A story of more woe

Tomorrow begins my second annual Shakespeare project, on the model of the Hamlet project that gave birth to this blog. This winter, I'll be watching a shitload of Romeo and Juliets, including (unlike last winter) such adaptations as West Side Story, Beneath the 12-Mile Reef, Love Is All There Is, and (I'm really looking forward to this) Tromeo and Juliet.

Anyway, like last year, I have reread the play and assembled a list of questions to ask about every version (though some may apply only to productions of the play itself, not to adaptations). Some are carry-overs or adjustments of last year's Hamlet questions. They are:

Who (how old), when, how long? This is a straight pickup from last year, with the critical addition of the ages of the lead players. Romeo's age is not specified in the play, but he's clearly an age-appropriate partner for Juliet, whose age is twice implied as 13. Along with this, do we get the lines in the play in which J's age is specified?

What sort of R&J? Are they silly kids, or is their passion as irresistible to us as to them?

Seriocomic scale for first scene? This presumes, of course, that the original act I, scene i is retained, with Montague servants confronting Capulet servants. This scene is typically played for yuks, but of course the rest of the play suggests that there are tragic seeds here. I'll try to rate the opening on a scale of 1 (silly) to 10 (ominous).

"Wherefore": do the film/playmakers know what it means? Extremely annoying that in pop culture this most famous line is usually misread (typical jokey answer: "Down here: the trellis broke"). I don't really expect anyone to screw this up, but anyone who does is under double-secret probation from I.ii.

Carrion flies? In one of the play's weirdest passages (III.iii), the newly banishèd Romeo bemoans that "carrion flies"

MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMmay seize
On the white wonder of dear Juliet's hand
And steal immortal blessing from her lips,
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
But Romeo may not, he is banishèd.
Flies may do this, but I from this must fly.

I'm interested to see who's got the balls to include this macabre sequence.

Body count? This is an obvious one that I should have done for Hamlet. Here the textual count is 6: Mercutio, Tybalt, Paris, Romeo, Juliet, and Lady Montague. Except for Paris and Lady M, they all seem mandatory, but we shall see (especially in the adaptations--I already know, e.g., that in West Side Story Maria/Juliet survives, and there's no Lady M equivalent).

What (else) is missing? and What (else) is changed? and What (else) is odd? are carryovers from the Hamlet Project, and are self-explanatory.

End-of-the-play exposition? Hey, Will was young, and though the comic wordplay throughout the work was a pleasant surprise after so long since my last reading, a good editor would have cut the last c. 190 lines (including an uninterrupted 40+ lines from the Friar) to about a dozen: did Elizabethan audiences really need to have the whole fucking story retold at the end? Had they all taken ill-timed bathroom breaks? I'll be looking to see whether the sensible decision is made to cut to the chase once the title characters are dead dead dead.

And that's that--tune in again over the next couple of months for more R&J than you can possibly stand.

Busy bein' born

Don't Look Back

(1967)

Ah, little Bobby, embryonic, insistently enigmatic, genius through Plexiglas. Strangely, I feel as if I've seen much of this already, perhaps because I've seen 65 Revisited. Ah, but still, what a time--and by the way, who broke the fucking glass on the sidewalk?

Undergraduates

Låt den rätte komma in (Let the right one in)

Crit

OK, I've never seen Fanny and Alexander, but I suspect that it would not be inapt to say that this film is to Twilight as F&A is to Home Alone. Twilight is a perfectly OK Hollywood teenage-vampire-love story, populated with pretty 90210ish faces and centered on a moral and existential dilemma that we can intellectually respond to, even if the pretty actors don't really convince us that it's any more than an academic exercise. This, on the other hand, is a beautiful, heartbreaking, heartbreakingly beautiful story of 12-year-old love, notwithstanding that one of the 12-year-olds has been 12 for a long time and has unconventional dietary requirements, and the pair's responses to that complication is so real that we, well, bleed for them.

