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Monday, March 18, 2024

37 Days of Shakespeare, Day 15: All’s Well That Ends Well

37 Days of Shakespeare, Day 15: All’s Well That Ends Well, first broadcast January 4th, 1981
  • Possibly written: 1602, possibly his 25th play
  • What’s it about? Helena, the ward of a countess, falls in love with the countess’s son Bertram, who despises her. She saves the life of the king and asks only that he order Bertram to marry her, which he does, but Betram flees to fight in a war. She follows and tricks Bertram into impregnating her, at which point he finally begrudgingly says he loves her.
  • Most famous dialogue: None. If I had to pick one, I’d say “The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together.”
  • Sources: The play is based on the tale of Giletta di Narbona (tale nine of day three) of Boccaccio’s “The Decameron”.
  • Best insults:
    • That vile rascal, that jack-an-apes with scarfs.
    • A most notable coward, an infinite and hourly promise-breaker, the owner of no one good quality worthy of your lordship’s entertainment.
    • A snipt-taffeta fellow there whose villainous saffron would have made all the unbaked and doughy youth of a nation in his colour.
    • But the biggest insult seems to be “physician’s daughter”, which apparently at the time was quite a lowly thing to be.
  • Best words: adoptious, misprison, moiety, armipotent
  • Best production of this play I’ve seen: I saw a fine production at the Chicago Shakespeare Theatre that made a brilliant decision I’ll address below.
  • Notable Names in the BBC Adaptation: No names or faces I recognized.
How’s the cast?
  • Glum. Angela Down as Helena is basically just bummed that Bertrand doesn’t love her, and Ian Charleston as Betrand takes little more joy from his philandering then he does from his forced marriage. Nobody told either that this was supposed to be a comedy. The one time Down perks up is when Peter Jeffrey as Parolles is flirting with her. Marry him, girl! Even with Parolles being totally degraded by the end of the play, he seems a better prospect than Bertrand.
How’s the direction by Elijah Moshinsky?
  • Picking up from last episode, Moshinsky continues Miller’s project of recreating the work of famous painters. There’s more Vermeer here and also Rembrandt and Georges de La Tour. The result is one of the most beautiful episodes. But the tone is more problematic than playful. He does get good milage out of the one truly funny scene in the play, the scene where Parolles is kidnapped by his own compatriots speaking pseudo-Italian gibberish.
Storyteller’s Rulebook: If Your Characters Refuse to Fall in Love With Each Other, Don’t Force It

How do you solve a problem like “All’s Well That Ends Well”? Since the term “problem play” was coined by critic F. S. Boas, there’s been much debate about which plays fall under that definition, but this one is on everybody’s list. The “problem”, of course, is that it’s a romantic comedy that’s not very funny and not at all romantic.

The primary distinction that makes a Shakespeare play a comedy rather than a tragedy is whether or not there’s a happy ending. This play is supposedly a comedy which means the ending is supposedly happy, but does anybody believe that this marriage will be anything other than a horror show? Was any husband dragooned into marriage so unwillingly?

If actors want to play this as a true love match with a happy ending, they get no favors from Shakespeare, who gives the two nothing happy to play together. The only remaining option is to play it downbeat, either playing his forced profession of love as insincere or go so far as the justify it by playing him gay and secretly in love with Parolles (If so, that’s an even more sadistic love than he has with Helena, if such a thing is possible!)

In the uncharitable reading, Shakespeare wanted us to buy his final abrupt-180 declaration of love, and simply fails to convince us. If you’re going to give Shakespeare more credit than that, you have to make it clear something else is going on. The Chicago production I saw had what I thought was a brilliant solution. Helena reveals to Betram that she’s tricked him into impregnating her. He then gets down on one knee and says “I’ll love her dearly, ever, ever dearly” to her belly! He’s not going to love Helena, he’s going to love the baby. Not necessarily a happy ending, but no truly happy ending would be supported by the text. At least this ending is believable and explains his reversal. And marriages, after all, have subsisted on less.

