37 Days of Shakespeare, Day 32: Coriolanus

The Tragedy of Coriolanus, first broadcast April 21st, 1984

• When was it written? Probably around 1608 or 1609, possibly his 31st play
• What’s it about? Around the time of the founding of the Roman republic, general Gnaeus Marcius defeats the Volscian army at Corioli and gets the nickname Coriolanus. Returning home, many people encourage him to become a consul, but after he gives a disastrous speech his political rivals turn the common people against him and get him banished. He teams up with Aufidius, the Volscian general he defeated, and declares war on Rome, but his family is able to talk him out of it. He makes peace instead, and then Aufidius kills him.
• Most famous dialogue: None
• Source: The “Life of Coriolanus” in Thomas North’s translation of Plutarch’s The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans (1579).
• Best insult: “You are no surer, no, than is the coal of fire upon the ice, or hailstone in the sun,” or “You common cry of curs, whose breath I hate as reek o’ the rotten fens, who loves I prize as the dead carcasses of unburied men that do corrupt my air”
• Best word: mammocked
• Best production of this play I’ve seen: I had never seen or read it.
• Notable Names in the BBC Adaptation: Noted ‘80s bad guy Joss Ackland does a great job as Coriolanus’s only steadfast friend in Rome, Menenius. (His reading of “Down with that sword” is chilling.)

How’s the cast?

• Alan Howard is a little stiff (no pun intended) as Coriolanus. Irene Worth is great as Coriolanus’s mother.

How’s the direction by Elijah Moshinsky? 

•  This is the most beautifully lit play I’ve seen so far, looking very cinematic.  And Moshinsky makes a clever decision to have cramped sets that look dangerously crowded even with just a few people, to create the sense that the roiling mobs are always a threat.  But Moshinsky’s biggest decision is to make the production so homoerotic, so let’s talk about that below…

Storyteller’s Rulebook: I Say Again, Not Everything Has To Be A Sex Scene

Earlier in this series we had Derek Jacobi’s Richard II, who was coded as possibly gay, and was a little fey. Then we had Troilus and Cressida with three gay-coded characters, all of whom seemed like caricatures. Now we get this play. With less support from the text, Moshinsky has decided to portray Coriolanus and Aufidius as two very masculine gay men whose every scene together, including their scenes of violence against each other, are played like sex scenes.

On the one hand, it’s nice to have two gay characters where neither is coded as effeminate, but on the other hand, it’s a brutal vision of male love. The intense homoerotic atmosphere of their scenes never seemed to me to be supported by the text, and always felt like an imposition, perhaps motivated by a belief of Moshinsky’s that there just wasn’t enough to this play without it.

I don’t know enough about this play to know how common this choice is. Tom Hiddleston was filmed in the role recently, and now I want to check that out to see if he played it this way too, or if the role could be made rich enough without it.

Storyteller’s Rulebook: A Play For Our Times

As with Henry VI, Part 2, this play was hard to watch, given what’s going on in the country right now. Shakespeare served at the pleasure of his monarchs, and one of his recurring themes was the inherent stupidity of democracy. He had already written about the downfall of democracy in Rome in Julius Caesar, due to the fickleness of crowds, and now we jump back 500 years earlier and find that, even at the beginning of Roman democracy, the crowds were just as jittery and easily swayed for evil purposes. (“The beast with many heads,” as Coriolanus calls them)

(Of course, if you’re going to play a Shakespeare lead, you have to know how to give a speech well, but this role is unique because it also requires that you know how to give a speech poorly. Coriolanus’s clumsy attempt at public speaking is the turning point of the play, and actors must love the chance to get to blow it for once.)

I know that, as a citizen of a democracy, I should be offended by Shakespeare’s wild-eyed contempt for voters, but given what’s going on right now, it’s hard not to see these two plays, bookending the rise and fall of the Roman Republic, as accurate depictions of the inherent idiocy of voters.

New Episode of "A Good Story Well Told" on Never Let Me Go!

Hey, everybody, it’s a new episode of my podcast “A Good Story Well Told” with Jonathan Auxier! In this episode, he shames me into finally reading Kazuo Ishiguru’s 2005 novel Never Let Me Go. We get much discussion out of it, including the power and peril of basing your stories on pre-established conspiracy theories. I hope you enjoy it! 

 Here it is on Spotify.

And here it is on Apple Podcasts!

37 Days of Shakespeare, Day 31: The Two Gentlemen of Verona

The Two Gentlemen of Verona, first broadcast December 27th, 1983

• When was it written? Sometime between 1589 and 1593. Some have made the case that it’s his first play, but others say it’s more likely to be his eighth play.
• What’s it about? Valentine and Proteus are best friends in Verona, both in love with women they aren’t allowed to love (Valentine loves Silvia and Proteus loves Julia.) But then Proteus meets Silvia and instantly decides to ditch Julia to pursue Silvia instead, and goes so far as to snitch on Valentine and get him banished to clear a path. In the forest Valentine joins a group of Robin-Hood-esque outlaws. Julia decides to dress as a boy and win Proteus back. Silvia isn’t interested in Proteus, so he considers raping her until Valentine stops him at sword-point. In the end, everybody ends up with who they started with and the friends are reconciled.
• Most famous dialogue: No famous dialogue here.
• Sources: Primarily The Seven Books of the Diana by the Portuguese writer Jorge de Montemayor, with a bit of Thomas Elyot's The Boke Named the Governour
• Interesting fact about the play: Those (in the minority) that conjecture that this was actually Shakespeare’s first play cite as their primary evidence how bad it is. I would argue the opposite: I found this to be very sophisticated, so I doubt it’s his first. It seems like a much more ambitious undertaking than A Comedy of Errors, which is more often listed as his first comedy. Writing about anti-heroes is hard. You generally want to master writing about likeable heroes first. I would argue that, since Proteus is a compelling and complex anti-hero, this is unlikely to be the first.
• Best insult:
• “She is peevish, sullen, froward, proud, disobedient, stubborn, lacking duty”
• “Thou subtle, perjured, false, disloyal man!”
• Worst insult: “Silvia, witness heaven that made her fair, shows Julie but a swarthy Ethiope.” Well that’s problematic.
• Best word: sluggardised, braggardism
• Best production of this play I’ve seen: I’ve never read or seen it before.
• Notable names in the BBC Adaptation: None

How’s the cast?

• They’re wonderful. Tyler Butterworth has very unfortunate 1983 hair that makes him a dead ringer for Shaun Cassidy, but other than that gives a great performance as one of Shakespeare’s most callow anti-heroes, John Hudson shows nice range as Valentine goes on his big personal journey from gentleman to criminal. Tessa Peake-Jones, as is always true in this series, is unconvincing as a boy, but does a great job otherwise. Tony Haygarth is very funny as Proteus’s servant Launce (and the dog playing Launce’s dog is great too) Paul Daneman is a real standout as a worldly wise Duke, about whom I will say more below.

How’s the direction by Don Taylor?

• Excellent. Shakespeare has many perfectly fine plays that are miscategorized as comedies and directors have to strain to squeeze jokes out of them, but this very funny production does not feel strained at all, and makes a convincing case that this is actually a very funny play (despite the possibility of rape at the end, which ends the comedy real quick, but I think that’s the point.) Taylor wanted realistic sets, but when he realized that the BBC couldn’t deliver, he decided to go in a more stylized direction, with aluminum poles for trees, and it works surprisingly well.

Rulebook Casefile: The Power of an Ironic Title

Look at that plot description again, then answer me: Who exactly are the gentlemen here? The one who betrays his friend and then considers raping that friend’s true love? Or the one who goes to live as a robber in the forest? Surely the title is intentionally ironic. Of course, these men are technically gentlemen, since that was merely an accident of birth, but to the degree that behavior can be described as gentlemanly, these guys lack it.

This is a play about how a new lust/infatuation can cause a man to betray not only his previous lady-love but his male best friend as well, which is unfortunately an evergreen topic. Valentine (named after the patron saint of love) and Proteus (a name that means changeable) begins the play with much lyrical talk about true love (as opposed to Launce, speaking in prose, giving a hilariously mercenary account of his own lover’s qualities) but one betrays his love and his friend, and the other proves to be a crook at heart.