The films have much in common (that "12 for a long time" line occurs in Twilight, as I recall, except that the number is 17), most particularly the central vampire's irresistible attraction to the central nonvamp, and the vamp's recognition of and resistance against the dangerous implications of that attraction. Where Twilight's vamp is part of a loving and protective vamp family, Rätte's has a loving and protective nonvamp father figure who does everything he can to protect her from the most gruesome consequences of her condition. (Funny, only as I wrote that sentence did it occur to me that "father" can hardly be an accurate description of his relationship to this ageless being. Which in turn may answer the question implicit in the Graduate-allusive final scene. Hmmm . . . ) The nonvamp's divorce dynamic is also similar.

That the lovers are preteens, though, and haven't the foggiest notion of what romance entails--Eli first suggests to Oskar that they simply stay as they are, then asks, "Do you do anything special?" when going steady; when he says no, she replies, "OK, then--we'll go steady"--and that, while beautiful in their own way, they lack Hollywood gloss (Eli, in fact, looks and smells a little funky when separated too far from her last meal), makes us believe in them and care for them in a way that I couldn't, at any rate, for Twilight's teens.

Then, too, where the good vamps in Twilight are sissified "vegetarians," feasting only on nonhuman blood, Eli needs to bite a neck now and again, and that's a messy thing. Notably, though, in this version of the vampire myth, apparently a victim who suffers a normally fatal injury after the bloodletting is spared joining the undead, and Eli is careful to administer that mercy, except once when she is interrupted. (Other elements of traditional vampirism are present: as in Bram Stoker's novel [but not, to my recollection, in most films], the vampire must be invited in before crossing a threshold the first time; the vampire can scramble up vertical surfaces with ease and even fly short distances; and cats hate, hate, really hate vampires.)

Seeing Eli's face smeared with her victim's blood, and seeing the sadness in Lina Leandersson's face in the aftermath of the meal, is worth all the prettiness of Twilight put together. Leandersson is, I see, a first-time actor (IMDb is silent on her actual age, but 12's probably pretty close), as is Kåre Hedebrant; hope we see lots more of them, and of director Tomas Alfredson. In fact, how do you say "sequel" in Swedish?

Trailers

• Slumdog Millionaire--You notice that when some form of the word million is in a Danny Boyle title, the film's a lot sweeter and more sentimental than when it contains words like grave or spot or smaller numbers, like 28? Though actually there's sweetness in all of them--it's just not on the surface. Anyway, in the face of lukewarm reviews, I'm in if it comes downtown, which seems likely.
  

Torn 'twixt love and duty

High Noon

(1952)

A prescient allegory of George W. Bush's unilateral stand against Saddam "Frank Miller" Hussein, necessitated by the cowardice of the townspeople/French.

Another of those films that I used to love, then tired of, then thought it time to revisit. Well, it is a masterfully structured film, no doubt about that, economical almost to a fault, and it minimizes the thespian shortcomings of Gary Cooper and Grace Kelly. But the politics, whether applied to appeasement of the Russians, as in '52, or to the neat twenty-first-century updating that writes itself, makes it hard to love.

On the other hand, I can't wait to see W contemptuously throw his badge in the dust and ride off with Laura in their buggy on 20 January.

La mort n'a pas des excuses

Il y a longtemps que je t'aime (I've loved you so long)

Crit

If there's an Oscar for conveying emotion in the first tenth of a second of a film without a word, let's just go ahead and give it to Kristin Scott Thomas, whose sadness from opening shot to the end is ineffable--and rarely referenced in her few words.

Fact is, though, that as perfect as Scott Thomas is as the just-out-of-prison Juliette, everyone in the cast is remarkably good, from Elsa Zylberstein as her sister Léa (who really does look like her sister sometimes) to Lise Ségur as Léa's adopted Vietnamese daughter P'tit Lys to Jean-Claude Arnaud, amazingly, expressively wordless as Léa's stricken father-in-law.

