Posts Tagged ‘movie’
Alas, poor Yorick
Definitely, poor Yorick, it’s a fairly well known line from Hamlet and often misquoted. This doesn’t mean I’m reviewing Hamlet, far from it. I am going to make quick mention of the storyline and then talk a little about the numerous essays and creative responses that I’ve had to read as part of my studies.
One of the problems I have with Hamlet is that it’s supposedly set in Denmark but it has English values and thoughts in it. I know this is because Shakespeare was not widely travelled and didn’t know a great deal about other countries. He was widely educated about legends and used them in his stories, but he very loosely based them in Denmark or Verona or wherever while overlaying English society into the play. That worries me.
Synopsis
Hamlet’s father dies and his mother marries his uncle within a couple of months. Not too good you reckon? I quite agree, Hamlet’s father was the king of Denmark and although it was an elected position, if Hamlet had been in Denmark at the time then there’s a fair chance he’d have been elected. Fat chance he has now, then to add insult to injury a ghost appears claiming to be his father and tells Hamlet he was really murdered by his brother. Awesome work, now he just has to unmask his uncle, Claudius, then kill him and then take over the crown. Doesn’t happen, he manages to unmask Claudius just at the very end and kill him but everyone else dies too and he recommends Fortinbras, the nephew of the king of Norway, take over the throne with his dying breath. There you go, how’s that for spoilers?
Essays
The play is a very complex one, I’ve simplified it substantially and put in some of the interpretation I feel necessary to make sense of the whole thing. Freud would most likely have words to say about the whole ‘mother issue’ Hamlet seems to have and so many other people have had their say. The overwhelming thread that comes through all these pieces of writing is that they’re looking from the point of view of their training. Freud…no, I’ve already mentioned Freud. Asimov wrote a very sensible piece which detailed the entire play complete with history attached and with the political ramifications fully intact making it really easy to put the play in context.
A 19th Century piece of prose by someone called Fox was very nice. We were told to be aware of when it was written and how that would colour the thinking. I bore that in mind and just enjoyed the turn of phrase. Ann Blake gave us an essay on Hamlet’s state of mind. Sue Tweg wrote A Dream of Passion which brings in Shakespeare’s contemporary, Ben Jonson, and also Mona Lisa. Jan Fox discusses the many soliloquies by Hamlet in Now I am alone…, it’s not terribly long considering Hamlet has so many soliloquies. In Graeme Henry’s essay, The poison of deep grief he talks about how ingrained into society Hamlet is.
Hamlet: Dying as an Art by Fintan O’Toole is a lovely article on the character of Hamlet and why he’s never going to do what he needs to do. I have one page full of paragraphs from different people including: Coleridge (1818), A. C. Bradley (1904), T. S. Eliot (1919) and G. Wilson Knight (1930).
Blood and Madness by Bob Carr
Hamlet from Shakespeare’s Language by Frank Kermode
Essays and Soliloquies from A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare by James Shapiro
Hamlet Returns from What Happens in “Hamlet” by John Dover Wilson
Hamlet from The Romantics on Shakespeare Wars by Ron Rosenbaum
Cross Cultural Reflections on Mortality: Hamlet and Chuang Tzu by F. Gonzalez Crussi
Word-games and Hamlet by David Crystal
An interesting essay by Carolyn Heilbrun gives a different view of Hamlet’s mother. Most people look on her as being ineffective and brainless, Heilbrun details how astute she feels Gertude really was and why. Edith Sitwell wrote a few ‘notes’ on Hamlet, she felt she was unworthy to write on this topic and so only wrote a few notes.
Creative Responses
I really enjoyed some of these. Clive James wrote a poem called Angels over Elsinore which I found rather interesting as it’s been written in fairly modern language but you can see the style of Shakespeare and he’s referenced Hamlet a number of times using some of Shakespeare’s phrases.
The one I enjoyed the most was written by Margaret Attwood, called Gertrude Talks Back it’s written from Gertrude’s point of view and basically tells Hamlet to stop agonising over what to do and to go away. Awesome stuff!