The title drips with irony. The word “Gentlemen” might as well be in quotes, and the power of that ironic title adds new layers of meaning to the play.

Storyteller’s Rulebook: When Should Actors Be Allowed to Play Things That Aren’t Necessarily in the Text?

Shakespeare wrote rich texts, densely packed with meaning and overflowing with subtext. But that’s never enough for actors or directors. In production after production, you find actors injecting new meanings into scenes that simply aren’t supported by the text. (I’ve talked before about the urge to turn perfectly innocent scenes into sex scenes.)

But then you also have examples of great actors who push it right to the edge, delivering an unorthodox interpretation that is, in retrospect, justified by the text, but was invisible until the actor (and/or director) dug it out.

This production has a wonderful example. Valentine is illicitly in love with the Duke’s daughter, but so is Proteus. Proteus wants to steal his friend’s girl, so he betrays his friend to the Duke. It would have been easy to stick to the text and have the Duke be entirely appreciative of this warning that his daughter is about to run away with Valentine.

But Paul Daneman as the Duke gives us a lot more than is seemingly on the page. In this version, the Duke sees exactly what’s really going on. He can see what a scoundrel Proteus is and he’s disgusted by it, but has to pretend to be thankful for the tip. It’s an excellent example of playing against the surface text in a way that does not contradict the underlying text at all.

Rulebook Casefile: The Power of Props

Props are one of the most powerful tools any writer can have. I’ve written and made videos about how powerful it can be to invest objects with meaning, and create more meaning every time those objects are exchanged.

And yet, Shakespeare does not do this very much. It’s not uncommon to have whole scenes with no props.

This play, however, is a big exception. It struck me in the first scene, where there’s a lot of business with Proteus’s letter to Julia, that this was uncommon. Later, there is a hilarious scene where Valentine has a rope ladder hidden under his cloak that the Duke contrives to reveal.

Perhaps this is an indication that the play really did come earlier than is commonly supposed. We’ve seen with other early plays that Shakespeare didn’t understand Elizabethan stage conventions yet, sometimes to good effect. Was the tendency in his later plays, which were all-dialogue-no-business, a stage convention at the time but he didn’t grasp it yet? If so, this is a delightful departure.

New Episode of "A Good Story Well Told" on Slaughterhouse-Five!

It’s a new episode of “A Good Story Well Told” with co-host Jonathan Auxier! We’re still doing our “Shame Shelf” series, and in this episode I shame Jonathan into finally reading Kurt Vonnegut’s 1969 novel “Slaughterhouse-Five.” Much discussion is had about whether it’s good or bad to write a novel that is very much a product of its time.

We also discuss the New York Times review of Guy Fieri’s restaurant in Times Square, written by Pete Wells.  Here that is (or here, if you’d prefer not to give any clicks to the Times.)
 

Here’s this week’s episode on Spotify and here it is on Apple Podcasts: 

New Episode of "A Good Story Well Told" on Treasure Planet

Hey everybody, it’s time for a new episode of A Good Story Well Told. In this episode, Jonathan gets me to finally watch the notorious Disney flop Treasure Planet! Will I end up saying “I haven’t missed much” or “Where have you been all my life??”

Here’s the episode on Apple Podcasts…

…And here it is on Spotify!

   

I am no longer cross-posting the episodes on the Secrets of Story feed, so you’ll have to subscribe to the new feed to get them from now on!

New Episode of "A Good Story Well Told" on Vertigo!

Hi everybody! As you may recall, I’ve launched a new podcast called “A Good Story Well Told” with Jonathan Auxier. We released an intro episode and a first full episode where Jonathan shamed me into finally reading the book “The Giver.”

I’m glad to say that both episodes got great ratings and lots of positive attention! Thanks to everybody who gave them a listen. Please feel free to rate and review us on iTunes to help people find the podcast! (Here’s an interview with Jonathan and me that my wife conducted for School Library Journal’s website, if you want to learn more about us!)

Well now we’ve released our second full episode, where I get to shame Jonathan into finally seeing the movie Vertigo. I think the episode turned out great!

You can find it here on Apple Podcasts!

And here on Spotify!

Announcing a new podcast: A Good Story Well Told, with Jonathan Auxier!

Hi everybody!

So I have some bad news and some good news. The bad news is that James Kennedy and I have decided to shutter the Secrets of Story Podcast for the foreseeable future. As you may have noticed, we only did two episodes in the last year, and now things have sputtered to an end, partly because James is so busy with all his exciting writerly endeavors.

So does that mean less content for you? It does not!

You may remember that our most frequent guest on The Secrets of Story Podcast was acclaimed children’s author Jonathan Auxier. Well I overheard Jonathan on a Zoom call with my wife lamenting that he’d like to do a podcast but it was too late to hop on board that train. I gave him a call and said, “Not so fast! I need a new podcast partner!”

Instead of continuing Secrets of Story, we decided to start a new podcast called “A Good Story Well Told”. This will be similar to The Secrets of Story, and everyone who enjoyed that one will enjoy this one too, but there will be changes. The biggest change is frequency. For each season, we’re going to put out a new episode every two weeks no matter what!

The great news is that two episodes are available to listen to right now! The first is an intro episode where we talk about how we met and what we’ll be doing on the podcast. The second is the first episode in our “Shame Shelf” series about what you can learn about writing from the book (and terrible movie) The Giver.

(I’ll be cross-posting the first episode to the Secrets of Story feed, so all 1000 followers or so know about the new show. To hear the second episode and follow along for the whole first season, you’ll have to find and subscribe to the new podcast feed “A Good Story Well Told” on your podcatcher of choice. So please, go right now and subscribe to “A Good Story Well Told” so that you won’t miss the avalanche of new content you’ll have thundering your way!)

Okay, so here’s the first two episodes of the new podcast!

Episode 1 on Apple Podcasts!

Episode 2 on Apple Podcasts!

Or, if you prefer Spotify:

Episode 1 on Spotify!

Episode 2 on Spotify!

Shakespeare, New Sidebar Items, and My Own Personal NaNoWriMo

Well, folks, we have 7 Shakespeare plays left. They are:

• The Two Gentlemen of Verona
• Coriolanus
• The Life and Death of King John
• Pericles
• Much Ado About Nothing
• Love’s Labours Lost
• Titus Andronicus

As you may have noticed, one of these things is not like the others. You have the legendary Much Ado and six of his most forgotten plays. The production history here, in case you hadn’t guessed, is that they let directors pick their Shakespeare plays and these are the ones nobody picked (with the big exception of Much Ado which was supposed to be done earlier but kept getting cancelled and pushed back for various reasons.) Are the six I haven’t seen all duds? I hope not. I’ve been pleasantly surprised by some I was unfamiliar with as we’ve gone through these, and I’m hoping that will happen again here.

But I’m intimidated to continue, and, more importantly, I need to rewrite my novel, so I’m turning April into my own personal National Novel Writing Month (which is usually held in November.) I’ve got thirty chapters, there are thirty days in April and I’m going to rewrite a chapter a day.

I also have big news announcing new material coming up but I’m not quite ready to announce that yet.

Meanwhile, if you’re starved for content in April, you’ll note that I’ve been doing what you should be doing, exploring the 15 years of archives of this blog, and I’ve discovered some posts that never ended up in the sidebar. Check them out in the bottom of the sidebar over there, or just click on them here:

• How to Write a Memoir (I had forgotten I’d had a series with this title. My novel is semi-autobiographical, so I’ve been studying memoirs intensely for a year, so I should expand this series with what I’ve learned.)
• Have at Least Six Big Decisions (One question I wish I could go back and add to the checklist)
• Can a Computer Do My Job?
• Secrets of Dungeon-Mastering
• My Top 20 Films! (Or at least what they were 15 years ago, the list would be different today. I was really into Tales of Manhattan at the time!)

Appearance on Jon Spurling Write in the Head YouTube Show!

