Invisible Gesticulations - February 13th, 2008

About February 13th, 2008

Tarry! Take the Fool with Thee! 12:41 am
Wow. I think this is my favourite YouTube find of the year; a user named ShakespeareAndMore has uploaded an awesome bounty of Shakespeare, among other things. I only wish he or she had more complete plays.

But I can't overstate how giddy I was to find this clip--John Hurt as the Fool and Laurence Olivier as Lear. I think even people who don't like Olivier will dig him here;



Egad, John Hurt's amazing. I think I'll have to rank him next to Peter in Ran as my favourite King Lear fool. The affectionate performance Hurt gives actually kind of reminds me of Peter's. I don't think this degree of visible love is implied by the text, but I could be wrong, I haven't read it in a while.

Discussing Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in class on Tuesday night, I couldn't help thinking about its similarities to Vertigo. Is that movie just too much on my brain? But think about it--Gawain's Scottie, the Green Knight and his wife are Judy, and Morgan le Fay is Gavin Elster. Morgan le Fay's barely in the story, yet it's her plot that sets everything in motion--just like Elster. Gawain's having an existential crisis, in that he finds his nature in conflict with his identity as a knight--similar to Scottie's sexual impulses being at odds with his identity as a hero. Judy's even associated with the colour green in Vertigo.

Sheesh. I'm never getting away from that movie . . .
Current Location: Britain
Current Mood: tired

Aimless Pilgrimages 08:26 pm
I've downloaded 99.8% of Mikio Naruse's Yama no oto. That last .2% is taking forever. The ETA fluctuates between two hours and two weeks. I've already been downloading this thing for a week, and this is the only Naruse movie that comes up in Scrape Torrent that I haven't seen yet. I feel like I've been eating them like candy.

I went to a Denny's I'd never been to in Rancho San Diego to-day to read the somewhat difficult Middle English prologue of The Canterbury Tales, only to be served by a mumbling waiter eight hundred times more difficult to understand.

I've been re-watching season one of Deep Space Nine lately. I got to "The Nagus" last night. Though I still kind of like Wallace Shawn in the role, I found the caricature-like, ultra greedy Ferengi a little off-putting. They sort of reminded me of the squinting, buck-toothed Japanese soldiers in World War II propaganda cartoons. Maybe I'm getting too sensitive . . .
Current Location: Greenwich
Current Mood: thoughtful
Current Music: "Cornflake Girl" - Tori Amos
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