I also enjoyed John Updike’s take on Hamlet with Gertrude and Claudius. A very nice little story from Gertrude and Claudius’ point of view giving us a great deal of probable background into their relationship before Hamlet senior’s death. Most enjoyable.
The one I didn’t enjoy was not given to me as homework but recommended by my eldest. Something Rotten by Jasper Fforde is the fourth book in the Thursday Next series, it was interesting to read how he took the popular line with Hamlet’s character. I’ll scribble a few more words about this another time.
Other creative responses included are:
Wife to Horatio by Jennifer Strauss
An Island Cemetery by W. H. Auden
Hamlet in the movies
Having read over 200 pages about Hamlet I feel I would be forgiven for not having read the play as there’s enough in all of that to detail the play in it’s entirety. I have not cheated, I have read the play and also watched the entire three hour film by the Royal Shakespeare Company with David Tennant in the lead role and also watched a good deal of the four hour film by Kenneth Brannagh with himself in the lead role. I like different things from the films, Tennant was good but I preferred Derek Jacobi in the role of Claudius. I’ll just digress briefly, it’s interesting how Derek Jacobi has played two different people by the name of Claudius, he’s done both of them very nicely.
We were shown one scene from a Russian version by Grigori Kozintsev produced in 1964. I would very much like to see more of it as it had the atmosphere that matched how I viewed the play. Hamlet has been produced so many different times including the one in 1948 with Sir Laurence Olivier, Sir John Gielgud produced the play on stage in 1964.
In summary
With 1,000+ words this article could only ever be a summary and I’ve really only skimmed the surface of the essays and creative responses I’ve read. Hamlet is so complex and so widely studied I suggest it’s impossible to do more than summarise a handful of them in such a short post. I have tried to at least list the names of the article and the author.
What an interesting weekend…
It’s been an interesting weekend with a juxtaposition of events. On Saturday we went to see the latest Harry Potter movie and on Sunday we went to a funeral. Why am I mentioning the funeral? You’ll have to get through a few words about Harry Potter before I get to that.
Here be spoilers…
It was a good movie, there were some unforgettable moments and most of them were in the special effects. There was the death of Voldemort and the fight scenes some of which were really good and others were not so good and then there was Neville. In the earlier books/movies you’ll remember him as the one who stood up to Harry, Hermione and Ron and received enough points to give Gryffindor the winning margin. He was chubby and a wimp, in this movie he’s all grown up and turning into a hero. He led the team when Harry wasn’t there and then dealt with one of Voldemort’s horcruxes in a spectacular way. He looked far more like a hero than Harry does. The actor, Matthew Lewis, had been in a few things before Harry Potter and has only managed to fit in one role in between the movies. It will be interesting to see what roles he’s offered now, but I see him as an action hero, he really did look good with a sword.
With every beginning there is an ending. I see this movie as the beginning of Matthew Lewis’ acting career and yesterday we attended an ending, a funeral. She was my very distant cousin and I hadn’t met her too many times, she seems to have touched many lives as there were around 300 people there. The room we use for funerals is not very big and there was standing room only, very little standing room. Normally the eulogy will be spoken by the rabbi and maybe one or more family members. In this case we listened to the rabbi, the brother, a poem read by a couple and also a eulogy by Mark Baker, an eminent local historian who was a good friend of hers. It was a long service so it was good we were inside as it often rains at Springvale and yesterday was no exception, lots of rain and lots of mud. Baker referred to my cousin as a prophet and compared her to Miriam, Moses’ sister. This is not a term people use lightly and looking around at the numbers of people and speaking to someone afterwards I could begin to see why this might be. The rabbi introduced the deceased’s favourite music and asked everyone to start it off and they did. Standing at the back I didn’t see any indication of anyone leading and it was beautiful to hear 50 odd voices start in unison without any lead in or counting, she would have been happy to hear such a beautiful sound. The rain was good in one way, a stranger offered to share her umbrella to walk from the building to the graveside, she was Christian, so I filled her in on some of our practices and asked her how she knew my cousin. It’s funny how I never got this lady’s name but we discussed how she knew my cousin through Torah classes. It was an interesting experience as I got to see my cousin through so many different eyes, the rabbi, the brother, the poem, Mark Baker and this anonymous Indian Christian. Listening to them talk I wished I could have known her more.