Hey everybody, I made an appearance on Jon Spurling’s incredible “Write in the Head” YouTube Show! I reiterate my long held belief that the first act should most consist of a longstanding personal problem becoming acute, often though a social humiliation, then an intimidating opportunity presenting itself, then an unexpected conflict immediately arising. On in shorter form: “Problem / Opportunity / Conflict.” We discuss lots of examples and have fun. Unfortunately, I do have to apologize for the quality of the video and audio, which, entirely my fault, are not great. So sorry that a few words drop out, but you can pick them up from context clues. Check it out!

37 Days of Shakespeare, Day 30: The Comedy of Errors

The Comedy of Errors, first broadcast December 24th, 1983

• When was it written: Possibly in 1594, perhaps his fifth play and first comedy.
• What’s it about? Two sets of twins, two young lords both named Antipholus and two slaves both named Dromio, are separated at youth and know nothing of each other. When their father is about to be executed for a debt, they all end up in the Greek city of Ephesues, where there are many mix-ups but everything ends happily (except for, y’know, the two slaves who are not freed and still constantly beaten)
• Most famous dialogue: Oddly, this is a beloved and often-staged play, but no one piece of dialogue has really become famous.
• Sources: The play is a modernised adaptation of Menaechmi by Plautus, a Roman playwright.
• Interesting fact about the play: This is the only play to mention America, despite being set in ancient Greece. Jones cuts the line here, possibly because it’s so jarring.
• Best insult: “He is deformèd, crooked, old, and sere, Ill-faced, worse-bodied, shapeless everywhere, Vicious, ungentle, foolish, blunt, unkind, Stigmatical in making, worse in mind.”
• Best word: This play had no words that were unfamiliar or strange to me, which is one reason it can be staged so widely.
• Best production of this play I’ve seen: I saw an excellent production at Chicago Shakespeare Company as a play-within-a-play set during the Blitz (and I saw a fine production at Earlham College way back in the day)
• Notable Names in the BBC Adaptation: Roger Daltry of “The Who” is both Dromios! Michael Kitchen, whom you’ve seen in things, is both Antiphili. Charles Gray also returns as the befuddled judge who has to sort everything out.

How’s the cast?

• Excellent. As an actor, Daltry is only remembered for playing the lead in the movie of Tommy, but this proves that he was a very gifted comic actor who could have had a good side career if he hadn’t been so busy rocking. Kitchen does a great job playing the two Antiphili slightly differently despite dressing the same. The ladies are great, the old people are great, everyone’s great.

How’s the direction by James Cellan Jones?

• Absolutely delightful. Everything is bright and colorful, befitting the sprightly text. The town sprawls around a massive map of the peninsula and circus performers prance about at all times doing their tricks. Ultimately, Jones’ best decision was the casting, which I’ll discuss more below.

Storyteller’s Rulebook: Stories are Better When Everybody Isn’t Dumb

Usually, this play is staged by casting two pairs of actors who look similar but not identical to each other as the two pairs of twins. This makes all of the townspeople who stare one Dromio in the face, and then stare the other Dromio in the face five minutes later, and can’t tell them apart, look like idiots. Jones does something different, simply casting one actor as each set of twins, dressed and styled identically.

Normally, this doubling cannot be done, because all four are together on stage for a long scene at the end, but this is, of course, TV, and Jones can simply do the ending Patty Duke-style, which works fine.

But there were complainers. According to Wikipedia: 

• “This production used editing and special effects to have each set of twins played by the same actors. However, this was not well received by critics, who argued that not only was it confusing for the audience as to which character was which, but much of the comedy was lost when the characters look identical.”

Allow me to say, those critics were bozos. I’ve seen this play many times, always with actors that looked kind-of-similar as the twins, and it’s never worked this well. Yes, every time Dromio or Antipholus appears, it’s a bit confusing for a moment about which one this is, but then the fun of it is figuring that out from context clues. It never took me more than a minute to get caught up on which one I was watching, and I’m famous for my failure to follow complex stories.

As for “much of the comedy” being lost, the implication here is that a key source of laughs in the play is that these idiotic townspeople can’t tell these not-entirely-similar actors apart. But Jones’ comedy is a more generous comedy. There are no idiots here. Anyone would be very confused in this situation, and these mix-ups are entirely understandable. The comedy arises from our frustration at understanding a situation that they couldn’t possibly understand, and I found it hilarious.

Storyteller’s Rulebook: Don’t Let Yourself Get Boxed In

There’s a certain “Dylan goes electric” feel to this play, where we have an artist suddenly branching out in a new direction and hoping his audience goes along.

We’re fairly certain that Shakespeare wrote the three Henry VI plays first (in one order or another), then Richard III. That quartet has very little comedy (unlike his later history quartet, which has Falstaff to lighten things). This was a badass playwright writing brutal history plays on blood-spattered sets. Then, it’s possible that this was the fifth play, an adaptation of an old Roman comedy. The result is a brilliantly funny farce, but theatergoers must have been totally unprepared for this very silly comedy, if we’re right in our suppositions about play order.

(Curiously, there’s almost no subplot. In almost every scene the two Dromios are mistaken for each other or the two Antipholi are mistaken for each other. It’s a dozen permutations of a single joke.)

I wrote a blog post 15 years ago advocating that writers might want to stay in their lane, but this play argues the opposite. You can yank your audience in radical new directions, if you have total confidence in your genius as a playwright, which thankfully Shakespeare did.

Storyteller’s Rulebook: Don’t, Y’know, Endorse Beating Slaves

My daughter just made her Shakespearean debut as Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing. It was wonderful, but watching this, I kept wondering if they should have staged this one instead. Much Ado is the better play, of course, but this one is, I would say, funnier, and certainly shorter (It’s Shakespeare’s shortest play). The only reason not to stage it is that owning and beating slaves is not condemned, and the “happy ending” leaves the Dromios still enslaved. (And one of the two without a love interest.)

And how do you cast it according to modern gender-blind and colorblind casting? It’s tempting to not have the four of them be white men, but as soon as you change either pair to women or another race, then the constant beatings the Dromios receive at the hands of the Antipholi become something that’s much harder to take.

Ultimately, I think you’d have to take out all the beatings, which I think would work fine. Ideally you would free the slaves at the end too, but I don’t think you could do that without altering the text, which I usually do not endorse.

Personally, with a large cast of 8-13 year olds, I would have done Midsummer, but this one would have been tempting (the lack of unfamiliar words would also help) but, in the end, it’s probably too problematic.

37 Days of Shakespeare, Day 29: Macbeth

The Tragedy of Macbeth, first broadcast November 5th, 1983

• When was it written? Nobody knows. Probably after 1603, because the new King James saw himself as a direct descendent of Banquo and the play seems to have been written to flatter his bloodline. Possibly written in 1606 during the Gunpowder Plot trials, from which some language may have been drawn.
• What’s it about? Scottish thane Macbeth is told by witches he’ll be king. He tells his wife, who convinces him to go ahead and kill the king to speed the process along.
• Most famous dialogue: Probably the “tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” speech
• Sources: Holinshed’s Chronicles, of course, and Hector Boece’s History of the Scottish People, but also The Daemonologie, a pamphlet written by King James himself.
• Best insult: “Not in the legions Of horrid hell can come a devil more damned In evils to top Macbeth.” “I grant him bloody Luxurious, avaricious, false, deceitful Sudden, malicious, smacking of every sin That has a name.”
• Best word: “Aroint thee, witch, the rump-fed ronyon cries!”
• Best production of this play I’ve seen: I just saw one unmemorable production, and I’ll be missing it in Stratford this year. (I’ve also seen the Welles, Polanski and Coen films, all of which are very good.)
• Notable Names in the BBC Adaptation: Nicol Williamson from Excalibur is Macbeth

How’s the cast?

• Williamson and Jane Lapotaire as Lord and Lady Macbeth are both captivating but a little broad for TV. I’ve been sticking to this one series of plays, but on YouTube you can apparently watch Ian McKellen and Judi Dench in the parts, and it was tempting to watch that one instead.

How’s the direction by Jack Gold?

