Just say “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” last night, and it’s got Shakespeare in it. As a general movie rule I find that whenever a character says that he was raised on classics or learned to read from classics, a Shakespeare quote is coming.  So when “Tizzy” said, “I learned to read when I was five.  My grandfather was a dresser for a famous actor…”  I was expecting Shakespeare. What I got was this:

 "Kind keepers of my weak decaying
               age, Let dying Mortimer here rest
               himself. Even like a man new
               haled from the rack. So fare my
               limbs with long imprisonment. And
               these gray locks, the pursuivants
               of death, Nestor-like aged in an
               age of care, Argue the end of
               Edmund Mortimer."

I have to admit, I did not recognize it.  Though I kept the name “Edmund Mortimer” in my head to look up later.  The character Tizzy goes on to say that the “great actor” was John Wilkes Booth, who Shakespeare geeks will know was an accomplished Shakespearean actor in his own right.

Later in the movie, in a voice over about people’s purpose in life, the narrator does indeed say “Some know Shakespeare”, so I knew I had to find the reference.

Turns out, if you didn’t already recognize it, that it’s from Henry VI, Part One.

 

By the way I have no idea how accurate it is, but I was very surprised and pleased to find the entire script online!  Maybe it’s not perfect, but all I needed to do was recall the Shakespeare quote :).

Today is the last day to get your entry in for the Bill Bryson For Everyone And Their Grandmother contest!  To enter for your chance to win *2* copies of Bill Bryson’s Shakespeare biography, just click the link above and add a comment telling us who you would give the second copy to, and why.    Contest ends today (Jan 31) so hurry up and get commenting!

Recently I picked up a book of Shakespearean paper dolls, which I have to get around to reviewing when I have a moment.  The kids seem to love it.  They pick up characters and say “Who’s this?  What story is he in?  Is he a good guy or a bad guy?” Sometimes, they want the story told.  And wouldn’t you know one of them picks Shylock?’ So here, in a nutshell, is the quick and dirty Merchant that my kids got.  It is fairly brutal, so those with delicate sensibilities about effing with the text are fairly warned…. Once upon a time there was a businessman named Antonio.  Normally Antonio had lots of money, but he’d made some bad business decisions and lost a lot of it, and needed more.  So he went to his friend Shylock, who had lots of money. Shylock had so much money, in fact, that that was his business – all he did was lend money to people. Antonio asked his friend to borrow some money.  Shylock said, “How will I know that you can pay me back?  You make bad business decisions, you lose money.”  Antonio promised that he would be able to pay it back.  Shylock said, “I need some assurances.  So let us say, in the contract, that if you are unable to pay me back my money, I … get to cut off your fingers.” [ NOTE : I figured explaining “pound of flesh” was a little too much. ] Antonion did not like this deal one bit.  “How could I ever do business without my fingers?” he asked.  “Then I would never be able to make money.” “But you are so very confident that you will be able to pay me back, that I will never need to use the contract, now will I?” Antonio needed the money, so he agreed, even though he was not too happy about the deal.  He then set about trying to make some better business decisions so that he would be able to pay back the money and not lose his fingers. Unfortunately he did not have good luck, and as the day approached where he was supposed to repay Shylock, he still didn’t have the money.  He went to his friend and said, “You weren’t serious about the finger thing, were you?” and Shylock said, “Oh yes, I certainly was, a contract is a contract.” Right about this time, Portia, Antonio’s daughter who had been away at law school [NOTE – I know, I know, sue me…. ] came back to visit her father and heard the whole story.  “That is crazy!” she shouted.  “He can’t possibly think that he can take your fingers!"  We have to take this before the judge.” So they all went in front of the judge.  Shylock got up and said simply, “Your honor – a contract is a contract.  I explained the terms up front, Antonio agreed.  He is unable to pay me my money, therefore I get his fingers.” Portia then stood up for her turn, and pled for mercy from the judge.  “If he has no fingers he will never be able to work, and then he will never be able to make money again!” she said. The judge considered both arguments.  He said, “While I agree that these are horrible terms, I have to acknowledge that the contract is binding – your father knew the rules, he signed the paper, I can’t see how I can change that.”  Shylock thought that this was wonderful, and started coming toward Antonio.  “BUT!” said the judge, “I see nowhere in this contract about you getting to take any of his blood.  So it is my ruling that you are entitled to take Antonio’s fingers, but not any of his blood.  You may begin.” Shylock thought about this for a moment.  He considered his options, trying to figure out how to do that.  “That’s crazy!” he shouted at the judge, “You know perfectly well that if I take his fingers, there’s going to be blood!” “That,” said the judge, “Is not our problem.  A contract is a contract, and you didn’t write in anything about blood.” Everyone laughed at Shylock then, no longer scared of him.  Humiliated, he ran away and was never seen again.