The two events made an interesting (there goes that word again) weekend. Harry Potter was revered as the saviour and my cousin was revered as a real person and a prophet. I don’t think I’ll have many weekends like this.
A Christmas Carol DVD
I was given A Christmas Carol DVD to view and review. As I’ve never read the book I took the time to read it first so as to be more familiar with the story. When I came to watch the movie I found it reasonably faithful to the book.
In case you don’t know the story I’ll just give you a quick description. It is the story of Ebenezer Scrooge and how he was very tightfisted with his money, he wouldn’t give money to anyone for anything outside of his own small ideas and was only interested in making more. One Christmas Eve his partner who had died seven years previously came back to introduce three Ghosts to him. Against his better judgement he goes with these three Ghosts and learns much about his past, how he became so miserly and what is likely to happen to him should he continue in the same way. He takes the lessons well and changes his ways.
It has so many of the scenes Charles Dickens described so carefully detailed with much love and care. I did notice one scene that has been added in, it is well within context and helps to explain a later scene. This scene showing the young Ebenezer Scrooge dancing with a young lady, both enamoured with the other, is not in the book but a scene only a few pages later where the young lady is telling Scrooge she’s been supplanted by gold is there. I almost skipped that scene in the book at it is so very short and there is apparently no lead up to it so it does help to have them dancing, it puts it totally in context.
The movie is made with mocap which is a technique that consists of putting the actors in strange costumes totally unlike the costumes we see and painting lots of dots on their bare skin all of which help the computers to see the different parts. After filming the shots are then turned into animation, they’ve done such a great job you can often tell who the actor is. The actors often take more than one role. Jim Carrey plays Ebenezer Scrooge as well as the three Ghosts. Gary Oldman plays Bob Cratchitt and his son, I did wonder why they looked so much alike. Colin Firth plays Scrooge’s nephew. I very much enjoyed Bob Hoskins as Mr Fezziwig but then I like his acting. Many of the other cast played more than one role, something that’s very easy with the way this movie was made.
Walt Disney Studios have been very clever and released this as a value pack so you get a Blu-Ray disc as well as a DVD so you can play it now on your DVD player and then again later when you upgrade to Blu-Ray.
I do recommend you help your child read the book before viewing the movie. If they’re old enough then they can read it by themselves. I feel that this movie complements the book in so many ways. It shows us the things we can’t imagine from the book about how society used to look and act.
Warnings:
There are some scenes where Scrooge falls from great heights which had me worried despite knowing they were not real. I’m really not good with heights.
When you put DVD into the player it goes straight into the movie and afterwards goes straight into the extras. You can shortcut this by pressing the main menu button. The extras consist of one of the actors talking about the making of the movie with shots of how it works and some explanations of some of the techniques. The second one is one of the child actors showing and describing one of her days, the is lovely, the girl is a delight and you can see how excited she is to be doing this. The third extra is deleted scenes, they are all incomplete and the faces of the actors sometimes show through the animation which I feel might disturb younger children.
Starstruck – the movie
This is the typical story of two teens meeting and falling in love. One of them is famous, Christopher Wilde played by Sterling Knight, and the other isn’t, Jessica Olson played by Danielle Campbell. Jessica’s older sister, Sara played by Maggie Castle, is mad keen on Christopher and is desperate to meet him on their trip to see their grandma while Jessica is totally unexcited and just wants to see their grandma. Thanks to Sara’s desperation, Jessica runs into Christopher and ends up spending a day with him. They fall madly in love but won’t admit it, Christopher because he wants to protect her from the paparazzi and Jessica because she doesn’t understand his motives. Everything comes out all right in the end as you’d expect.
It’s a cute little movie and there are some scenes which highlight the current storyline. One scene I noticed was when Christopher is turning things down in order to be with Jessica and he does this on a movie set between takes. The scene being shot is full of rain while the weather outside is lovely and sunny, it just highlights how he’s moving from being very sad to very happy and shows he’s doing the right thing. This is just one example as there are many of these little asides happening throughout the show.
