So if you saw a list called The 50 Most Hated Characters in Literary History, and you knew it was tagged Shakespeare, who would you expect to find?
I suppose we could debate what exactly hate means, and for that matter what exactly literary history means, for that matter – but for the purposes of this list lets just call it “characters that audiences love to hate.”
Did you guess Iago? That was easy.
Well Shakespeare shows up in 3 spots, so what are the other two? I have to admit, I wouldn’t have guessed. I don’t think I’m particularly surprised, but those aren’t the ones I would have picked.
Bikini Shakespeare
So, somebody sends me a link on Twitter yesterday, and I see that it’s a video of bikini girls reciting Shakespeare while eating popcorn. Declaring it a bit NSFW I save it for later.
I come back later, only to discover that it’s been taken down for a “spam/scam/deceptive” complaint. No idea what that means, I’ve never even seen YouTube use that excuse. Made me sad. If there’s one person that needs to see this, it’s me. For science, you understand. Research.
Good news, though! It’s back. Check it out, and I’ll see you in a couple of minutes.
Every now and then you think that the universe is so small that somebody’s on the other side of it, creating something solely for you, you know? Somebody out there loves me :). It is so corny (popcorny, even! ha!) it’s stupid. But that’s sort of the point. You should see me here on the couch, watching the video with my wife sitting next to me, cringing and screaming every time they mispronounce a word while alternately commenting that this one’s got no hips, and that one’s got a fake rack.
The gimmick appears to be something to do with The Apprentice tv show for the Popcorn, Indiana product. If you don’t feel like watching the video, by the way, the girls keep pausing in their soliloquoy to wolf down handfuls of popcorn. Oh, and their bikini tops are made out of popcorn. 🙂
Now the only thing that makes me sad is that it’s clearly labelled “1 of 4” and I can’t find the other 3 parts. :)! Maybe it’s going to be a series? A geek can dream. Can I put in a request that for the next one they do the mudwrestling scene between Hermia and Helena from Midsummer?
Messing With Geeklet
[ Well, that was annoying. See updated post for the real story. ]
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!