Month: March 2020

Shakespeare in Film – Part 5 – Hamlet – Olivier’s 1948 Version

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Olivier won the Academy Award for Best Picture and directed himself to the Best Actor award too.  That is still a unique circumstance.  Despite this acclaim purists condemned the excisions that Olivier made to the plot eliminating the sub-plots involving Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, and Fortinbras.  This shaved an hour and half from its length and concentrates the play into a personality study.

Despite Olivier’s modifications it remains a very formal telling of the tale from the aspect of the acting.  Olivier spent a number of years in London’s Old Vic Theatre Company performing Shakespeare’s plays with the greatest living British actors of his generation.  Comparing his portrayal with an American version such as Mel Gibson’s excellent 1990 version defines the two schools of acting.  The American method acting version requires the actor to submerge himself into the personality he “discovers” for the character.  He feels the part.  The British actor learns the techniques needed to portray the character and emotions he desires to project to the audience.  Olivier himself once described a circumstance that highlighted this difference.  During the making of the film Marathon Man his co-star Dustin Hoffman tortured himself with various discomforts to help him feel the part of a man exhausted and at the end of his strength.  When Hoffman noticed that Olivier was sitting comfortably in anticipation of his scenes Hoffman asked him how he could get into his part without some physical method.  Olivier was said to have answered, “Dear boy, it’s called acting.”

So, all that said.  I consider this the best version I’ve seen.  The dialog, the acting, the staging, all excel the other two versions I’ve seen.  The story flows and the characters live in front of us in a way that often escapes other performances of Shakespeare’s plays.  Every little phrase and movement works the way it should.  Olivier is a craftsman walking us through his weird world of pain and revenge.  The lines are alive and sound like dialog and not museum exhibits.  They fit perfectly with the action that attends them.  They are poetry and human speech both.

And I actually have no complaints with any of the actors.  All were skilled and none fell short that I can remember.  That is not a small thing.

And despite the formal theater there are naturalistic touches that work well.  My favorite is the gravedigger.  When Hamlet comes upon him he fits completely with what you would expect of a son of the soil.  He is contrary and defers not at all to the high-born questioning of his Lord and better.  He is witty and authoritative in his knowledge of graveyard ecology.  Another technical advantage of this version is the dagger and rapier duel in the final scene.  Olivier and Terence Morgan who plays Laertes do an impressive job of simulating a sword fight.  No special effects either.

My advice to anyone coming to Hamlet for the first time, watch this version first.  Measure the other ones by it.  It will actually make the others easier to understand and thereby improve them.  Olivier is truly a master at his work.

Star Trek – The Original Series – Complete Series Review – Season 1 Episode 22 – Space Seed

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I have previously reviewed this episode as part of ShatnerKahn I.  But I think it is desirable to provide a standard treatment for all the Star Trek episodes so I will follow the usual procedure here.

The Enterprise encounters a derelict space ship drifting slowly through space and identifies it as an old Earth vessel from the 1990s.  Upon scanning it they find signs of life and board it.  They discover the crew to be in suspended animation.  Upon rescuing the leader from his sleep they discover that the crew are eugenically produced supermen who were forced to flee Earth after their dictatorships were overthrown.

Their Leader Khan Noonien Singh, played by the inimitable Ricardo Montalban, dissembles his intentions and seduces crewmember Lt. Marla Mcgivers into assisting him in capturing the Enterprise in order to aid his people in finding and conquering an Earth colony for their new home.  The supermen quickly overwhelm the crew and Khan puts Kirk in a vacuum chamber and threatens to suffocate him if one of the crew does not assist him in his plan.  We get a view of Kirk gasping like an out of water goldfish which will earn this episode a very healthy Shatner mockery score.  But McGivers repents of her mutiny and saves Kirk from the death trap.  With the assistance of Mr. Spock Kirk is able to use knockout gas to subdue the mutineers.  But Khan escapes to the engine room and is causing an engine overload that would destroy the whole ship when Kirk arrives for their showdown.  Khan starts by prying Kirk’s phaser out of his hand and then bending it into a curve with his bare hands.  And here Khan makes his famous taunt.  He says, “Captain, I have five times your strength!” in his unique Ricardo Montalban enunciation.  Khan proceeds to toss Kirk around the engine room like a rag doll while Kirk attempts some pretty rudimentary martial arts moves.  I’m not 100% sure but I believe there was a stunt double for Shatner in some of the acrobatics.  But naturally Kirk fights dirty.  He grabs a metal rod and starts hammering Khan in the head and back until he passes out.