The music is nice and light, quite appropriate to young people, there are no scenes of dubiousness as it’s aimed at the preteen and early teen market. I quite enjoyed it despite it being a love story. There is a little bit of violence, but it’s mostly accidental and they apologise for it.
All three actors were good, but there is one person I’m going to watch out for as he grows up. Brandon Smith played Christopher’s best friend, Stubby. I was quite taken with his performance, especially his singing.
I checked out all four actors and discovered that Maggie Castle has a lot more experience in the film industry than the other three, maybe that’s what made her performance a little more believable than the others.
Thank you again to the lovely people at Disney for providing me a copy of this movie. It was released on DVD a few days ago with an extended version of the movie and a couple of extra music videos attached to the movie. I quite like these but when I saw the word ‘Extras’ I expected a little more.
The Princess and the Frog
I was sent this movie to review and asked a friend to come over with her young son as my kids are in the wrong demographic and I wanted to get a young person’s take on it.
This movie was loosely based on The Frog Prince originally written by the Brothers Grimm. You know the story line with The Frog Prince…prince turned into frog and needs princess to kiss him to turn him back, yes? This movie was rather turned around and I liked it. The prince is turned into a frog and needs a princess to kiss him to turn him back, which is fine, but there aren’t any princesses around and the girl he thinks is a princess, isn’t. She kisses him anyway and is turned into a frog, this is the story of how they’re turned back into humans. While looking for a way to change back into human form they make some friends in the form of Louis, an alligator and Ray, a firefly.
Every good Disney story needs a villain and Keith David obliges with the voice for Dr. Facilier. There are also shadows who can attack the humans and the animals, there’s other animals helping the frogs and some lovely singing. Anika Noni Rose does the voice of our heroine, Tiana, and has a lovely singing voice. Bruno Campos voices our hero, Prince Naveen and Oprah Winfrey voices Tiana’s mother, Eudora.
There are a number of issues dealt with in this movie. It’s okay to have a dream, but wishing won’t make it come true, you really need to work at it. What you need is not always what you want. Other issues they deal with are death, funerals and a concept of heaven.
There is a little violence. Some is rather slapstick, in that Prince Naveen gets slapped flat with a book, twice, with a book titled, The Frog Prince. Some men are hunting frogs for their legs and there is some violence there until one of the frogs starts talking, at which point the men row away at top speed. When Tiana is a frog she is grabbed by the shadows and my friend’s young son was rather frightened by this scene.
Other things you need to know about this movie. It’s set in New Orleans in the 1920s and the hero and heroine are not white, they are both coloured and Tiana is patronised quite severely due to her gender and skin colour. We both looked at each other with pleasure as it is such a change to have both lead characters of colour.
Yes, I liked the movie. I found it quite enjoyable, it was really good to see stereotypes challenged in a way that young kids can understand. I liked the songs and the animation was nicely done.
Tomorrow When the War Began – The Movie
Now, I’m sure some of you already knew that work has begun on transforming John Marsden’s book Tomorrow When the War Began into a movie, but I’ve just found out. I read on IMDB that they announced the casting of Caitlin Stasey as Ellie Linton, the central character of the books. They announced back in June that Stuart Beattie would be co-writing the screen play and will also direct. It is to be filmed in the Hunter Valley in NSW. Of course there’s a website for the movie. I’ve just found it here.
I have a love/hate relationship with the Tomorrow series. I absolutely love the writing and the beauty of the scenery that John Marsden has described. I love the way he has put together some teenagers and described them all so well, the relationships they have and the way they grow up just seems so right. I absolutely hate the emotions that the writing engenders. These stories are about growing up in a war zone and I know of so many people in other countries who are doing this at this moment in time that it makes it that much harder when the war being described is in my home country. I’ve heard so much of what it is like to live and grow up in a war zone, to become someone so different to a similar person growing up in a place such as Australia which is relatively peaceful. I’ve found with the Tomorrow series that I don’t have to put my imagination at work to find out how it might be as I’m sure they’re pretty close to reality.
