Lord Voldemort rocks Shakespeare

When I read John Locke's adaptation of Coriolanus for a film market in 2009, I scoffed. Although I thought he did a brilliant job with the language and the conceit of the play (which was filmed in Serbia, Montenegro and the UK), I predicted it would not be very commercial. In fact, it was a box office disaster, earning a little over a million dollars in its global release. (Interestingly, three-quarters of that million was from US dollars, it only earned $31 million overseas.)
I've never seen the play performed live an I barely remember reading it, so when the dvd of Coriolanus came out, I picked it up. And was ... dazzled.
Ralph Fiennes directed the movie and stars in the title role. with his shaved head and facial scars he looks every inch the warrior he is playing, a soldier who never wanted to be a politician and who has no patience (or love) for the common people who want to embrace him as their hero. In the Harry Potter movies, Fiennes delivers lines like, "Harry Potter, the boy who lived, come to die," with a sinister silkiness. Here he blows out all the stops--sometimes whispering his lines, sometimes roaring them like the "dragon" he becomes. It's a symphonic performance even when it skirts close to melodrama.
Vanessa Redgrave plays Coriolanus' mother--a great part for a mature actress--with a ferocity that just wipes everyone off the screen. (You'll get a glimpse of her intensity in the trailer.)She is a master (mistress) of manipulation but her ambitions for her only son go horribly awry. With her coronet of silver braids and her noble profile (it should be on a coin), she takes command of the story.  "I would the gods had nothing else to do but confirm my curses," she spits at a Tribune who has betrayed her son. (This story is full of excellent insults, my favorite being, "This Triton of minnows.")

Of course, she's Vanessa Redgrave... so you'd expect her to be awesome, but what's surprising is Gerard Butler's mastery of the Shakespeare's words. He's terrific and in the scene where Coriolanus' mother comes to beg him not to destroy Rome, he's got one line and does everything else with his eyes and his body language.
And then there's Brian Cox. Brian Cox should be in every Shakespeare production somewhere.  He's just the perfect actor.
The setting of the story is a world of graffiti and greed, and the color scheme is monochromatic, often black and white in color (or more precisely...gray and white with splashes of blood). Blood is spilled here, and there are a couple of brutally intimate scenes where one or another character is slitting someone's throat or knifing them int he guts. (The story begins with a character sharpening the blade he will later sheathe in a body.)  The war-torn country LOOKS war-torn and not art-directed, and some of the scenes could have come from an Occupy Wall Street rally.
The directing is spotty and Fiennes occasionally makes some creative choices that seem a bit iffy. But all in all, this is a terrific production of one of Shakespeare's lesser-known plays and it's worth two hours of your time.

Just Say No

Foodie advisory.  You may come across a carton of McConnell's Salt Caramel Chip ice cream in your supermarket freezer. You may read the description on the side of the carton and visions of chocolate ice cream stuffed with salty-sweety bits of pure caramel may dance through your head. And you may pick up that carton of ice cream and buy it.
Don't do it! 
Because you will be disappointed.  The salty-sweety caramel bits are tasty but the ice cream, a pinky light brown substamce even more pallid than a layer of unadorned German Chocolate cake, has a faint ... chemical ... taste.
I tried a spoonful.
Disappointment.
I tried another.
I let the ice cream melt around the caramel bits.
Third time was not the charm.
And so, the search for caramel ice cream goes on...

What's in a name?

"A rose by any other name would smell as sweet," Romeo insisted. In his own time, "Shakespeare" was a household name, with many variant spellings--Shakespear and Shake-spear, for example--but though he had three children, there was no one to carry on his name. His only son Hamnet died in childhood, his daughter Judith (married to an unsavory character named Thomas Quiney) outlived all her children and died at 77. Shakespeare left most of his estate to his daughter Susanna, who married a local doctor and gave birth to one child, Elizabeth. Elizabeth married well but died childless--William Shakespeare's last direct descendant.

"I'll Take Shakespeare for 500 Alex"

My head is stuffed with trivia. I blame my father. He had an eidetic memory and my siblings and I inherited various degrees of it. I can't remember how to do some of the simplest things on a computer for more than a minute and a half, but I can recount the plots of books I read at 8
I've tried out for Jeopardy a couple of times and have never made it past their trivia test. (There's always a geography question that stumps me--some question about a river in Tanzania or a mountain in one of the 'Stans.) But I would rock a Shakespeare category.
For example, di you know...
Shakespeare was 52 when he died.  Hard to believe he died that young and left such a rich legacy behind. And according to the site No Sweat Shakespeare, it was a rich legacy; Shakespeare died a wealthy man. He left everything but his second-best bed and bedclothes to his daughter Susannah. (His wife, Anne Hathaway, got the bed.)
The Fun Trivia site has a slew of Shakespearean trivia quizzes for people who just can't get enough fun factoids about the bard. If I were teaching English, I'd lean heavily on this site to engage my students and show them that Shakespeare doesn't have to be boring.  I'd also teach Macbeth as a Shakespeare noir.  It's got everything--friends betraying friends, a dangerous woman, a manipulated man. And witches!!!  But I digress.
A lot of Shakespeare sites (like the Shady Shakespeare Company)  use Shakespeare trivia as a marketing gimmick, most likely to promote "stickiness" among their users.  I know I always "stick" around to read trivia and quotes. 
Some sites are just in it for the trivial pursuit of it all, like Sporcle, which has a whole bunch of Shakespeare trivia games. Check out "Shakespeare or Batman?" with its compendium of hilariously over-the-top quotes you have to match to either the superhero or the Shakespeare hero.
It's more fun than popping virtual bubble wrap. (Don't pretend you haven't done that.)