Another continuing installment of Life with Geeklets… Mommy:  “I have to go meet Liv and Tommy to pick out wedding invitations!” Geeklet:  “What kind of meet, Mommy?  How do you spell it?” Mommy:  “M-E-E-T.” Daddy:  “What other kinds of meet do you know, Geeklet?” Geeklet:  “Ham?” Daddy: “Very good, and how do you spell that one?” Geeklet: “Ham?” Daddy: “No, how do you spell the meat that is.” Geeklet:  “I don’t know, I was guessing.” Daddy:  “Fair enough.  There’s lots of different ways to spell it, and different meanings.  Shakespeare uses it too.  Hamlet uses that one when he says, “I shall think meet to put an antic disposition on.” Geeklet:  “Which story is he in?” Daddy: “Hamlet?  He has his own story.  That’s a grown up one, lots of people die in that one.” Geeklet:  “They do?” Daddy:  “You see, Hamlet’s father had died, and he was very sad about it.  But he was visited by a ghost who told Hamlet that his father had been murdered!” Geeklet:  “What’s murdered?” Daddy: (thinking that if Mommy finds out we just went down this path I am in a world of trouble)  “That’s when a bad guy sends somebody to Heaven on purpose.  Back in the old days, a long time ago – nobody does this anymore – if you wanted to be king, there was only one way to do it…get rid of the old king.  But only bad guys would do that, that’s why they’re bad guys.” Geeklet:  “Did Hamlet know the ghost?” Daddy: “He sure did – it was the ghost of his father coming back from Heaven to tell Hamlet what had happened!’ Geeklet:  “It was?  It was really his dad?” Daddy:  (loving it when the 6yr old stumbles onto the heavy duty questions) “You know, it’s actually a good question.  Nobody was really sure about ghosts, whether they were good ghosts or bad ghosts.  So it might have been Hamlet’s father, coming back from Heaven…but it might have been a bad ghost just pretending to be Hamlet’s father, to mess up his brains.  We don’t really know, and neither did Hamlet.”   At this point the children are summoned to kiss Mommy goodbye before she leaves, and then it’s off to watch Blues Clues.

Last night on the redeye flight back from California I finally got to watch Hamlet 2.  For a week I’d been seeing a steady Twitter-stream of comments from people that either loved or hated it. I can’t say I loved it, but man it wasn’t good.  I wrote on Twitter that it had 4 minutes of good in it, a comment I’ll explain in a moment. Hopefully everybody saw the trailers when they came out, and our discussion.  The plot : A really bad drama teacher attempts to save his drama department by putting on a play so bad that it’ll get everybody’s attention and turn into one of those “so bad it comes back around to good” things.  The bigger plot : It’s also insanely offensive and stupid (you did see Jesus and Hamlet together on the time machine, right?  They did not, however, show the president French-kissing Satan in the commercials), so it turns into a big free speech thing, blah blah “We heard it’s offensive so we want it banned even though we never saw it for ourselves”, all that sort of stuff.  Throw in some self-satire about “inspirational teacher” movies – the bad drama teacher is obsessed with writing stage versions of movies, and wants to model his life story on something like Mr. Holland’s Opus or perhaps Dangerous Minds – and you’ve got everything you need to know. The movie itself is just pieced together scenes from other movies, perhaps on purpose.  You’ve got the gangbanger kid who doesn’t want to be in a play, but turns out to be the best actor in the group…who then has to quit the show because his parents are making him.  You’ve got a teacher’s pet who learns to let her hair down, and a theatre major figuring out that he’s gay.  There’s a whole subplot about his wife leaving him that’s so bad I don’t understand why it was there to begin with, you could have shot one scene at the beginning with him coming home to an empty house, and saved yourself about 25 minutes of film. There are a handful of funny moments, almost all of the outrageous/shock variety – somebody comes out with a stream of curse words, or shows up naked when you didn’t expect it, or falls down. The plot of the story, which I don’t think I’ve mentioned yet, shows Jesus bringing Hamlet back in a time machine.  Hamlet is going to go back and correct everything so that no one dies.   I don’t think it’s “taking the tragedy out of the tragedy” as one character puts it – I think it’s exploring what it means to want to go back and make amends, and using the world’s greatest tragedy as the canvas to depict how that might go. It comes at 1:19 into the movie (yes, unfortunately for me, I waited 79 minutes for this).   You know what I’m going to say.  It’s when we actually start seeing Shakespearean content.  The entire movie up this point has been stupid, and quite frankly could just as easily have been a movie about Ghandi and Martin Luther King, for all the Shakespeare it had in it.  But then there’s Gertrude, poisoned cup in hand ready to drink, and a time-travelling Hamlet comes lunging in (in slow-motion, no less) to bat the cup from her hand.  There’s those damned lightning bolts up my spine.  It happens every time, and I love it.  I won’t spoil things, but we then get about 4 minutes of the play-within-the-movie and you do get to see Hamlet’s quest to put everything right.  I was intrigued, I have to admit.  It’s not dumb, it has no Jesus in it, no sex and violence. It is exactly what I described – Hamlet trying to undo the tide of tragedy around him.  And then it’s over, and we’re back to the regular movie.  At first I thought, “That could have been a 4 minute YouTube clip and I would have enjoyed it more”, but that’s not really fair.  By the time the play does go on, you know more about the characters, at least one or two of them.  So maybe instead of a 4minute clip it could have been a 15minute short film.   If you’re like me and the only reason you’d consider looking at this movie is for the Shakespeare references, you know all you need to know.  There are maybe one or two other references sprinkled throughout the play (meeting the student’s parents was a particularly good one), but they’re clearly not important to the movie.