• Everything feels a little cheesy and tacky, from the sets to the lighting to the camera movement. It feels a bit like an old Doctor Who episode. I enjoyed watching it, but there are better options for viewing this play.

Storyteller’s Rulebook: Not All Killers Are Psychopaths

On the surface, Macbeth has a lot of similarities to Richard III. They both kill to gain a kingship, then keep killing women and children to hold it, finally dying on the battlefield as the proper order is restored. (In fact, Richard’s rise was also prophesized by a witch way back in Henry VI Part 2, wasn’t it?)

But it is a sign of Shakespeare’s greatness that the characters are so different. The easy reading of it is that Richard is a psychopath whereas Macbeth is not. Killing is easy and fun for Richard, whereas it’s torturous for both Macbeth and his wife. They’re riven by indecision, horrified by the act, and wracked by guilt afterwards. Each blames the other for getting them into this mess, and can’t forgive them or themselves. She is driven mad and kills herself, and he comes to feel that his life is a tale, told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

To paraphrase Twelfth Night, some are born murderous, some become murderous and some have murderousness thrust upon them. The Macbeths are clearly not in the first category, but it’s probably too generous to put them in the third. The witches don’t even tell them to kill the king, the Macbeths just pretend they did.

Ultimately, this is a greater play than Richard III because Macbeth is so torn up inside. Richard III is an excellent portrayal of how unreserved evil works, but this is an even better portrait of how evil is waiting to swallow any of us up at any time.

 
Storyteller’s Rulebook: Unsex It, Please

 
There is much debate about how bawdy Shakespeare really was. We have many dirty interpretations of his work today that may or may not have been what he intended. Was he really making a c-word joke in Hamlet? We’ll never know.

But undoubtedly many directors take moments in Shakespeare that were not intended to be sexual and make them sexual. Lawrence Olivier turned Hamlet’s bedroom scene with his mother into a real bedroom scene with his mother. (This would have been daring if he had cast someone old enough to be his mother in the role, but instead he cast an actress who was 11 years younger than him!)

In this series, I haven’t been focusing on these moments but they’re here and they’ve been annoying me. In the BBC All’s Well That Ends Well, the scene with the king is made very sexual even though there seems to be no justification for that in the actual text.

In this play, Lady Macbeth calls on spirits to “unsex her”, by which she means just make her more like a man and less like a woman, but they could stand to unsex her in other ways too, because she’s quite hot and bothered at times. When she says “Come to my woman’s breasts And take my milk for gall, you murd’ring ministers,” she starts to build to a fit of emotion that can only be described as orgasmic.  When she concludes the speech with “Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark To cry ‘Hold! Hold!’” then falls back on the bed, she leaves little to the imagination. 

Lapotaire has fun with it, and it almost works, but ultimately it tips over into the unintentionally comic. Not everything is a sex scene, people, and injecting them into Shakespeare where he didn’t intend them is not doing him or yourselves any favors.

37 Days of Shakespeare, Day 28: Cymbeline

Cymbeline, first broadcast July 10th, 1983

• When was it written? Around 1611. Perhaps his 34th play
• What’s it about? Cymbeline is an ancient British king who is tired of paying tribute to the Romans. His daughter Imogen has a husband named Posthumus, who has been banished to Rome, where he makes a bet with Pisanio about Imogen’s faithfulness. She is faithful, but Pisanio convinces Posthumous she’s not, so Posthumus orders her killed. She flees into the forest dressed as a boy, where she meets the king’s exiled brother and two stolen sons, who have no idea they’re princes. One of the princes beheads Cloten, a would-be suitor of Imogen. She takes what she thinks is medicine and passes out. The princes bury her and the headless corpse together. Imogen wakes and assumes it’s Postumous’s headless body. There’s a war for a while, then everything ends up back in Cymbeline’s (remember him?) throne room where everything is happily sorted out.
• Most famous dialogue: None
• Sources: Holinshed’s Chronicles and the play Philaster by Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher
• Best insult: There are no really juicy insults here, but Cloten calls the prince a “mountaineer” and the prince, who is clearly a mountaineer, gets so insulted he chops Cloten’s head off immediately. So I guess that must have been a pretty harsh insult back then.
• Best word: ‘ods pittikins
• Best production of this play I’ve seen: I saw a rather bugnuts production at The Stratford Festival last summer, with lots of gender-swapped roles (Lucy Peacock played Cymbeline)
• Notable Names in the BBC Adaptation: Claire Bloom returns as Queen, Helen Mirren returns as Imogen, Michael Gough is Belarius.

How’s the cast?

• They’re okay. Mirren plays a very similar role to the one she played in As You Like It, and once again she makes no attempt to feign maleness when in “disguise,” which makes it bizarre when people who knew her well don’t recognize her. Everybody else is okay, but they play this ridiculous play too seriously.

How’s the direction by Elijah Moshinsky?

• Entirely inferior to the production that I saw in Stratford. This one cuts out all the warfare, which was quite rousing on stage. The stage version had a very amusing Cloten that was allowed to steal the play, but this one had no standouts, and I blame Moshinsky for that. Worst of all the ruffs are back! I just don’t agree with the idea that plays set in ancient times (though there are many anachronisms) should have Elizabethan dress.

Storyteller’s Rulebook: Just Retire Already

We are fairly certain that this play came very late in Shakespeare’s career, and to say that it recycles old material is an understatement.

• As with Othello and Much Ado About Nothing, the heroine is framed for adultery through a very complex plot, and her heretofore-doting lover now decides to kill her.
• As with As You Like It (which also starred Helen Mirren in the BBC adaptation) the heroine, whose relationship is not approved of by her royal father, goes into the forest dressed as a man to live in exile, where she meets other formerly royal exiles who have become earthy forest dwellers.
• As in Romeo and Juliet, the heroine takes a sleeping draft that makes her very convincingly dead for 24 hours, with disastrous results.

Is Shakespeare wittingly or unwittingly repeating himself? Harold Bloom conjectured that this play might be self-parody on Shakespeare’s part, hauling out his old plots so that he could poke fun at himself. Of course, that only works if you treat the play as a comedy, but this production plays it as a tragedy until the very end, when a happy ending arrives out of nowhere. We’re supposed to just take it seriously and not notice all the repetition.

Bizarrely, the play was quite popular during the 18th century, with John Keats himself saying it was one of his favorites. By the end of that century, it was going out of favor. George Bernard Shaw (not entirely incorrectly) said the play was:

• “stagey trash of the lowest melodramatic order, in parts abominably written, throughout intellectually vulgar, and, judged in point of thought by modem intellectual standards, vulgar, foolish, offensive, indecent and exasperating beyond all tolerance.”  

But then he rewrote the ending and changed his mind, saying that, other than that fifth act, it was “one of Shakespeare’s finest later plays.”

I’ve now seen this twice in the last year. The Stratford production worked better than this one, but neither made the case that this was a great play. I haven’t finished making my way through these yet, but surely, Keats’s feelings aside, this is one of the worst. Just retire already, Will!

Best of 2024, #1: Will and Harper

Putting this here now feels like a protest against Emilia Perez, but I already had my list drawn up before I saw that one. Nonetheless, it is impossible not to compare and contrast the two. One of the many offensive things about Emilia Perez was that, as with The Crying Game, it was stuck in the mindset that trans people are trying to trick us all. Those movies focus on the question of whether they get away with it. This doesn’t jibe with my experience. Is it possible that I have post-transition trans people in my life that are passing? If so, that’s fine, but it seems to me that that’s just not what being trans is about.

This documentary is a much more touching story of a trans person who just wants to be accepted, so she goes on a road trip with her friend Will Ferrell. It’s at this place on the list because, more than any other movie this year, it made me laugh and it made me cry.

At this point, if you poll all Americans, you won’t find a majority who say they hate black people, or any other race, or gays or lesbians. And that’s been true for many years. The only minority group that a majority of Americans will flat out state that they hate is trans people. Trans hatred is a majority opinion. Trump hates black people, but he didn’t say “Vote for me because I hate blacks.” Instead, he said “Vote for me because I hate trans people, just like you do.” Previously good people like J.K. Rowling get infected with trans hate and it destroys them from the inside. Elon Musk was supposedly turned to the far right by his hatred of his trans daughter.

