and BERT join OSCAR on the balcony.
BERT: Are you Prince Hamlet?
OSCAR: No, I’m a merchant from Venice.
ERNIE: Where’s Venice?
The weathervane spins back to north-north-west.
OSCAR: Of course I’m Prince Hamlet.
BERT: Prince Hamlet, we have a question for you.
ERNIE: We hear you’re having a bad month. We were wondering why that is.
OSCAR: Why am I having a bad month? You. have to ask why I’m having a bad month? Count von Claudius took away my trash. All of my lovely stinking trash. My whole foul and pestilent congregation of vapours.
Love it.
Shakespeare Was Gay! O Noes!
When I spotted this 11 Points article (via Reddit) that claims “11 Pieces of Evidence That Shakespeare Was Gay,” I thought, “Oh, lord, here we go again.” And at first read I thought, “Wow, terrible article with horrible points.”
Then I, you know, actually read it. And I’d like to think that this was the author’s whole point. First of all it’s a humor site. Second, his point is pretty plainly “Look, I have to make a pretty ridiculous leap before any of these can be considered evidence of anything, but the fact that I’m presenting them as research shows that people have, in fact, tried to make exactly this case with exactly these points.”
All the typical points are there — he didn’t love his wife, the sonnets are all about his love for another dude, too much cross dressing, you’ve heard them all before. A couple were new to me, though, like the urban legend that in the “original” Hamlet, the first letters of the last lines spelled out “I am a homosexual”? Come again? Given that there’s really no such thing as a single “original”, I’d still like to know what word supposedly started a line with the letter X.
Anyway, thought I’d post it and give the author a little acknowledgement for apparently being on the right and sane argument of the “We’ll never know for sure, and really, does it even matter?” debate. It’s an entertaining bit when you realize you’re not supposed to take it seriously.