Tag Archives: Movies

Anonymous

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Okay folks,

People keep asking so I figure I should say something before I say something.  On October 28th, this is going to be unleashed unto the world:

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5XcyiQ50W8]

Yesterday’s New York Times featured an op-ed review of the film  written by Professor James Shapiro of Columbia University (prominent Shakespearean and author of a great many books  ).

Let’s take a moment to talk about the authorship debate.  The nineteenth century saw the deification of Shakespeare (debatably) at its peak.  It was during this time that scholars and literati realized that very little biographical information was available about our esteemed playwright.  Because of this dearth of fact, said literati began to suspect the actuality of William Shakespeare as author of the plays (backed by an insistence that Shakespeare only had a base-level of education and the plays were so transcendent that they must have been written by a University man).  Thus the so-called “anti-Stratfordians” were born.  In an effort to validate this conclusion, various figures have been put forth as alternative “authors” to the plays (including Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlow, and Edward De Vere the 17th Earl of Oxford).

All of these arguments have fundamental flaws (perhaps the most amusing being the fact that De Vere died in 1604, years before at least ten of Shakespeare’s plays were written).  I don’t really have the space to get into the full implications of each argument here, but I’ll be happy to divulge what I know if you buy me enough alcohol (or shoot me an e-mail and ask).

In any case, “Anonymous” falls into what is referred to as the “Oxfordian” camp (i.e. it argues that De Vere wrote the plays).

Here’s my brief opinion of the authorship debate: why are we wasting our time?  No matter how we slice it, Shakespeare (either the man from Stratford or the great playwright – whether these two are the same person or not) is dead.  Shakespeare the man from Stratford existed.  Shakespeare the playwright wrote amazing, transcendent works of literature which continue to touch upon the human soul hundreds of years after his death.  Everything else is a fairy tale.  Whomever this person was, no matter what his life was like,

sitting under the Mulberry tree in Shakespeare's garden in Stratford... my happy place

the important thing is that the plays do exist and they do continue to effect us.  Whether he planted the mulberry tree behind his property in Stratford, whether he hated his wife and ran away with the traveling players to get away from her, whether he was homosexual or heterosexual or bisexual, “he” undoubtedly left us something.  Shakespeare is more important to the modern world as a concept than a person.  We scholars can tell ourselves pretty stories about his life all we want, and back them with as many or as few facts as we can find, but the bottom line is that barring some unforeseen and incredible discovery of a cache of lost documents, we will never be able to prove definitively even a majority of what we tell ourselves.  So we may as well concede that fairy tales are nice, but the play is the thing.

Now, allow me to briefly address Shapiro’s piece.  I sympathize with Dr. Shapiro.  I am fully expecting to leave the theatres angry and frustrated that the good name of my man Will has been despoiled.  Will this keep me from seeing a movie about Will?  Absolutely not.

However.  Dr. Shapiro’s argument in this op-ed piece is perhaps born a bit too much out of the described heat of passion which I am certain will also haze my own vision in red.  Shapiro states that he is more troubled by the fact that “Anonymous” “turns great plays into propaganda” and takes great exception to the film’s point of view that “all art is political… otherwise it is just decoration”.

…well… isn’t that actually true?  I mean, there’s the famous anecdote about Elizabeth I barring any performance of Richard II by saying “know you not that I am Richard?” after

to me, Elizabeth I will always be Judi Dench

the Essex rebellion, but Elizabethan politics are written more subtly all over Shakespeare’s plays.  And not just the histories!  Love’s Labours Lost begins with the cession of Aquitaine to Naverre.  A Midsummer Night’s Dream is founded upon the principle that Theseus defeated Hippolyta’s tribe of amazons.  As You Like it begins and ends in an upturned world of unjust political tyranny made right at the end by the return of the proper Duke.  The Tempest depicts a wild world of chaos organized only by true noble blood which must be forfeit to return to the courtly world of Milan.

Art is power.  And especially in Elizabethan times when plays were the most popular form of public entertainment.  Shakespeare was never shy about expressing his opinions via the theatre, and we shouldn’t be shy about saying that’s what he (whomever he was) was doing.  The canon is not just dead words, it’s imbued with a certain living history and understanding of audiences (both past and future).  And really, that’s part of why it’s still relevant.

