The Reader Travels

Before I end this tour of Shakespeare in the movies, I just have to give a shout out to Steve Martin and Woody Allen for their tributes to A Midsummer Night’s Dream. This play holds a special place in my heart, possibly because I’m a borderline hedonist with a special appreciation for Dionysus, the Greek god of partying. They call him the god of wine, but I think he’s also the god of psychedelic mushrooms. But that’s another story.

A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy is funny, like most of Woody Allen’s movies, but doesn’t stand out as one of his best.  L.A. Story, on the other hand, is one of my all-time favorites and proof that Steve Martin is friggin’ brilliant.

Anyway, it’s been fun, but it’s time to move on. I’ve been itching to take a long road trip.

I think my Shakespeare in the movies tour was devised just so I could talk about Strange Brew and 10 Things I Hate About You, two of my all-time favorite films. But I realize it’s gotten way out of hand, what with so much other material out there.

10 Things is not just another teenage movie, and it’s not just another Shakespeare rip-off. It is a fine tribute to The Taming of the Shrew, embracing the interpretation that Shakespeare was a feminist. Kat is fierce and independent, a feminist as Shakespeare himself could never have imagined.

And I even liked Julia Stiles, even though she’s deterring me from watching O. I love the scene where she gets all drunk, dances on the table and then hits her head on the chandelier. It brought me back to my own drunken high school years. I was never a table dancer, but I did tend to throw myself at guys who couldn’t stand a woman who wasn’t submissive. There were no Patruchio’s in my high school.

The Taming of the Shrew
is a fun play to remake into movies. You’ve got a spunky girl causing a bunch of trouble, an overbearing father and a lot of sexual tension with this new man in her life.  It’s a great formula for a Hollywood comedy.

I faked my way through an honors paper that asked the question of whether Shakespeare was a feminist or not. Instead of actually answering the question, I went into this whole BS answer about how Shakespeare was part of a baby boom generation, so yeah, he might’ve been a feminist maybe.

On the surface the story might look a little sexist, right? You have this shrew of a woman who needs to be put in her place, tamed as it were. But what we really see is a man who learns to appreciate the fire in this woman and to see what really motivates her as a person.

And yadda yadda yadda, I’m not sure why I like The Cutting Edge
so much, but I will watch this movie every time I catch it on cable. And you can hear the words echo in the house, as me and my man sing in unison: “Toe pick!!!”

High school seems like an apt setting for the type of jealousy and back-stabbery of Othello. And though I’m not sure  I’d ever be prompted to watch O (probably because of Julia Stiles, and despite Mekhi Phifer), I did let Quentin Tarantino talk me into watching Switchblade Sisters, a loosely based rendition in pure cult cheese.

I really related to this film.  Even though I wasn’t in a girl gang, I was in the flute section in marching band, and that’s really close. And even though I didn’t have girlfriends lying to me about my other girlfriends to win my affections, I did have a really jealous boyfriend who was his own Iago, whispering lies to himself.

He was jealous of everything. First, my sister, then my best friends. Then there was the gay trumpet player, who had a huge crush on me, but only in the boyfriend’s disturbed mind. There was the guy at the beach, which I almost understood, but not really. But the one that really got me, was the dog.

He was jealous of his own dog, the same dog he would take to the beach to pick up girls before we started dating. That cute, furry little maltese was a chick magnet. He was a wing man, a partner in crime, an accomplice. Until that furry little traitor started taking my side in arguments and snuggling up to me instead of his master.

It was hard to escape alive in such a tragedy, but I did it. And when it was all done, I think he was right to be jealous of the dog. I didn’t look back. I never even missed the man. But the dog, that’s another story.

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:

1. I wore a sleeveless, backless dress, so I had to make up a lot more than just my face and hands.
2. I went to a party and drank enough trashcan punch to make me bump into my host’s freshly painted walls, throw up on the drive home and pass out in my bathtub.
3. I wore a dress I had planned to wear again.

Now, there have been more than one white actor who played Othello in the movies, but let us compare the two big ones — Lawrence Olivier and Orson Welles.  Olivier got all dressed up in dark brown paint like me and my Ella Fitzgerald fiasco, but Welles did it right.