The only thing that keeps the film from being great is that the secret of Juliette's crime, when it comes, just seems a little too Lifetime-movie-ish. But that doesn't undercut the performances, which are more convincing than the denouement.

Piecework

Blast of Silence

(1961)

Wow: mega-gritty, astonishingly economical (sub-80 minutes), Manhattan-location story of a hit man who thinks he sees his one chance to get out of the game and settle down with a good woman. Only one guess as to his success.

Written and directed by the star, Allen Baron, who spent almost all of his subsequent career directing the cheesiest TV (Room 222, Night Gallery, The Brady Bunch, Love, American Style, Fantasy Island, Charlie's Angels, The Dukes of Hazzard, The Love Boat)--if it was '70s crap, he was there. This film has about as much in common with an episode of Charlie's Angels as . . . well, I'm sorry, there's just no comparison, except, I suppose, in involving homo sapiens behind the camera, if not necessarily in front of it. Baron resembles a young De Niro a bit, by way of George C. Scott.

Wonderful edgy (in every sense, but mostly in the sense of nervousmaking) modern jazz score by Meyer Kupferman. One of those movies--sort of like when I discovered Ascenseur pour l'échafaud a few years ago--that I have to slap my forehead and wonder why I'd been ignorant of it all these years.

Armies of the afternoon

Harvard Beats Yale 29-29

Crit

In 1968, when I was 14, the Tet offensive ended significant U.S. popular support for the Vietnam War, and, essentially, Lyndon Johnson's presidency; Dr. King was assassinated in Memphis; Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles; Chicago police bashed in young people's skulls and a party's soul; Richard Nixon was elected president; and then a football game was played in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Young fans of college football might be surprised to know that Harvard-Yale ever meant anything to anyone who didn't spend four years in Cambridge or New Haven, but it is so. By '68, though, that era seemed to be past--except that Yale somehow managed to attract a running back good enough to star for the Dallas Cowboys afterward, and a quarterback who could throw, run, and lead (and who had enough personality to become a character in a comic strip being started by another Yalie at the time), and the Elis entered the final game improbably ranked 14th in the nation, and heavily favored to complete a perfect season at the expense of the Crimson. But even more improbably, Harvard was 8-0 also--the first time since the teens both teams had brought perfect records into what they like to call The Game.

Only one could remain perfect, though, and with Calvin Hill and God, as teammates called Brian Dowling (before Garry Trudeau started calling him BD), on the Yale roster, the Elis made it clear which team would leave 9-0 by taking a 22-0 lead in the first half. With 4 minutes left, Yale was driving toward a score that would pad its 29-13 lead, and even the fumble that short-circuited that drive didn't really matter: Harvard was 86 yards and another touchdown and two two-point conversions away from tying, and the clock showed 3 minutes left.

The title of the film (lifted from a Harvard Crimson headline the next day--a better headline than I ever wrote in my 13 years of writing pretty good headlines) is a spoiler, of course, but even knowing that, you won't believe what transpires. Two people in the audience with me were at the game, and one commented after the film that it was so effective that she kept hoping maybe it would turn out differently this time.

The filmmakers--who, granted, would have to work hard to screw up material like this--do a masterful job of interweaving the television footage with interviews of players (including Dowling, a Harvard guard named Tommy Lee Jones, and Frank Champi, the backup Harvard quarterback sent in to mop up after Yale built its insurmountable lead). The politics of the time is a big part of the text--one Harvard defensive back, Pat Conroy (not the author), was a 24-year-old Vietnam vet, and other members of both teams held predictably conservative views, but most seem to have been antiwar, at least by November 1968, and some--like Dowling--were avowedly apolitical, and just wanted to be left alone to play the game.

The flip side, of course, is the admission by more than one participant that this was "just a game." Right: just a game people still talk about and replay and argue officiating calls from and agonize over 40 years later. Well, see the film before you judge their priorities.