If you didn’t know this about me already, I happen to be a white girl. But the year that Ella Fitzgerald died, I wanted to be her for Halloween, so I went out and got some dark brown theatrical make-up and slapped it on. I made a few mistakes that year:
I wore a sleeveless, backless […]
I gave Scotland, PA three stars on Netflix, but I gave it three-and-a-half on Flixster. The trouble with the Netflix rating system is that you can’t give a movie half a star. Like many, this film for me was more than “Liked It” but less than “Really Liked It.” What I hate is when they […]
So, despite my dresser, I’m more inclined to believe in karma than an after life Hell. I’m all about the golden rule. I believe that what goes around comes around. I believe that to live by the sword is to die by the sword and that fighting monsters can turn you into a monster. But I […]
I’m only one season behind on Lost now. When I started watching, I was three years behind, watching scenes that happened before, feeling as if I had slipped back in time to the year 2004, watching time progress again to 2005 and 2006. So, I’m a little slow in jumping on a bandwagon, and I’d […]
I had a thing for bad boys ever since kindergarten. I think they represented a kind of freedom I longed for in my hyper-controlled, good-girl world. My name was Sparkman, so the bad boy in my class called me, “Sparkplug.” I didn’t know what a sparkplug was, but I knew I wanted him. There was […]
I’ll admit it. Strange Brew is my favorite Hamlet tribute film of all time. It’s got a heroine (Pamela) instead of a hero, and instead of a prince, she’s an heiress to her father’s corporate empire. It has the ghost of her father communicating from the dead through an 80s video game machine, and a duplicitous […]
You know, when Disney does Shakespeare (or anything, for that matter), there’s always a happy ending, regardless of whether it’s based on a comedy or a tragedy. Hamlet is no exception. I watched Be Kind Rewind this week, and they made subtle reference to The Lion King’s roots, calling it, “Shakespearean.” I just smiled because […]
It’s Father’s Day, and we could talk about Katherina’s good father Baptista in The Taming of the Shrew, but we won’t. Instead, we’ll talk about the evil step-father who kills his own brother to attain the throne - Hamlet’s uncle/father Claudius. It’s not that I don’t love my father, because I do. It’s just that […]
My earliest knowledge of Richard III was watching Richard Dreyfus play a flamboyantly gay hunchback in The Goodbye Girl. I didn’t know the story, I just knew Richard was a serious dude with a bad back, and he wasn’t meant to be a joke.
When we visited the Tower of London, we walked through the Bloody Tower […]
I’ve been plottng this tour of Shakespeare in the Movies for over a year now, and what better time than following a trip to England? Our literary tour of England started in October of last year with Nick Hornby’s A Long Way Down. It took us through a journey into alternate reality London, and actual real-life […]