Shakespeare makes life better.
Last night, while rocking my son (who’s coming up on 3) to sleep: “What song do you want me to sing?”
“Shakespeare.”
Love it. “One of the sonnets, or maybe something from Hamlet?” I said, to amuse myself as well as Mommy, who was just leaving the room.
“Hamlet.”
Oh, crap. I was joking. Oh well. So I sang him the “What A Piece Of Work Is Man” number, from HAIR. Good thing I didn’t say Macbeth. :)!
(My apologies to whoever pointed me this movie, I’ve forgotten whether it was here on the blog or Twitter or elsewhere.)
Get Over It is, for the most part, your standard high school romantic comedy: nerdy guy has awesome girl, nerdy guy loses awesome girl to handsome jerk. Even more awesome girl (Kirsten Dunst) comes along who loves nerdy guy, but he doesn’t see it because he’s too busy trying to win back awesome girl #1. Blah blah, awesome girl #1 learns what a fool she’s been and wants nerdy guy back, nerdy guy decides that awesome girl #2 is the better choice, happily ever after.
Now, take that plot and drop it on top of a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Interesting. Especially when you have handsome jerk playing Lysander, nerdy guy as Demetrius, original awesome girl as Hermia and new and better awesome girl as Helena.
Now, do it as a musical. Directed by Martin Short, playing one of those standard “washed-up actor who goes on to direct high school theatre” roles (very similar to the Hamlet 2 thing that just came around last year). Is it me, or does Kirsten Dunst try to sing in all her movies? It’s… cute.
With any movie like this, I typically watch it for the Shakespeare. While the jokes are pretty standard stuff, there are some funny bits. When was the last time you caught yourself humming a catchy tune from Macbeth? Shakespeare may have been a great poet, but he’s no Burt Bacharach!
The ending, truthfully, was a surprise. I mean, not in the “Nerdy guy gets the right girl” thing. That always happens. I mean, how it all goes down. Actually it came down to a single word, which I found possibly the funniest part of the whole movie, but I can’t explain it without ruining the joke. If you collect this sort of stuff you might have missed it when it first came around. I know I’d never heard of it.
http://www.usatoday.com/life/theater/news/2009-02-24-evan-rachel-wood_N.htm?csp=34 No, not Mickey Rourke, although the way people talk about his performance you might wonder if he could do Lear. They’re talking about Evan Rachel Wood, who plays the daughter in the movie. She’s going to be doing some Juliet. Saw The Wrestler last week. The acting is very, very good. The writing is very, very good. The movie itself, and the directing, are pretty disturbingly violent. But the overarching story, this idea of a real life human being who spends his life only knowing how to do one thing, is perhaps the most upsetting. You get a clear glimpse of how horrible it is to do what he does, but an equally clear look at how he fails at doing everything else, and thus has no choice but to do this other horrible thing over and over again, forever. It actually reminded me of the scifi classic “Armor”, by John Steakley (I think I have that name right), about the soldier who, every time he thinks he can sit and rest, gets sent off to another battle, because he is a human machine that is just too good at it and not capable of anything else. It’s the kind of thing that makes you walk out of the theatre with your first thought being, “Life is not like that” and your second being, “God, I hope it’s not.”
http://bardfilm.blogspot.com/2009/02/shakespeare-author-cards.html
Over at Bardfilm they’ve got up a freely downloadable version of the “Authors” card game, naturally with Shakespeare theme. I don’t think I’ve ever played this game, but I expect I’ll give it a try. Who knows, maybe with the kids? Looks kind of like Go Fish, only instead of asking for matches (“Got any 3’s?”) you ask for plays (“Got any Richard II / Second Tetralogy?”) The cards are themed like a typical deck – Queen of Hearts, etc… – I think the kids would dig it more if a card for Macbeth actually had Macbeth on it, or at least some sort of graphic indicative of the “High Tragedies”.
http://lateralaction.com/articles/shakespeare-entrepreneurship/ I like it. Not just a biography of the business aspects of life, but an actual “Top 7” of lessons to be learned from Mr. Shakespeare, including such items as:
The Lord Chamberlain’s men owned the Globe Theatre in which they performed for most of their career. Unfortunately, they didn’t own the land in Shoreditch where it originally stood – they leased it from the owner, Giles Allen. When the lease expired, the landlord claimed ownership of the building, forcing the actors to desperate measures: on 28th December 1598, while the landlord was still celebrating Christmas, they armed themselves, and ‘liberated’ the theatre building, dismantling it and hiding it in a warehouse. They later shipped it across the Thames to a new site in Southwark. And because the new site was outside the official limits of the city, it meant they were beyond the jurisdiction of the city fathers, who were often keen to close down the theatres. Takeaway: Establish your business on your own domain – don’t become someone else’s user generated content. Otherwise your enterprise will be ‘Like a fair house built on another man’s ground’ (The Merry Wives of Windsor).