Why?? Why? Why all the hate? I don’t understand it. These are just the nicest people! They’ve done nothing wrong. As far as I can tell, the hatred is because the idea of trans-ness just seems so weird to cis people. Is that enough reason to hate?

Interestingly, Harper, despite expectations, does not encounter any face-to-face hatred in her roadtrip. But after she leaves each place, hateful trolls pop up on the internet to ridicule her. In person, she’s disarming and inoffensive. It’s the idea of her that inspires retroactive hatred.

I think most Americans have never met a trans person. What this movie does so well is give everyone who watches it a trans friend. Please watch it.

Storyteller’s Rulebook: They Don’t Have to Be On All the Time

I say that it made me laugh and cry, but I didn’t laugh as much as I thought I would: An interesting thing about the movie is that, despite starring a comedy giant and one of his head writers, it’s only mildly funny. These are comedy professionals who aren’t “on” all the time, and this movie shows us what they’re really like in their downtime. That turns out to be pretty fascinating. This is not a “Will Farrell” movie. Instead, it’s just a Will Farrell movie, and I loved it.

Best of 2024, #2: A Complete Unknown

Last time they tried to make a Dylan movie, it was called I’m Not There, and indeed he was not. This time they went with a similar title, “A Complete Unknown,” and indeed Dylan largely remains unknown at the end. There are no flashbacks to formative episodes in small-town Minnesota, no glimpse of parents or siblings, no flashforwards to times when he had more things figured out. The movie follows a very young man with delusions (?) of godhood from age 20 to 24 as he blazes his way into and out of the world of folk music. He goes electric and the movie’s over. He doesn’t even wreck that motorcycle at the end, because that happened two years later.

So what did I think of this film? I loved it. Timothée Chalamet and Ed Norton give astounding performances as Dylan and Pete Seegar, utterly transforming into their characters. The feel of Greenwich Village is just as good as the Coen Brothers’ movie about the same scene, Inside Llewyn Davis, which is a huge compliment. Limiting the scope of the movie so tightly was a brilliant move, saving us the annoyance of old age makeup or flashback kid actors who don’t look like the adult actors. The best thing about the movie is that it’s packed with music. The movie knows full well that the music, not his life, is his legacy, and it gives us a ton of it.

Is it a problem that Dylan remains a complete unknown at the end of the movie? No, because the movie makes the case that he’s unknowable. This is the same Bob we get in the documentary Don’t Look Back, a novaburst of talent, who is also a very private, antisocial guy that is determined to keep his secrets hid. Letting him do that was this movie’s most brilliant conceit.

Let me add, my favorite moment in the movie was Bob saying “It’s Bob, Bob Dylan” to his good friend Johnny Cash, who is on a bender. Johnny, like Woody, doesn’t recognize Bob. The two men he has the most respect forget who he is. That’s such a painful moment

Storyteller’s Rulebook: You Have to Choose How Much You Can Re-Arrange Events

The order of events of Dylan’s life are inconvenient for a screenwriter. The writers of the biopic Ed Wood (Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski) were in a similar position, and complained in the intro to that published screenplay about being constrained by the actual order of events of Ed Wood’s life:

• Finally, we had to figure out how to create a satisfying third-act climax and resolution. In a perfect world, Glen or Glenda would have been Ed Wood’s final film – the man cranks out numerous silly monster movies, before learning his lesson, turning to personal honest film-making, and creating his autobiographical valedictory masterpiece. But unfortunately, Glen or Glenda came first. So we had to turn Plan 9 from Outer Space into a climax.

Even though most people don’t know the life of Ed Wood, they felt they could not flip the order. They preferred to be honest.

More people know about the life of Bob Dylan, so Mangold could never have gotten away with it, but it must have been even more tempting to flip the order with a Dylan biopic. Surely it would be more satisfying to start with Dylan making electric records, then he meets a girl working in civil rights, realizes how much injustice is going on, switches from electric to acoustic (his fans call out “Judas” but he sticks with it) and then the triumphant ending of the film is when he performs at the March on Washington.

Indeed, the most bizarre element of this film is when Dylan performs at the March on Washington but it’s just a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment, with terrible CGI, playing a little snippet of a song without even pausing a different song that’s playing on the soundtrack.

This is the story of a man breaking out of his box, and the March, though it remains the most heroic moment of Dylan’s life, was nevertheless part of that box, so that’s all it’s shown as here. It’s amazing that original screenwriter Jay Cocks and rewriter James Mangold made it work.

Best of 2024, #3: The Brutalist

First of all, let me just say that this movie had many wonderful aspects, but the best aspect of all was the intermission. Every long movie needs one, and this one was glorious. I stretched my legs, I used the bathroom, I thought about the first half, then I returned to the second half refreshed and ready.

Killers of the Flower Moon had gorgeous cinematography that I would have loved to see in the theater (and a great score I would have loved to hear on good speakers) but there was no way I was going to see it in the theater without an intermission, which it bizarrely lacked. Just add an intermission!

This movie isn’t at the top of my list because it’s a little too similar to The Fountainhead. The politics are much less loathsome, but there’s still an element of worshiping architects that I found problematic. It reminded me of two documentaries from 20 years ago about children struggling with the legacy of their architect fathers. My Architect was good, and was somewhat of a hit as documentaries go, but I thought the subject was too enamored of his asshole Brutalist dad. I preferred a movie that barely got distributed called My Father the Genius, where the director had a more jaundiced view of her dad’s hair-brained architectural visions.

Storyteller’s Rulebook: Not Every Story Needs an Unpredictable Plot

One interesting thing about the movie is that it contains few surprises. By an hour in, you can see that Guy Pierce will be a bad boss and you can guess that the movie will end 2 ½ hours later with the project ending badly, and indeed that happens, very gradually. It is somewhat surprising just how bad things get at the end, and what happens as a result, but I still felt like I was well ahead of the movie. As my manager once said, it all runs downhill.

But this shows how to make such movies work. The movie is all about moments, not plot. With amazing cinematography, score, and especially performances, we just enjoy living in this world, feeling for these people. The greatest asset this movie has is just Adrian Brody’s face, which is enough to sustain this giant runtime. I don’t know why Brody never became a major actor, despite being the youngest Best Actor winner for The Pianist, but all I know is that you put this guy together with surviving the holocaust and you’ve got gold.

Rulebook Casefile: Leave Big Holes

After sprawling for 3 ½ hours, this movie just kind of ends. Mid-crisis, we suddenly jump 20 years ahead, and we find out a little about what happened to some of the characters, but not all. There are huge holes. But I didn’t mind. It gave me something to talk about with my wife as we left the theater. Audiences actually enjoy unexplained gaps, which just make a movie feel real and lived-in.

Best of 2024, #4: Inside Out 2

We saw this movie when my daughter was away at sleepaway camp, which was silly, because my daughter had just turned 13 a week before, as the heroine does in the movie. As soon as she was back from camp, my wife took her out to see it as a mother-daughter thing. I can only hope it helped my daughter deal with her own turbulent transitions, because that’s not the kind of thing I could talk to her about.  I’m not in her head and can’t fully understand what she’s going through, but this movie seemed uncanny in its understanding of teen girls and its ability to craft an entertaining story out of it.

(And of course, as with last year’s list, I think this movie proved that Maya Hawke, who plays Anxiety here, is an undervalued treasure.)

Storyteller’s Rulebook: Don’t Overextend Your Metaphor

Here, too, I thought the first Inside Out was overpraised and the sequel was underpraised. The first one was very well made, but I kept thinking “This metaphor is overextended and somewhat incoherent.” The metaphor is even more complicated here, as five new teenage emotions are introduced, but I thought this one tracked a lot better than the first. Whereas the first felt strained, this one felt effortlessly clever.

I also just found the previous movie’s “tweens need to accept their own sadness” moral to be way too much of a bummer. This movie, about learning to overcome anxiety, felt more uplifting. I understand what the first one was saying, and I guess it was worth saying, but I never enjoyed watching it in the many times I watched it. I look forward to rewatching this one more.