Thursday, March 14, 2024

37 Days of Shakespeare, Day 14: The Merchant of Venice

The Merchant of Venice, first broadcast December 17th, 1980
  • Possibly written: 1596-1598, possibly his 14th play
  • What’s it about? Antonio wants to loan money he doesn’t have to his friend Bossanio so that Bossanio can court Portia. Antionio borrows the money from Shylock, promising a pound of flesh if he can’t pay it back. When Shylock comes to collect, Portia dresses up as a man to defend Antonio, and humiliates Shylock in court.
  • Most famous dialogue is hard to pick:
    • If you prick us, do we not bleed?
    • All that glisters is not gold
    • The quality of mercy is not strained
  • Sources: The primary source was the 14th-century tale Il Pecorone by Giovanni Fiorentino
  • Interesting fact about the play: I had always thought of Shylock as the title character, on second watch, it’s clearly Antonio.
  • Best insults:
    • Such a want-wit sadness makes of me
    • An inhuman wretch uncapable of pity, void and empty from any dram of mercy
    • O, be thou damned, inexecrable dog
  • Best words: eanlings, fruitify, slubber
  • Best production of this play I’ve seen: I’ve just seen the Pacino movie, which is fine.
  • Notable Names in the BBC Adaptation: Just John Rhys-Davies in a small role as Salerio
How’s the cast? 
  •  This production was widely denounced for its anti-Semitism, as well it should have been, but Miller defended it saying that he, the director and Warren Mitchell, who plays Shylock, were all Jewish. Nevertheless, Mitchell’s Shylock still comes off as a broad caricature. Gemma Jones does a good job as Portia.
How’s the direction by Jack Gold?
  • Continues this season’s themes of realistic costumes combined with abstract sets. I’m starting to long for an actual set. Give them objects! Actors act better when they can interact with actual objects on an actual set. The cross-dressing is remarkably well done, even though they don’t add facial hair (as I usually suggest). I sort of believed that Bossanio wouldn’t recognize his new wife.
Storyteller’s Rulebook: Don’t Try to Redeem the Unredeemable

Why on Earth did the BBC do the two most problematic plays back-to-back to launch their third season? Ultimately, unlike The Taming of the Shrew, this play is unredeemable. Yes, Shylock has one great speech demanding we recognize his humanity, but that can’t make up for the rest of the play.

In Taming of the Shrew, there’s really only one character who’s horrible to women, and, if you interpret the text in such a way that he’s slaughtered with a carving knife, which, as I showed last time, you can do by only deleting a few lines of text, then proper morality is restored. In Merchant of Venice excising the evil of anti-Semitism is impossible, because almost every character, all of whom are supposed to be sympathetic, is virulently anti-Semitic. The dispossession, humiliation and forced conversion of Shylock, with its inescapable intimations of the holocaust, is cheered on by almost the entire cast.  They all think it’s hilarious. 

Ultimately, the problem with both plays is that they’re posited as comedies. Nowadays, seeing misogyny and anti-Semitism as evil, we can choose to stage them as tragedies, and the text will partially support us, but then you have all these comedic scenes in the subplots undercutting that. In Taming, the scene with the rival tutors is genuinely funny. In this play, the exchanging of the rings at the end is quite funny as well. You simply cannot hide that these are supposed to be comedies, and that includes the “hilarious” abuse heaped on Katherine and Shylock. Shakespeare was usually a writer of great humanity, but it failed him in these two plays. You can try to redeem Taming but this one should be consigned to the dustbin of history.