Feminist Fiction Friday--The Nora Ephron Edition

I was working for producer Lauren Shuler Donner when her movie  You've Got Mail was filming. Nora Ephron wrote and directed the movie, so that's my one-degree of separation from a woman I considered a modern Dorothy Parker.
But of course, she was her own woman and not an imitation of anyone else. Since she died this week, people have been posting quotes from her all over social media and they're all terrific "sound" bites.
Here's one that's been posted on IMDB forever: Insane people are always sure that they are fine. It is only the sane people who are willing to admit that they are crazy.
In addition to You've Got Mail,which starred Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks, Nora wrote Sleepless in Seattle with the same stars and also When Harry Met Sally, the Meg Ryan-Billy Crystal film that became everybody's favorite date movie.

She wrote several movies that starred Meryl Streep--most recently Julie  & Julia. (The other two were Heartburn, a fictionalized version of Nora's marriage to journalist Carl Bernstein of Watergate fame, and the terrific true-life whistle-blower story Silkwood.) A picture of Nora with Meryl Streep (who is no giant at 5'6") makes her look impossibly tiny.
Good things come in small packages.
Here's something I'd forgotten about Nora Ephron. She was a foodie. (And long-time friend of my favorite foodie of all, Calvin Trillin, author of Alice, Let's Eat.) In one of her books, I think it might have been Heartburn, she included recipes.
The first thing I ever read by Nora was her collection of essays, Crazy Salad: Some Things About Women. It's out of print now--Amazon lists used copies in the three-figure range--but it's probably at your local library. (It's at mine.) And you might be able to find a copy on eBay. It's worth tracking down. (I just checked eBay--there are three auctions for copies of the book--one is at $14, one at $55 and the other at $125, so maybe the library IS the best option.)
I love that Nora Ephron guessed (figured out) who "Deep Throat" was before his identity was finall revealed. I knew that her marriage to Carl Bernstein had not ended well, and it seemed like her knowing that was a great "screw you" to the man who had screwed around on her. (In Heartburn, she describes her protagonist as a man "capable of having sex with a venetian blind," which is a great line that's made even more potent because you know it came from a very painful place.)
Nora began her career as a journalist and ended as a blogger with HuffPost (presumably one of the few paid ones), and in between she was a humorist, essayist, screenwriter, novelist, director, and feminist.
I have lost a role model.

Random Internet Silliness

Yes, I'll admit it.
I waste time on the Internet.
I'm not talking about the time I spend updating my social media either, which at least has a purpose.
I mean just general roaming around getting lost in the corners and crevices of the web.
Thanks to Chuck Wendig's weekly flash fiction challenge, I stumbled across the Band Name Maker, a random band name generator. And then kept hitting refresh.  It was sort of mesmerizing.
And speaking of entertaining ways to amuse yourself, check out James Hibberd's hilarious roundups of Game of Thrones episodes. He periodically suggests Heavy Metal Band names based on characters in the show.

Shakespeare Resources

I once wrote a paper comparing the character of Hotspur (from Henry IV, part 1) to Hamlet and got an A because my professor though the comparison was just too weird (Hotspur is all about action and Hamlet is deliberate) but he was entertained by my argument. I was thinking about that as I surfed around looking for resources students can use for writing papers these days. Who needs Cliff Notes?
Shakespeare Online is kind of an ugly site but it's really entertaining. The home page features something called "Bard Bite" which is a Shakespeare trivia question. (Today's is a question about what Edwin Booth thought was teh worst rhyming exit in all of the plays.)  The landing page offers fodder for at least a dozen term papers and it changes daily.
Absolute Shakespeare is another basic-looking site that includes study guides and trivia and summaries and all sorts of other info in a matter-of-fact all text format.  Their list of Shakespeare films is way out of date (it ends with the  Ethan Hawke version of Hamlet from 2000) but the rest of the material is still relevant.
Mr. Shakespeare and the Internet is a livelier looking site that has two goals--to be an annotated guide to scholarly Shakespeare resources; and to provide material not available anywhere else (like a timeline). They also have a store that will link you to DVDs of great Shakespeare plays (including a recording a performance of Macbeth by Patrick Stewart).