Another thing I didn’t like about the first movie was the glimpses of the father’s manly emotions and the mother’s feminine emotions, as if our fathers and mothers wouldn’t have gender-mixed emotions just like we do. There was less of that here.

Best of 2024, #5: Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga

Mad Max: Fury Road is a great film, but perhaps overpraised. This sequel is not quite as good, and certainly much messier, but it was bizarrely under-praised, getting none of the previous film’s Oscar attention and not showing up on any Top 10 lists I’ve seen.

Like the previous film, this movie is insanely intense, and gave me my biggest thrills of the year. Unfortunately, like every other sequel in the past five years, this is overlong. Most Mad Max movies take place over a 24 hour period and have simple plots, but this one sprawls over 15 years or so, with a very complicated flashback/flashforward structure. It’s the most ambitious movie in the series and I applaud that ambition, but I did miss the simple stories of the previous four movies.

Just to add: This movie lost a ton of money at the box office, and I always have mixed feelings when that happens. On the one hand, if filmmakers make a good movie, I wish them all the best, and I know what a bummer it is for them to not have that rewarded. On the other hand, as much as I liked this movie, I would be just as glad to see them create new IP and not go back to the same well so often, and if movies bombing is what it takes, then okay. (I do want more James Bond movies though. I hope they don’t stop making those because the last one tanked.)

Rulebook Casefile: Exchange Objects

I don’t want to get into what all happens with the peaches in this movie, because that would involve spoilers, and I’m hoping more of you will see the movie with my recommendation, but suffice it to say that the use of peaches in this movie perfectly exemplifies my rule about putting objects in their hands and then having those objects multiply in meaning as they’re exchanged from hand to hand.

Best of 2024, #6: Gladiator II

The next two movies are both would-be blockbusters that didn’t end up on anybody else’s Top 10 List. I saw this movie with a big fan of the first movie. He hated this one. He was shocked to find out as we were leaving that I liked this one, but I pointed out that him that, unlike him, I disliked the original.

The first Gladiator seemed like an unintentionally comic movie to me that took itself way too seriously. I spent that movie cringing from the over-earnestness. This movie was the opposite: It was ten pounds of fun in a five pound bag. It knew precisely how silly it was, and was all the better for it. So many gladiator scenes! Every ten minutes, our hero was back in the arena, up against more and more outlandish threats (yes, including sharks!)

Ultimately, this was a good old ’50s style sword-and-sandal epic, and one of the best of the genre (Nowhere near as good as Spartacus, of course, but other than that, there weren’t a lot of great ones.) If I had to sum up this movie in one word, it would be spectacle. Like the patrons of the Coliseum, I was given my bread and circuses, and boy oh boy did I need them.

Rulebook Casefile: Capture Real Life National Pain

But I also felt like this movie had more going on.

What do you do when your country is dying? Like, what do you actually wake up and do every morning? Do you try to do something about it? Do you just lament that it’s too late? Do you try to turn the situation to your own advantage?

Most of the characters in this movie want to save their dying country, but all in different ways, resulting in tragic ends for most of them. Living in a dying-if-not-already-dead country myself, I felt for each of them.

My plan right now is to move to Canada. The people in this movie don’t have that option, and they all suffer greatly for it. In this movie, there are no good outcomes. It’s going to be a bloodbath.

Best of 2024, #7: Wicked

I walked into this movie feeling incredibly dubious, especially of Ariana Grande, and it didn’t grab me for the first ten minutes or so, but soon enough the movie and Grande won me over. She’s just delightful

One of the oddest things about the movie was how complete it seemed. It’s just the first half of the musical but everything seems to wrap up pretty well. Both times I saw the show on Broadway, I liked the first act much more than the second half, so I kind of like have it lopped off like this. I will go into Part 2 suspicious all over again, and if it fails to win me over, I will be content to treat this movie as the whole thing.

What’s the Matter With Hollywood: Why Are Movies So Long These Days?

There are only so many stories you can write about how long movies have gotten in the last five years, but this movie reignited the debate, because it takes one hour of the musical and adapts it into a two hour and forty minute movie, which seems particularly elephantine.

The movie does feel too long, and, as always, I did spot things that could come out. Fans would have gone apoplectic, but the entire long sequence with Idina Menzel and Kristin Chenoweth comes right out.

But even the changes I would suggest would only get the movie down to 2:20 or so, still leaning it more than twice the length of its source material. This is because many the additions are good. Many things that were never clear in the musical are much clearer here, such as why the animals can’t talk and the mechanics of their oppression. 

Ultimately, this movie was a hit and widely acclaimed, so they seemingly made the right choice to swell it up so much, though that violates everything I was ever taught about how to tell a good story.

Best of 2024, #8: The Wild Robot

The primary reason this movie is here is that it made me laugh and cry, which, as I get older, is more and more what I look for in a movie (though it’s not true of several of the movies I have coming up.)

Another thing I loved about this movie was its mastery of dialogue-less storytelling. Of course, that brings up the fact that the main problem with this movie was that it was superficially similar to WALL-E, but not as great, so I kept unfairly comparing them the whole time, but, judged on its own merits, this is a really well-made movie about parenthood and other existential dilemmas.

(My mother-in-law’s main problem with this movie was that she didn’t believe that the predators wouldn’t eat each other when cooped up for the winter. For some problem, that was more of a problem I had with Zootopia, where they had built a whole society where the predators seemingly had no ability to eat. In this movie they just had to get through a shorter amount of time.)

Rulebook Casefile: The Power of an Ironic Title

I talk in my first book about how the best way to convey that you have an ironic concept is to have an ironic title. When this book came out, I heard the title and immediately knew I had found one of the great ironic titles. How can a robot be wild? They’re the opposite of wild. Put a robot in the wild and a great story writes itself.

This is a high concept movie. As I say in my book, high concept can refer to wild sci-fi stories like this, or dead simple stories like Wedding Crashers. What they have in common is that the title writes the movie for you.

Best of 2024, #9: Anora

It was embarrassing watching this movie with my wife, but not as embarrassing as it would have been watching it with anyone else! There are maybe 10 different lapdance scenes and 20 different sex scenes? It was all a little much. But in the second half of the movie, the heroine got to keep her clothes on more and the movie became quite funny and charming. Mikey Madison does a great job as a very foul-mouthed Cinderella-story heroine and I hope this earns her some roles that don’t require this, uh, much of her.

Storyteller’s Rulebook: Heroes Don’t Call Their Lawyers

Anora, who has married a billionaire’s son without a prenup and now faces annulment, would have ended up a lot better off if she had ever called a divorce lawyer, but of course that would have brought the movie to a screeching halt. Great heroes tend to be those that don’t call their lawyers, even when they really ought to. Sometimes a great story (this episode comes to mind) consists of the viewer just pleading to the screen saying “Lawyer! Lawyer! Lawyer!” the whole time. (Anora finally mentions a lawyer as the movie is almost over, but by that point she’s too firmly in the clutch of the villains and has to meekly back down.)

Best of 2024, #10: Conclave

This is one of those movies where nominating it for Best Picture does it no favors. It’s a fun little twisty election drama, based on an airport paperback bestseller. It’s well worth watching, but ultimately there’s not much to it. It’s not meaty enough for a Picture nomination. Ralph Fiennes is more overdue for an Oscar than any other actor, but I think it would be a shame if he won for this. It would clearly just be a career-recognition win, because he doesn’t get enough to do here. He definitely should have won Supporting last year for The Menu instead, but he wasn’t even nominated.

Straying From the Party Line: The Twist Has to Affect the Hero

This movie has a doozy of a twist at the very end, but our hero’s internal journey (admitting to himself that he wants to be pope and then accepting that he shouldn’t be) has already concluded, and the news he finds out at the end is shocking but not life-changing. If it surprised us that he was willing to hide this revelation, that would be one thing, but it entirely fits with his behavior before that. It’s not reversible behavior. So the twist felt more like an extra punchline than a climax.