If you’ve never seen this movie, it’s pretty cool from a cinematic perspective.  Orson Welles both starred in it and directed it, and while his acting was always phenomenal, it’s the way he directed the movie that’s so amazing. He had himself filmed in shadow, so he looks darker than he really is. Every scene is set up perfectly, so the white man turns black.

So, this got me thinking about the board game, which I used to play when I was kid, before I even knew what Othello was. The white disks turn black and the black disks turn white, and in the end, you’re just deadlocked. Play now.

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 tell you they think you’ll rate something three-and-a-half stars but then they only let you rate it three or four.  What’s that about?

Anyway, this was a fun spoof of MacBeth set in a 70s fast food joint in Pennsylvania. Murder, mayhem, drive-through service, what’s not to like?  And of course, there’s Christopher Walken which makes it a must see.

Did you know that Christopher Walken has averaged 3.8 movies per year since 1990?  That’s more than three and almost, but not quite, four.  And during that time, he’s been on seven episodes of Saturday Night Live, and seven episodes of Conan since 2000. I think he’s more of a workaholic than I am, and I need a vacation just thinking about it.

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 don’t buy into the fire and brimstone routine.

In a Shakespearean or Greek tragedy, the hero is defeated by some personal flaw. He creates his own hell by succombing to  jealousy, greed, paranoia, lust, hubris.

One of the coolest movie versions of MacBeth has to be Men of Respect starring John Turturro. It’s all mobsters and fortune tellers, plotting and back stabbing. Turturro’s own wife plays the Lady MacBeth (aka Ruthie Battaglia), and man is she vicious. Mike Battaglia is a badass. He lies and cheats and murders people to get to the top.

Here’s the question about MacBeth, though. What is our hero’s most serious flaw? Is it that he’s a power hungry murderer? Or is it that he lets his wife tell him what to do? Either way, he’s in Hell long before he goes down.

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 never make it in the fashion world.

I’m time tripping again now, going back a little further in time to see the mighty Buffy in action.  At the same time, I am making my way through the archives of Greg Howard, Buffy fan and blogger extraordinaire. It’s September 2003, and California is going through its governor recall election.  I don’t have the heart to tell him the Terminator is going to win and that TO will soon be moving to Philadelphia.

Greg jokes about himself and how he was slow in jumping on the blogger bandwagon, but I was a whole four years behind him. He talks of things as blogging cliches, things like making fun of the search terms people use to get to your blog, when I thought that was an original idea I came up with all on my own (don’t you worry, I’ll do it anyway).

Anyway, back in 2003, River Phoenix had already been dead for ten years but was still missed.  And before he died, River starred in one of the coolest versions of Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part I ever — My Own Private Idaho. If you’ve never seen it, don’t you worry about young Keanu — he was always good at playing young stoner types. Back in the day.

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 another boy just like him in fourth grade who stuck his tongue out a lot and wanted to be just like Gene Simmons when he grew up. And on and on through high school and college.

By the time I met my man, I had dated plenty of bad boys, who introduced me to adventures and trials, drama and trauma.  I spun out of control and lost my mind for a time.  When I came back to my senses, he was there, and he was a little bit bad, but not any more so than I had already become.  And now we’re having discussions about Shakespeare and how his stories relate, not only to real life, but our life.

Me: Which Shakespeare character do you relate to most?
Him: The guy from Henry IV .
Me:  Falstaff?
Him: No, the prince.
Me: You mean you’re not the bad influence, luring people into the dark side?
Him: Nope, I’m just a dude who likes to party.

But it’s more than that.  Prince Hal escaped from his father’s rule to go hang out with his friends. He got really wasted for a long time until he finally came back to his senses and put himself to the task of becoming king.

And now, we rule.

(forgive me, that was lame)

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 uncle who pretends to be a father figure. But most of all, it’s got beer. And lots of it.

The clue that gave it away for me was the name of the brewery. They called it Elsinore after Hamlet’s own home in Denmark. And there were two Elsinores - the brewery and appropriately, the insane asylum. Who’s to know if Pamela’s visions are part of some insanity, or if she’s just plain drunk?

Hamlet aside, here are some of my favorite movie quotes from Strange Brew:

• Who horked our clothes, eh?
• I gotta take a leak so bad I can taste it.
• You’re so nice. If I didn’t have puke breath, I’d kiss you.