Monday, March 11, 2024

37 Days of Shakespeare, Day 13: The Taming of the Shrew

The Taming of the Shrew, first broadcast October 23rd, 1980
  • Possibly written: between 1590 and 1592, possibly his 7th play (and the earliest we’ve looked at)
  • What’s it about? Everybody wants to marry fair Bianca, but her father won’t let her marry until her independent sister Kate is married, so the suitors recruit Petrucio to “tame the shrew.” He does so, brutally, utterly destroying her sense of self, until she gives a final speech about how women must be subservient to men.
  • Most famous dialogue: There is no famous dialogue from this play, thankfully. The closest thing: “This is a way to kill a wife with kindness.”
  • Sources: Nobody knows. There was a very similar play called “A Pleasant Conceited Historie, called the taming of a Shrew” right around the same time, but that may be based on this one or this one on that one, or both on a lost original.
  • Best insults:
    • An irksome brawling scold
    • Rascal fiddler and twangling Jack
    • A whoreson, beetle headed, flap-eared knave
    • You heedless joltheads and unmannered slaves
  • Best word: Shakespeare absolutely falls in love with the word “froward,” using it eight times in the play. I had to look it up. Runners up: Plash, Galliases, and bemoiled
  • Best production of this play I’ve seen: Before seeing this I had never seen or read this play, other than what I got of it in Kiss Me, Kate and the “Moonlighting” episode. I’ve never even seen 10 Things I Hate About You.
  • Notable Names in the BBC Adaptation: John Cleese! His first time ever doing Shakespeare.
How’s the cast? 
  • What do you do with a play like this? It’s a romantic comedy that isn’t remotely funny or romantic. Cleese and Sarah Bedel as Katherine play it as if it’s both, which doesn’t work at all, but it’s hard to blame them. What else is there to do?
How’s the direction by Jonathan Miller? 
  •  We begin the third season of BBC Shakespeare here. Cedric Messina, who ran the first two seasons, is out and Jonathan Miller takes over as producer of seasons 3 and 4, also directing this and several other episodes. Miller was less realistic and more concerned with creating a sense of Shakespeare’s time than the times the plays were attempting to portray. One fun thing he does in this and later plays is recreate scenes from Vermeer. The stylish staging is fine, but the abstract lighting is off-putting and distracts too much from the play. Miller also eliminates the framing sequence, making this one of the few productions with notable cuts, which is unfortunate.
Storyteller’s Rulebook: Don’t Ask Us to Laugh at Things That Aren’t Funny

It is amazing how well most Shakespeare plays have aged. We can’t show my daughter movies from the 1980s, because she’s inevitably horrified by their sexism, but we can easily show her most Shakespeare plays, because she recognizes in them the universal humanity of all the characters. Shakespeare’s women, for the most part, have a richness and multidimensionality that even most modern male authors cannot hope to match in their own work. Amazingly, Shakespeare was even able to write a play about a black man that has stood the test of time very well and that black actors today are proud to play. This was the most timeless author of all time.

Then there’s this play, a horrible misogynistic mess.

This is the only production I’ve seen and it’s unwatchable. Are any of them watchable? People speak fondly of the Raul Julia / Meryl Streep version, and those are two wonderful actors, but I don’t see how they could save this text.

Shakespeare companies are content to now pretend this play doesn’t exist. I spent the whole time watching it wondering if anybody could make it work today.

And I think it could: To begin, admit that the Kate/Petruchio storyline is neither funny nor romantic. If you stage it as a deadly serious tale of brutal abuse, it could work. Shakespeare was a good enough writer that he wrote a believable, well-observed tale of a how a man can utterly crush a woman’s spirit, if only he were not asking us to cheer it on. I think that if you staged it today, you’d have to really lean into the abusive aspects. Let it fully horrify us and everyone else in the play who sees it. Then, at the end, when he shows off her obedience to win a bet at a dinner, have her subtly palm a steak knife while she gives her speech about subservience, and triumphantly end the speech by stabbing him dead in front of everyone. Over and over until she’s covered in blood and he’s lifeless on the floor. Then she looks up at the others. What will happen? There is a long pause… Then everybody begins a slow clap. Hortensio says to Petruchio’s corpse, “Now, go thy ways; thou hast tamed a curst shrew,” and Lucentio adds, “‘Tis a wonder, by your leave, she will be tamed so.” They leave Kate standing over Petruchio. Curtain down.

Is there any point in such a production? Why not just put on one of the better plays? Ultimately, the only reason to do it is if you’ve pledged to stage every play, as the BBC did. If so, you would have to grapple with this one, and I think this would be the only way to make it work.