Not on the Best of 2024 List: Emelia Perez

At the beginning of Emilia Perez, an evil Mexican druglord transitions to female. She is told by her doctor that this transition will also transform her soul. For the next few years of her life, it seems as if this is true: She has gone from being a totally evil male to a totally saintly female, now employed running a foundation for victims of cartels. In the last half hour of the movie, things are complicated somewhat as some of her former behavior begins to resurface, but only slightly, and when it does, it’s clearly supposed to be shocking to us that she’s acting anything like her former self.

But why would it be? When friends of mine have transitioned, their personalities haven’t changed, and why would they? By all reports, the writer-director of this movie does not seem to have known many trans people, and is simply assuming that it also involves a brain-transplant. I’m not trans, but it’s my understanding that a transition is just an external change. Inside, a transwoman has always been a woman, and a transman has always been a man. They’re just choosing to share their true self with the world.

The bizarre twist, of course, is that the trans star of Emilia Perez has had her Twitter feed exposed and it turns out she was a pretty terrible person before and after her transition, which certainly didn’t make her saintly. She wouldn’t be the first racist to win an Oscar of course, and she does give a good performance in the movie, but the narrative that giving her the award would be a step toward justice is long gone.

Now let me say, I found this movie very watchable. Unlike many others, I thought the musical element mostly worked. Who knew that Zoe Saldaña could dance? I didn’t find the lyrics very catchy, because they were written in French, crudely translated into broken Spanish, and then subtitled in English, but the music is good, and the choreography and production design are excellent.

But ultimately, this movie is snake-bit. The director has made himself look bad in various ways, the star has made herself look awful, and everybody else seems tainted by association. It’s a shame. There’s a great version of this movie that could have existed, if made by actual Mexicans in Mexico, rather than by French people (and Americans and Spanish people) in France.

Best of 2024, Introduction and Four Movies Not on the List

Welcome to the Best Movies of 2024! As usual, I will begin by pointing out some movies I didn’t see and explaining why some movies aren’t on the list. I didn’t see Nickel Boys, I’m Still Here, The Apprentice (all too depressing given what’s going on) and Flow (which I’ve heard is great but haven’t gotten around to seeing.) Now let’s get to some (but not all) of the movies not on the list:

• Hit Man: This is an excellent script, directed by an excellent director, so it should have ended up on the list, but the movie had one glaring flaw that kept it off: the star. The hero is a nerdy professor type who ends up going undercover for the police and getting transformed into the sexy hit man he only pretends to be, steaming up the screen with the target of his sting. The challenge for the casting director was to find an actor who could do both, but unfortunately, they cast Glen Powell instead. Powell was great as a cocky asshole in Top Gun: Maverick, and he's good here when his character becomes a red-hot-loverman, but he’s utterly unconvincing when his character is a nerdy professor type (see above). I didn’t see Powell’s two other leading-man-tryouts this year, Twisters or Anyone But You, but based off of this one, he just doesn’t have the range.
• Deadpool and Wolverine: This threequel was very similar to another recent Marvel movie: Ant-Man 3: Quantamania. Once again, after spending the first two movies on relatively grounded Earthbound adventures, they spend the entire third movie on sci-fi worlds, forgetting all about the Earthbound supporting cast, which was disappointing in both movies. That said, this movie was a lot of fun, and it was great to see so many surprising actors pop up in limbo, or show up in different roles than we expected them to play. The music was great, too.
• The Substance: This was a very powerful movie with a lot to say about society. The sequence in which Demi Moore prepares for her date is one of the best scenes of the year and she deserves Best Actress for it. But this movie is just too much. It’s by far the grossest movie I’ve ever seen, which is fine, but it’s also 2 hours and 20 minutes, which is unforgivable. No movie this gross should be this long. I would have been happy to cut 30 minutes out if they’d just given me a few days to edit it.
• Dune Part 2: I had completely forgotten Part 1, so I spend all of Part 2 trying to remember who all of these people were. The result is that, a year later, I’ve completely forgotten Part 2, too. All I remember was that the hero surprisingly ditched Zendaya at the end for a more advantageous marriage, which was an interesting twist. 

Tomorrow: One more movie that’s not on the list (Yes, it’s that one)

37 Days of Shakespeare, Day 27: Richard III

The Tragedy of Richard III, first broadcast January 23rd, 1983

• When was it written? Somewhere between 1592 and 1594, possibly his fourth play (and the earliest of his plays that still gets performed a lot)
• What’s it about? York’s son Richard is determined to seize the crown, so he manipulates the crowds and murders his way to the top, including killing two innocent princes in the Tower of London, but Henry VII finally kills Richard at the Battle of Bosworth Field and brings an end to the War of the Roses
• Most famous dialogue: “Now is the winter of our discontent” (or “A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse”)
• Sources: Hall and Holinshed, of course
• Best insult: “Thou elvish-marked, abortive, rooting hog, Thou that wast sealed in thy nativity the slave of nature and the son of hell; Thou slander of thy heavy mother’s womb, Thou loathed issue of thy father’s loins”
• Best word: They keep saying that one character was drowned in a barrel of malmsey-butt, which I guess is a kind of wine?
• Best production of this play I’ve seen: I saw a great production in Stratford, Ontario, with a female Richard. The Ian McKellen movie is also great.
• Notable Names in the BBC Adaptation: A very young Patsy Kensit (Lethal Weapon 2, Angels and Insects) shows up in a small part, Zoe Wannamaker (Harry Potter’s Madame Hooch) is Lady Anne

How’s the cast?

• Ron Cook continues to do a great job as Richard, Julia Foster continues to steal the show as Queen Margaret and everybody else does a good job falling like chaff before Richard’s scythe. Howell has everyone who died in previous plays come back as different characters in small roles, then appear to Richard as hallucinations, then finally appear in a pile at the end, with Margaret (still alive!) cackling atop it.

How’s the direction by Jane Howell?

• Still excellent. I would say that this is the weakest of the four, but only slightly. (More on this below) All told, this and the three Henry VI plays come together to form an exquisite 15 hour saga, and it’s well worth watching on Britbox. I know, you thought you were badasses for sitting through all three and a half hours of The Brutalist, but this makes that movie look like a music video by comparison.

Straying From the Party Line: Evoke Pathos

These days (and indeed ever since Shakespeare died) everyone stages (and films) Richard III over and over and nobody stages (or films) the Henry VI plays, unless they’re doing all four together. But why? In this production it seemed like the weakest of the four.

Henry VI and several of the people surrounding him in the previous three plays were tragic figures, meeting sad ends, but Richard in this play doesn’t evoke much emotion. He’s just unreservedly evil, and he’ll be the first one to admit that. Shakespeare does not attempt to wring much pathos from his death. As a study of the nature of absolute evil, this is still a great play, but it’s not as morally meaty as the previous three.

So why does this one get staged so much more often? Most obviously because it’s not identified as Part 1, 2, or 3. Its title implies it’s a standalone play, and indeed, this one doesn’t end on a cliffhanger. Also, because actors love putting on a hump and limping.

But if I were running a Shakespeare company, I would be more drawn to doing the Henry VI plays, and I do believe that each can be staged independent of each other (or this play). Each of the four is great in its own way, and each deserves a chance to shine on its own.

(Of course one of the problems is that this is the only one of the four in which Shakespeare had to pick a side. His own queen was descended from Henry VII, who had to seem legitimate and blameless, while Richard III had to be pure evil. That bring us to…)

Storyteller’s Rulebook: All Writing is Propaganda

One problem with enjoying this play is that there’s another piece of classic English literature which exists for no other reason than to insist that this play is bogus.

Josephine Tey was a mystery writer who had written several novels about a detective named Alan Grant, solving murders in modern-day England. But for the fifth Grant novel, she broke with the formula. In “The Daughter of Time”, Grant is in the hospital and happens to see a portrait of Richard III. He believes he can spot criminals easily, and Richard’s eyes don’t look villainous, so he determines to prove Richard’s innocence. From his bed, he does a bunch of research and concludes that Richard was actually a good guy. But what about the Princes in the Tower? Grant concludes they both survived Richard and were actually slaughtered by Henry VII himself once he seized power.