In addition, Dr. Shapiro’s title makes me anxious.  It’s not Hollywood that’s dishonoring the Bard, it’s every anti-Stratfordian whose research led to this movie.  Yes, the film itself comes from the institution of Hollywood, but it sprang from us.  Without the scholars, the movie wouldn’t have come to be.  Blaming the product upon the process is like blaming the bomb and not the scientists who developed it or the politicians who set it off.  We can’t claim diplomatic immunity here, we’re part of the problem.

It is with great respect for Dr. Shapiro that I am forced to disagree with his conclusion.  His rage, however, is one which I’m certain I’ll be sharing of in the next few weeks.

Nostalgia for the Lost Generation

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So there are two things you should know.

Number one: if you are ever in Bar Harbor and looking for an evening’s entertainment, you

enjoying the couches and TV tables inside reel pizza (yes, that is inside a movie theatre!)

should check out reel pizza.  Imagine a movie theatre.  Imagine a movie theatre with couches.  Imagine a movie theatre with couches that serves fresh homemade pizza and locally brewed beers.  Imagine all that with old school aluminum TV tables and an intermission about halfway through the movie.

This place is too intensely cool for words.  They only play two movies at any given time and they do tend to fill up for shows, so make sure you get there super early and be prepared to see something quasi-indie.  Totally worth the (might I add cheap) ticket price.

Number two: If you have yet to see Woody Allen’s Midnight In Paris, correct this egregious oversight as expediently as possible.  Especially if you have any interest in literature, painting, Paris, or the 1920s.

 

F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald

Basic plot synopsis: Hollywood screen-writer Gil comes to Paris with his fiancé Inez in hopes of finishing his book while they are there.  He is also nostalgically stuck in 1920s Paris and romantically longs to wander the streets in the rain and write in a one-room apartment in the Latin Quarter.  WASP Inez is having none of that and instead strikes up an affair with her old flame.  Gil, intent to enjoy Paris on his own terms, discovers that if he waits on a certain street corner, at midnight a cab will appear and he can enter that cab to be transported to 1920s Paris where he hangs with such illustrious influences as Gertrude Stein, Earnest Hemingway, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, and Salvador Dali.

Of course, I enjoyed the film, but couldn’t help but notice one blaring detail which fails to surface over its course.

When, exactly, does Gil go back to and are his companions during the time travel segments of the movie feasible?

The entire film is based upon a nostalgia for “the twenties”.  Several times, Gil explains his time travel adventures as going back to “the twenties”.  This occurred enough times in the film’s sequence that it seemed out of place.  Wouldn’t someone so enthralled with Paris’ history have some notion, based upon the surrounding historical events as well as the company he kept, of when he was?

My snooping around has revealed several things.  First and foremost, a disclaimer: I am not an art historian or a Picasso enthusiast.  My information on Picasso is as limited as my sources, and there is simply so much to sift through.  I have done my best to compile reliable sources in a limited amount of time, but if any of you know more than I do about the topic do feel free to correct me.

During the time of Gil’s visits, both Hemmingway and Fitzgerald had published at least once before.  Hemmingway’s first work was The Sun Also Rises published in 1926, and Fitzgerald’s first novel was This Side of Paradise in 1920.  Fitzgerald published The Great Gatsby in 1925, and in the subsequent years he and his wife Zelda (married in 1920) made several trips to Paris and became close with the expatriate community there (including Hemingway whom the Fitzgeralds met in 1925 in Paris).

So far, so good.  All evidence points to a time period between 1925 and 1930.

Hemingway was close with Gertrude Stein and he did meet Picasso at Stein’s salon (the bastion of modernism in Paris).  Picasso never had a mistress named Adriana (his mistress in Allen’s film), though the painter was famous for his affairs.  As far as I can tell, the actual woman who most resembles the Adriana figure is Marie-Therese Walter, Picasso’s mistress during the time in which he was married to Olga Khoklova.  Picasso married Khoklova in 1918 and had a child with her in 1921.  After the child was born, their relationship deteriorated and Picasso met Walter in 1927 in Paris.