I can’t wait to see the movie to see how they’ve treated the book and to see if they’ve done a good job. On the other hand, I really don’t want to see it as it will be so hard emotionally. I know that if I do see it I’ll have to be prepared and take a box of tissues as just remembering the books I have tears rolling down my face. It’s a good thing I’m a touch typist and don’t need to see the screen to know what I’m typing as I’m really struggling.
Dragon Slayer (The Story of Beowulf) – Rosemary Sutcliff
Beowulf is the ultimate in adventure stories it was written somewhere between the 8th and 12th centuries. The poem itself has 3,182 lines. I had heard of Beowulf and had even been read a brief except from it by my English Literature teacher a couple of years ago, but I’d never read the whole story in full so when I found Rosemary Sutcliff’s interpretation I was delighted and picked it up immediately.
Rosemary Sutcliff was a wonderful author, I remember her works with great fondness from my childhood. She wrote fabulous historical fiction for children but the depth and quality of her writing make her very good to be read by any group. I do recommend people start reading her in the pre-teens and early teens, but if you haven’t read her works before then now is a very good time to start.
I’m actually meant to be reviewing Dragon Slayer and not Beowulf so here we go. Dragon Slayer is the story of Beowulf for young people. Beowulf feels obligated to help out the Danish king Hroðgar as he has helped Beowulf’s father pay weregild. He and his men spend the night in the hall Heorot and he kills Grendel, a marauding monster. Grendel’s mother takes offence at this and Beowulf finds himself battling and killing her. He eventually becomes king of his people and at a great age he battles a dragon, killing with the help of Wiglaf but the cost is too high and Beowulf dies.
What a great story and I know understand why they had to make a movie out of it as it is exactly that sort of story. I enjoyed it all the way through. Rosemary had a way with words and could make any scene sound alive. I couldn’t quite visualise Grendel or his mother, but there are some line drawings which go a long way to help. This book gives a fabulous insight into the period it is likely to have been set. I express it in that way as there is a lot of argument as to when it was actually composed. Whether it was composed when it was written or whether it was oral history passed down the ages. As with a lot of her books I would recommend it for pre-teens to early teens who are okay with violence and gore.
The Amber Spyglass (His Dark Materials, Book 3) by Philip Pullman
The Amber Spyglass is the final book in the His Dark Materials trilogy by Philip Pullman. I have read all three books and find them all fascinating. The first book Northern Lights was made into a movie with the title of The Golden Compass and I believe they are planning to film the second book The Subtle Knife as well as The Amber Spyglass but I haven’t been able to find any confirmation of this. I did find the best ’404 page not found’ ever. If you visit His Dark Materials movie page, scroll all the way down to the bottom and click on the link ‘His Dark Materials movie’ you will be taken to it. Stay there for a couple of minutes and just read. I think it’s great fun and I challenge everyone to give me a better one.
This is meant to be a review, but it’s hard to review a book where I totally object to the key feature as I can’t mention it and rant about it in case of spoilers. I don’t want to give spoilers for those who haven’t read it so I’ll just make mention of a few things including the movie.
I love most of the ideas in all three books. I find the idea of having a daemon absolutely fabulous and would really like one myself. The idea of parallel worlds has been written about many, many times and this time has been done really nicely. I like the idea of talking armoured bears. The writing is really good. Philip Pullman is a really talented author and I look forward to reading more by him.
If you’ve seen the movie, you absolutely must read the books. I saw the movie first, with my kids, and was totally enchanted. My kids were terribly upset and told me how much better the books were. They ranted and raved about it and how I just had to read the books. They finally made their way to the top of my reading pile and I had to agree with them. The books are definitely better. However, the books can’t show you the size of Iorek Byrnison compared with Lyra. They can’t show you the alethiometer. They can, and do, describe them, but some of us just can’t visualise this by ourselves. The special effects in the movie were fabulous, I particularly liked the scenes where Lyra was running with some other kids and their daemons, something else I found hard to visualise.
My recommendation is to read the books and then see the movie, not always possible, but I do recommend it.