Primrose Road

From the Fall 2008 issue of the Nextbook Reader, on Israeli-American-German filmmaker Omer Fast's Spielberg's List:

"The beginning of the film seems like just so much more Holocaust testimony: first-person descriptions of the camps, the smokestacks, the dogs, the hunger, the widely plumbed range of Nazi inhumanity. One might watch this testimony with the same measures of sadness and respect and anger and exhaustion with which most Holocaust testimony, at this point, is taken.

"But the film starts to breed some strange incongruities ... The interviewees, it begins to become clear, aren't talking about their experiences in the camps themselves but about their experiences as extras in the film Schindler's List.
...

"Where the woman in Poland had actually been at a fake place, the medic in Jerusalem seemed to have been absent from something real: His participation in a real event was a far less emotional experience than her participation in a staged one."

Also some interesting stuff on dybbuks and women, the "Jewess" and Obama hate this month.

My thoughts on the Branagh/HBO "As You Like It":

- The one truly interesting decision Branagh made here was to have Rosalind not even try to disguise herself. The Boston Herald's generally negative review did not pick up on this; early on, when she and Orlando speak, and she asks Orlando to call her Rosalind, it's apparent that he knows that she's Rosalind and that she knows that her "disguise" is hardly a disguise at all.

- Bryce Dallas Howard's eyes are creepy. (And they flit around too much during close-ups.)

- Was Charles the Sumo Wrestler the only reason why Branagh decided to set this film in 19th century Japan?

Hamlet's no prince. When the country he's supposed to inherit is in trouble, he goes away to school. After his father is murdered, he reads books and stages performances (his own "antic disposition" and The Mousetrap) instead of bravely avenging the murder, addressing Claudius' crime and perhaps even Gertrude's complicity. His "performance," unlike Hieronomo's in The Spanish Tragedy, doesn't do anything.

(I fear that my blog is often more empiricist than I am.)

In his asking "should I kill myself?" instead of "should I face Claudius and take my place on the throne?," Hamlet's rather ... annoying. Michael Almereyda's Hamlet is one of my favorite adaptations because Almereyda and Ethan Hawke play this annoyingness well: Hamlet's a film student who should stand up for his father, but all he can do is make films about his own life, his own situation.The translation from stage to film -- on both levels -- captures the total failure of "The Mousetrap."

The "to be or not to be" soliloquy is recited in the action section of a Blockbuster store; instead of drawing from these films the inspiration to act, Hamlet thinks about his own life and death.

Courtney Lehmann's Shakespeare Remains, which supplies a (fairly) good model for working media theory on Shakespeare without overlooking the historical conditions of Early Modern play and book production, calls the Almereyda/Hawke Hamlet's filmmaking a "search for a new technology of representation" (95). For those interested in a psychoanalytic/"hauntological" reading of the film, Lehmann's chapter on this film is worth a read. I won't get into my specific critiques of her reading, though, because that's dissertation/article material, which will not appear here.

This is more of a venue for arguments like "damn, Hamlet's annoying." Remember!