Grant (and Tey herself?) makes the case that Shakespeare was a propagandist for the Tudors, so he had to shift the blame from Henry VII to Richard III, but now we can look back dispassionately and see that it was all lies.

Both the play and the novel are great, but surely we have to pick one, right? We can’t like both, when one completely impeaches the other. Well, not so fast. Grant makes a strong case that Shakespeare’s case was specious, but Grant’s own logic, founded on his ability to spot guilt in an official portrait, is dubious as well, and it’s not clear that Tey backs him up.

And, ultimately, as someone who is admittedly not an expert, I side with Shakespeare. My understanding of the current state of the historiography is that Richard, not Henry, was the true villain. But what do I know?

All writing is propaganda. Often, it is intentional propaganda for the writer’s chosen cause, but, at the same time, it might be unintentional propaganda for a cause the writer doesn’t even know he’s promoting.

On the surface, Arthur Miller is condemning the Salem witch hunts in “The Crucible”. In the intentional subtext, he’s really condemning the 1950s Red Scare. But looking back on it today, we see that, by portraying a man as the victim of the witch hunts and a teenage girl as the victimizer, he was also unintentionally exposing his era’s sexism and panic about teenage girls’ sexual independence.

So there are three levels of text: The text, the intentional subtext, and the unintentional subtext. All three are present in just about every work of literature. It’s good to be suspicious of all three in everything we read. Tey gets a great book out of a detective’s attempt to investigate and reverse Shakespeare’s verdict. Ultimately, she doesn’t need to convince us she’s right to remind us that skepticism is always a good thing to maintain.

Anybody Out There?

Well folks, we’ve been on a good run, and I tried to watch Richard III this week, but it was just too depressing, giving what’s going on. Hopefully this is just one week off and I’ll be back next Thursday. Meanwhile, let me just ask, is anybody actually reading these? Is anybody getting anything out of them?

37 Days of Shakespeare, Day 26: Henry VI, Part 3

The Third Part of Henry the Sixt, first broadcast January 16, 1983

• When was it written? Possibly in 1591, perhaps his second play (after Part 2 but before Part 1)
• What’s it about? The Duke of York and Henry VI’s Lancasters continue to vie for the throne. Both of them (and thousands of others) end up dead, with York’s son Edward on the throne, but Edwards’ brother Richard is plotting to take that throne from him in our next play…
• Most famous dialogue: None
• Sources: Hall and Holinshed again
• Interesting fact about the play: According to Wikipedia, “the first major American performance was in 1935 at the Pasadena Playhouse in California.” So apparently no one produced this play during the American Civil War?? That is insane! In the play’s best scene, Henry strays onto a battlefield, where he finds that one father has accidentally killed his son in the heat of battle, and, nearby, a son has accidentally killed his father. It wasn’t uncommon for libraries in Civil War times to have the Complete Works of Shakespeare. Nobody read this play? Nobody thought they should maybe stage it? Of course, if they had, it might have had one of the Booth brothers in it, and wouldn’t that have been ironic!
• Best insult: Henry has Richard’s number: “The owl shrieked at thy birth, an evil sign; The night-crow cried, aboding luckless time; Dogs howled, and hideous tempest shook down trees; The raven rooked her on the chimney’s top, And chatt’ring pies in dismal discord sung; Thy mother felt more than a mother’s pain, And yet brought forth less than a mother’s hope, To wit, an indigested and deformed lump.”
• Best words: Orisons, quondam, malapert
• Best production of this play I’ve seen: I’ve never seen it or read it until now.
• Notable Names in the BBC Adaptation: Just Bernard Hill again

How’s the cast?

• They just get better and better. Peter Benson as the title character and Julia Foster as his queen suffer more than in the previous two plays and really get to show how great their performances are. Lots of actors get to have tear-jerking death scenes.

How’s the direction by Jane Howell?

• Excellent. The set and costumes have all turned black to show that the party’s over. The many, many battle scenes are all well-portrayed, with the final one being gloriously fought in the (indoor) snow. This is a fifteen hour epic, shot on video in 1983, but it’s shockingly watchable.  She has made the case here that the Henry VI plays are among Shakespeare’s best. 

Storyteller’s Rulebook: We Don’t Need Another Hero

When we read the history plays today, we read them in chronological order. Certainly the BBC did them in that order, as does everybody else who does the work of staging all eight. But it’s important to me to remember, as I watch these “Henry VI” plays, that these came first. The “Henry VI” plays were, in all likelihood, the first three plays Shakespeare ever wrote. And that’s wild.

The specter of Henry V looms large over these plays. “Henry VI, Part 1” begins with the nobles standing around Henry V’s coffin and lamenting that they’ll never see his like again. And indeed, when his son turns out to be too mild-mannered to hold the country together, everyone is constantly contrasting him with his father. Everyone on every side claims that they will bring back Henry V’s greatness.

As he half-heartedly fights for power and his life, Henry VI’s whole pitch is, “I know you dislike me, but you can’t impeach my claim to the throne without impeaching my father too, and he’s practically England’s patron saint!”

As viewers, this all makes so much more sense if we’ve seen “Henry V” first! We know what they’re talking about! We’ve seen the greatness! But when these plays were written and performed, this specter was entirely immaterial. Henry V was much discussed, but never seen.

When you have all eight plays, you’ve got a rise and fall narrative, peaking right in the middle with the Battle of Agincourt, then sliding down precipitously for the next four plays. But, when first performed, these plays were all fall and no rise.

Why did Shakespeare choose to begin his career by writing three plays about a horrific civil war with not a single hero to be found anywhere? Why did he not write about Henry V for many years later? At least at the first, the Bard was hardcore. Let others write about heroes, he’s writing about gory, grimy degradation, where every single character dies horribly (and first has all their dignity stripped from them.)

One can’t help but feel that he might have been a little disappointed in himself when he finally caved and wrote about Henry V later. “Fine,” he said, “I’ll write a bunch of prequels and give you a hero, but I prefer wallowing in the muck.”

Storyteller’s Rulebook: Write Beyond Good and Evil

Watching the first two “Henry VI” plays, it did occasionally occur to me “Oh yeah, isn’t Game of Thrones based on this same war? I’m not really seeing it.” It was only when I got to the plot point here when Edward impetuously decides to break from an arranged marriage and marry a common woman (pissing everybody off) that it all snapped into place:

• Evil, cheating Queen Margaret (a Lancaster) became Cercei Lannister
• Her trusting dupe of a husband, Henry VI, became Robert Baratheon
• The beheaded Duke of York became Eddard Stark
• York’s son’s Edward became Rob Stark
• And Margaret is always trying to install her son Ned, so that must be Joffrey
• So I guess Edward’s brother, the future Richard III, is… Jon Snow? Theon? I’m not sure. That’s where George R. R. Martin breaks with the true story.

What makes it so fascinating is that these two TV series tell such similar stories, with so many of the same plot points, but I rooted for different families in each one. In GOT, I boo-hissed Cercei, as I was supposed to, but in this BBC series, Queen Margaret, despite her lying, cheating ways, eventually won me over to her side. (It helps that her son Ned isn’t a monster like Joffrey!) In GOT, I liked the Starks, but here I just never liked the family they were based on, the Yorks. There’s just something slimy about them, at least in this portrayal.

Shakespeare, unlike Martin, writes such rich texts that I’m sure you could stage this in such a way that I was rooting on the Yorks and not the Lancasters. Certainly the Lancasters, like the Lannisters, do many revolting things. My choice to root for them was uncertain.

GOT is ultimately a fairly straightforward good-vs.-evil story, albeit very well written. Shakespeare’s plays, on the other hand, are far more ambiguous about good and evil. There’s not a good family and evil family here, just a bunch of very flawed human beings lashing out at each other for hundreds of different conscious and subconscious reasons.

(I suppose I’m being unfair to GOT, because the presence of Tyrion does morally complicate things, but even then, it’s clearly supposed to be ironic that this ultimately-good character could come from such an evil family.)