Thursday, March 07, 2024

Best of 2023, #1: Barbie and #2: Poor Things

It will always go down in Oscar history as two of the great slights: Margot Robbie not getting an Actress nom, and Greta not getting an Director nom. Who did it? Who pulled off the heist of the century? Look no farther than Poor Things. Barbie made the mistake of coming out too far away from award season. That left time for interlopers to come along and steal its fire. Barbie (co-written and directed by a woman) is a profound meditation on the subject of corporatized utopian feminism and its discontents. And it did it all while being a four quadrant movie: My family (M48, F45, F12, M9) all laughed, loved, and cried when faced with the shockingly deep pit of ennui churning beneath the plastic sand.

…but wait, here comes another brilliant film, released several months later, exploring a similar story of a manufactured woman taking on a life for herself. This new one, however, has no women creators, and that’s clear in every frame. Male gaze feminism is here to help, provided the nudity is copious and everything is kept decidedly sex-positive.

Now let me make it clear: I love Poor Things. In its own more-muted way, it matches Barbie’s deranged surrealism, set in a world that seems to combine the 19th and 22nd centuries. Emma Stone gives a very powerful performance, as do Willem Defoe (robbed of a nom) and Mark Ruffalo. I was rivetted to the screen the entire time, wondering where on earth this bizarre story was going. It’s a gruesome movie, a misanthropic movie in many ways, and ultimately a problematic movie (I think it’s not saying entirely what it thinks it’s saying) but it’s ultimately very watchable and compelling.

In the end, however, I preferred Barbie, which is my favorite movie of the year. This is a movie that has no right to be any good. It’s offensive that anyone would even want to make a movie out of this shoddy plastic material. But the result is astounding and devastating. I grappled with the thoughts and feelings this movie stirred in me for weeks. And it’s got the Indigo Girls! Three times!

It was an excellent year for movies. Marvel stalled out and better movies dominated the box office, which was a delightful change of pace. It’s been a long time since the most popular movie of the year was my favorite movie of the year, and it’s great to see great taste prevailing. In other years, it’s possible that Poor Things would have been the best movie available, but this year I’m glad we got something even better.

More thoughts:
  • So why was Barbie the highest grossing movie of the year? Not just because it was the best, that’s for sure. It undoubtedly helped that this was one of the only major Hollywood releases this year to be under two hours. I think Hollywood is underestimating the number of people who are checking the runtimes on Mission: Impossible and Indiana Jones movies and noping out because they’re over two and a half hours.
  • I’m currently writing a semi-autobiographical novel about a high-school socialist and wondering to what degree audiences will find that off-putting. Based off Poor Things and Oppenheimer, I think modern audiences still like (or like more than ever) heroes who embrace or dabble with socialism, and it’s not a big likability hurdle for me to overcome.

Wednesday, March 06, 2024

Best of 2023, #3: The Holdovers

Is this the most convincing period piece ever made? This feels like a movie that’s been sitting in the can sealed up since 1971, and is only now getting a belated release. It felt like Hal Ashby made this in between Harold and Maude and The Last Detail, and that’s pretty high praise, coming from me.

The number one rule of writing is that you can write about any type of character except one: Self-pitying losers. That’s the one type of hero audiences will supposedly never root for. Well, no one ever told Alexander Payne and Paul Giamatti. Just as with Sideways, they’ve created another wretched failure we cannot help but love. (Both are high school teachers, both have had to give up on dreams of getting published, both drink high end hooch straight out of the bottle.) In this one, Giamatti’s character literally stinks! He gives off a fishy smell. How abject is that?

So how do they do it? James Kennedy thought Sideways got away with it by having Giamatti ditch his job for a while and live out a fantasy trip (on stolen money) instead. Giamatti also ditches his job for an unauthorized road trip with a different type of manchild, although in this case he’s doing it in a more self-sacrificing way.