 

A Picasso Nu Couch, this one was painted in 1942

The Picasso painting shown in the movie, allegedly of Adriana, is not actually a Picasso.  It does, however, closely resemble any one of his nu couché paintings (nude on a couch).  It is clearly done in the mid-to-end of his career since Picasso didn’t adopt the cubist style until 1910.

Alright, so if we’re assuming that Adriana is Walter, then the film couldn’t have taken place until at least 1927.

Incidentally, in January 1927, Hemingway divorces his first wife Hadley.  He married Pauline Pfeiffer in the May of that same year.  Hemingway had been having an affair with Pfeiffer, though Hadley and Hemingway separated in Paris (presumably where Pfeifer was not).  Allen’s Hemingway displays a raucous amount of womanizing behavior, perhaps to be expected of a man recently separated from his wife. Hemingway’s women are never mentioned in the film, though at one point he runs off to Africa with Adriana.

The trip to Africa did, in fact, happen… but not until 1952.  During the trip, he was almost killed in a plane crash and this incident left Hemingway in pain or poor health for the rest of his life.

So despite a few little irregularities, we can fairly firmly place Gil’s time travel to the Spring of  1927.  Incidentally, at that juncture Hemingway had yet to pen A Farewell to Arms (though most of his lines in the movie seem as though they come directly out of this book).  Mark Twain, also mentioned in the film, had already published The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) as well as The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn (1876) so it is a slight wonder that, when Gil mentions these publications, he receives only blank stares.  This year was almost exactly mid-career for Fitzgerald, though he had already published both his most lucrative work (This Side of Paradise) and his most lasting (The Great Gatsby).

So there you have it.  And now that that niggling detail won’t be bothering you the entire movie, even more reason to go see it.

…you may want to brush up on your lost generation trivia before you go.  Understanding the in jokes isn’t pivotal to enjoying the experience, but it most certainly helps.

How Shall I Share Thee on a Summer’s Day?

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Alright, fine, I’ll admit it.

After writing a list of summer reading that included absolutely nothing on or about my man Will, I’m tweaking out a little bit.  In my incredibly biased opinion, summer isn’t summer without a requisite dose of Bard.  And, since I’m still making up for my little indiscretion with Jane Austen last year  (he just won’t drop it!), I’ve decided to create a second list.

Will is rocking a summery look with his D&G glasses and ruff by Hermes

Here is my Shakespeare-centric summer to do list.  Since I am a firm believer that plays should not be read except by those with a true penchant for masochism (academics mostly, literary flagellation is a requisite skill for the wanna-be literati), I am re-focusing the primary task of my list.  There will be reading on here, certainly, but only as an added bonus to alternate activities.  This is a three dimensional interactive list which, hopefully, will provide you with some Shakespearey goodness and me with a much-needed break from a long-dead playwright breathing down my neck.

Enjoy!

1) Go see some Shakespeare!  ‘Tis the season for the free outdoor variety!  If you’re in New York, obviously you’re going to want to see Shakespeare in the Park.  This year, they are re-vamping last year’s popular repertory style and performing All’s Well that Ends Well and Measure for Measure (a theme, by the way, which will repeat itself…).  Performing a season in “repertory” means that one cast rehearses and performs two or more productions simultaneously (before you start having visions of a Midsummer Night’s Hamlet, allow me to clarify that I mean “simultaneously” in a fairly cosmic fashion in that the shows are performed at separate showtimes during the same season).  Back in the day (Elizabethan times, that is), this was how all theatre was performed.  A company would have a bag of plays from which they could pull on any one given night and all the company actors would be used in whatever production was performed.  In my opinion, repertory is the most robust and interesting way to produce theatre.  It keeps the actors hopping, keeps the moments fresh, and really allows everyone involved in the process to flex their theatrical muscle.  You haven’t learned lines until you’ve learned them for two shows… in meter… simultaneously.

If you happen to live in Boston, they have their own version of this time-honored summer tradition.  This summer, the Commonwealth Shakespeare Company will be performing All’s Well that Ends Well.  This year will be the first year that I’ve had the opportunity to attend a CSC performance and I am very much looking forward to it.  As such, I cannot currently vouch for quality of production, but I will report back to you as soon as I can.