One thing the two characters have in common is expertise and dedication to their fields of study. We like stubborn characters. In this movie, when Giamatti gives his surly student a copy of Marcus Aurelius’s “Mediations” for Christmas, it feels pushy, but then when he gives the same book to the cafeteria worker, it seems downright willful.

Of course, in this one, Payne has his thumb on the scale a bit more heavily, because the movie ends on Giamatti making a heroic sacrifice, putting us more definitively on his side than we ever were in Sideways. Maybe that means that Giamatti will finally earn his Oscar this time. Last time he wasn’t even nominated!

Ultimately this movie isn’t quite as good as Sideways, but it would be a worthy winner in all categories, if only to make up for last time.

Tuesday, March 05, 2024

Best of 2023, #4: Killers of the Flower Moon

It is almost inconceivable how much better this movie is than The Irishman. After that movie, I was convinced that Martin Scorsese was a pitiful shell of his former self, now devoid of all filmmaking talent. That movie was three hours of wall-to-wall voiceover, terrible CGI and egregious miscasting.

I had little hope that he had regained any talent when I heard the even-more-elephantine runtime of this movie. 206 minutes! I refused to watch it in the theater simply because my bladder isn’t that big. If he had allowed an intermission, which the film desperately needed, I would have gone.

When I finally streamed the movie at home, I was stunned by how good this is. The runtime just flies by. In fact, it flies by a little too quickly. Ultimately, I feel that this should have been a six-hour miniseries, not a three-and-half hour movie, since the FBI portion of the movie feels a little sped up. Every time we check in on the investigation, it’s jumped forward several steps without us. The way that Scorsese does it here does work, but it also could have worked if it played out slower in an alternate six-hour version. (Partly, I just wanted to see more of the investigation because Jesse Plemons is a national treasure.)

Given how beautiful the cinematography is in the film, I wish an intermission had allowed me to see it in the theater. It’s gorgeous. Amazingly, it’s the same cinematographer as Barbie, when the look could not be more polar opposite! And the music by the late Robbie Robertson is astounding. I would watch one of those DVD tracks where they just play the score without any other audio.

Scorsese’s cameo at the end sure made this feel like his farewell to the screen, and it would be a great high note to go out on. The Irishman was a self-parody of all of his worst habits turned up to 11. This movie feels more like a greatest hits. He’s made so many Great American Crime Pictures, and it all built up to a movie about the original American crime, the stealing of land from Native Americans. All other crimes flowed from that one.

Monday, March 04, 2024

Best of 2023, #5: Oppenheimer

I don’t usually enjoy Christopher Nolan’s movies and I had little reason to think I’d like this one any better. Everything I knew going in was unfavorable. I knew it was super-long, I knew it was a big non-linear bowl of spaghetti, and I knew I had issues with the casting.

But it turned out to be great. At times, as with the next movie we’ll be looking at, it felt like a six-hour movie cut down to three hours, so it felt like we were whizzing through the material in a sprightly way. Amazingly, I was able to keep all the storylines clear even with all the jumping around (It helped, of course that I already knew the story. I recommend also checking out Fat Man and Little Boy for a different perspective on this story.)

One of the reasons I tend to find Nolan’s movies unwatchable is because most of them have oppressive scores by Hans Zimmer, which pound the performances into oblivion. For this movie, Nolan went instead with Ludwig Göransson, who scored the Black Panther films, and the result is a thousand times better. I can actually hear the actors!

I do keep wondering if, with all the newfound focus on casting people true to their identity, if Hollywood will ever get to the point where they feel compelled to cast Jewish people as Jewish people. Certainly not the case with this or Maestro. One of my best movie-watching experiences this year was showing my kids Fiddler on the Roof, and authentic casting helped that movie a lot. Glad they didn’t cast Troy Donahue as Tevye.

If you listen to the “Secrets of Story Podcast”, you’ll know I wrote a pre-Imitation Game biopic of Alan Turing called “The Man Who Won the War”. That could also be the title of this movie and this movie has many similarities to my script. When I wrote and pitched that movie in 2005, and people asked me who I would cast, I always suggested a then-unknown actor named Cillian Murphy. Watching this movie, I kept thinking of what could have been.