My good friends at the Rhode Island Shakespeare Theatre will be putting up a production of The Merry Wives of Windsor this summer, so stay tuned for further details there.  In case you missed my rave review of their Henry VIII last summer, you should be made aware that Artistic Director/Executive Producer/Everything and a bag of chips man Bob Colonna is a true-blue GENIUS.  I would watch someone read the phone book if he directed it.  Make every effort to see this show.

If you’re looking for something further North, on Sunday, August 14th Lowell Summer Music Series brings back the New England Shakespeare Company to perform Measure for Measure.  NE Shakes is an interesting company with a unique production style.  They perform in what they claim is a more authentic style (I could dispute this claim, but that’s another entry I think…) and don’t do much rehearsing at all.  They read roles from scrolls carried into performance and focus on a “rough and ready” aesthetic which allows them to perform just about anywhere (usually in parks and things like that).  I would highly recommend catching a performance of theirs just to experience the quirkiness.

If you live in one of the ten million places that I haven’t mentioned above, I advise you to employ the services of google and find somewhere near you offering such an evening’s entertainment.  These places exist just about everywhere and I can nearly guarantee that you will find something suitable.  Free Shakespeare?  Outside?  Bring a picnic and catch a show.  It’s culture!

2) Read some Shakespeare fan-fic!  Okay, so you shouldn’t read a Shakespeare play, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t soak up some bardy goodness from the page.  Many authors have appropriated Shakespeare’s stories (and even Shakespeare himself!) into their work and it makes for a cute little nerd-read.  Here are some of my favorites:

*The Shakespeare Stealer Series by Gary Blackwood; This is a YA trilogy designed to introduce young audiences to the nuts and bolts of Elizabethan theatre.  I LOVE YA books and thus absolutely adored them.  Blackwood’s research is well done and the stories he crafts are engaging (if predictable).  So cute!

*Interred with their Bones by Jennifer Lee Carrell; The Da Vinci Code meets The Eight.  It’s a Shakespeare mystery set in present day and sure to give any geek who thinks they know their Shakespeare a run for their proverbial money.  The plot isn’t exactly inspired, but it’s fun to follow the Shakespeare mystery!

Gaiman's Shakespeare along with Morpheus

*A Midsummer Night’s Dream by Neil Gaiman (third comic in Sandman volume 3: “Dream Country”); Gaiman is an EXTREMELY literary writer and hides allusions to various texts within his work all the time.  There’s a great deal of Shakespeare in Gaiman if you look for it, but the most blaring example is this little ditty.  I’m not a huge comic fan (something about the genre just doesn’t jive well with me), but this one is totally worth it.

3) Watch a Shakespeare movie!  Despite the fact that I am still angry at Julie Taymor for

Imogen Stubbs as Viola and Helena Bonham Carter as Olivia in Trevor Nunn's film

her egregious behavior surrounding her Giant Broadway Flop Money Sink, she did make a pretty good Titus.  There are also a plethora of Kenneth Branagh films to choose from (some of the best are Henry V, Much Ado about Nothing, and (snobby academics be damned) Love’s Labour’s Lost).  Trevor Nunn directed a Twelfth Night which ranks pretty high on my Bard-o-meter (and stars Helena Bonham Carter and Imogen Stubbs… how can you go wrong?).  If you want to go more classic, you could watch the Zeferelli Romeo and Juliet (not to be confused with the Baz Luhrman Romeo and Juliet (you know, the one with Leo and Claire where nobody knew how to speak verse?)).  Find one, rent one, grab some microwave popcorn and a glass of wine to class things up.  A good way to hide in the air conditioning on your own couch for an evening while still soaking up culture.

4) Memorize a Sonnet!  The sonnets, since they’re poems, break the don’t read Shakespeare rule.  Read the sonnets!  Love the sonnets!  Pick your favorite sonnet and learn it!  Guaranteed to improve your snob factor by at least 10%, and really, everyone should know at least one poem by heart.  It builds character.  (My favorites, by the by, are 43, 50, 97, 98, 110, and 118)

5) Play a Shakespeare Game!  Yes, they make Shakespeare games.  My favorite so far has been Shakespeare: The Bard Game.  You’re going to want at least three people to play it, but don’t be shy!  Knowledge of Shakespeare, his works, and his times is helpful, but not crucial to enjoying this game.

Go on.  Let your inner geek show.  I promise I won’t tell anyone.