Friday, March 01, 2024

Best of 2023, #6: Mission: Impossible: Dead Reckoning, Part One

Yes, it’s too long, especially considering it’s only “Part One”, but this is a tremendously fun movie. Certainly, this movie ends much more satisfactorily than this year’s Spider-Verse movie. That movie just abruptly halts in the middle of everything, but this movie comes to a very satisfying climax. The promise that there will be more to come feels like a reward, not a threat.

This was the only movie this year I was in a hurry to watch again. I asked for the Blu-Ray for Christmas and then happily hopped on the elliptical runner to exercise to it over the course of five great work-outs. That was so much fun, I then did five more workouts while watching the director’s commentary! A movie has to be pretty thrilling to get a good workout out of the commentary.

Fans of the “Marvel Reread Club” podcast know how much I love to see fighting on top of trains, and this movie has one of the greatest train fights of all time, all the more thrilling knowing that Tom Cruise keeps it real. The movie is too long, but I couldn’t complain when the climax founds ways to keep topping and topping and topping itself. I’ve talked before about how modern action movies sometimes leave you “exhausted, not exhilarated”, but this movie, which is ten pounds of fun in a five pound bag, manages to do both.

I’m so happy there’s another one coming, though it was pushed back a year by the strikes. Unfortunately, this movie, crushed by Barbenheimer, was a commercial disappointment, but I hope they don’t change anything in response. It’s my understanding that it was mostly in the can, and it would be disastrous to start second-guessing themselves now.

Thursday, February 29, 2024

Best of 2023, #7: Dumb Money

I loved Michael Lewis’s book “The Big Short” and I loved Adam McCay’s movie of it even more. I had it as my favorite movie of that year. But I had to keep reminding myself: shorters are assholes, and we shouldn’t be celebrating these guys.

In fact, between the Big Short book coming out and the movie coming out, I wrote a screenplay-for-hire where the villain had elements of the main characters in the book. I then was surprised when they turned the book into a movie and somehow convincingly portrayed the shorters as heroes. The movie worked wonderfully well: I kept forgetting how much I would hate these guys in real life.

But it was great to see this movie about the actual underdogs of the stock market, the “dumb money”, mounting a coup and pulling off the ultimate dream: squeezing the shorters. This was the feel-good movie of the year. We root for these scrappy investors, cheer when they pull off their squeeze, howl with indignation when the system screws them over and then breathe a big sigh of relief when they still pull off a bit of a win.

Everybody in The Big Short ended up a billionaire at the end of the movie, profiting off of America’s misery. Nobody in this movie makes out like that, but some of them do okay.

Ultimately, the movie comes down to a fascinating dilemma: the squeezers find that their portfolios have shot up as a result of the squeeze, but they don’t want to sell because they want to make a point, even if they lose everything. Ultimately some sell, but some, like America Ferrara’s character, decide to die on their hill. We, as viewers, can’t decide which they should do. That’s a great dilemma I’ve never seen on screen before. Ferrara got deservedly nominated for Barbie but she was also great in this.

It’s interesting that this movie came out the same year as Lewis’s new book, “Going Infinite”. In this case, the public turned on Lewis for the first time for being overly-admiring of his “maverick” subject. Everybody read the new one and simply pitied Lewis for getting duped by Sam Bankman-Fried. Lewis insisted on seeing SBF as another one of his patented rule-breaking geniuses, whereas everybody else, even if they just read Lewis’s book, could see he was merely a petty crook.

It got so bad that Lewis was featured on the great podcast “Behind the Bastards”. Robert Evans skewered Lewis quite effectively. He points out that Lewis loves it when SBF does Zoom meetings while playing video games, as if that’s a sign of his genius, but Evans points out that everybody in Gen Z does that, and Lewis just didn’t know any young people.

So this movie was the perfect movie for “the year that everybody turned on Michael Lewis.” The Big Short is great, but everybody who sees it should be forced to watch this right after.