In the final scene Kirk convenes a court and dismisses all charges against the supermen if they will agree to exile on a deserted and inhospitable planet.  When asked if he accepts the offer Khan asks Kirk if he knows his Milton.  Kirk nods in understanding.  Then Kirk gives Mcgivers a choice; go into exile with Khan or stand trial for mutiny.  She eagerly accepts exile.

Scotty pleads shameful ignorance as a Scot for not knowing the Milton reference and Kirk explains that in Paradise Lost, Lucifer declares that he would rather reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.  The show ends up with Spock and Kirk wondering what they would find if they were able to come back in a hundred years and see what fruit had grown “from the seed” they were now sowing.

This is one of the quintessential Star Trek episodes.  Kirk is out macho-ed by Khan.  Spock gets to act appalled by the humans’ clear admiration for Khan’s obviously authoritarian methods, to which charge Kirk admits and explains humans have a primitive streak that allows them to admire an enemy for his strength.  In these days of #metoo Khan would never be allowed to rough up McGivers as he does to dominate her into helping him.  Of course, he also plays with her hair quite a bit so he is a romantic too.  One of the ludicrous things about the episode is Kirk giving Khan access to the ship technical manuals.  These allow Khan to capture the ship.  I mean come on!  What part of superman is hard to understand?  Couldn’t he have just given him a game of free-cell to keep him from getting bored?

Kirk’s fight with Khan is also classic.  His shirt manages not to get shredded but he has several awkward and lame looking judo holds that helps qualify this episode for a decent Shatner mockery score.  And above all there is Montalban.  He struts and brags and mocks Kirk for being inferior in all ways.  It’s quite entertaining.

Let’s give this a 9 for the episode and a 7 for Shatner mockery.  9  //  7.  Well done Ricardo.

The Age of Entitlement – A Book Review

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Christopher Caldwell’s book, “The Age of Entitlement – America Since the Sixties” is a hard book to read.  As I described in several places it took me much too long to finish because many times I had to stop after about fifteen minutes of reading and put it down.  It was too painful to hear the seemingly endless litany of defeats, betrayals and acts of cowardice by our elected officials and their bureaucratic, academic, legal and corporate co-conspirators.  And yet I think this book should be read by anyone who doesn’t know the full history of how we have been stripped of our constitutional rights based solely on our European ancestry and normal male identity.  It is so infuriating to read, that it serves as the perfect eye-opener for anyone who still thinks that affirmative action and political correctness are harmless and just.

Caldwell walks us through the years, starting with the Civil Rights struggle against segregation in the South and shows the gradual but continual evolution of that movement from a crusade to end discrimination against blacks to a concerted program to discriminate against whites.  He shows how the logic went from successfully ending the unconstitutional denial of equal rights for blacks into implementing the unconstitutional practices of affirmative action, with its abrogation of free speech, freedom of association and property rights based on not equality of opportunity, but rather equality of outcome.  And since these decisions were made by unelected judges who were basically answerable to no one, no recourse was possible.  For every white man the burden of guilt never had to be proved.  It was always assumed.

After this Caldwell walks us through the expansion of the civil rights movement to embrace other “victims.” Next was women with the adoption by the left of abortion on demand and equal rights for women in the work place and the delegitimization of traditional marriage.  After this we get homosexual rights, immigrant rights and on to the explosion of immigration.  Finally, we come to the present day where demonization of European identity and culture is all pervasive.  We reach a point where open contempt for the native-born Americans is open and threatening.  We see these people marginalized and starved out of their homes by industry and government leaders who openly connive to replace them with immigrants legal and illegal.  They end up on welfare and waiting for death under the soporific influence of  cheap and plentiful opioids that have purposefully been allowed to flooded our streets and countryside.

Throughout Caldwell points out how the leaders of the conservative cause are always woefully unprepared or even unwilling to challenge incredibly unpopular programs and laws.  Time after time a leader will run for office on a platform to defend or revive some part of life that the progressives are undermining and again and again, we witness either a defeated attempt or no attempt at all to prevent the destruction of our way of life.

And at the heart of most of these campaigns are the progressive lawyers and judges working hand in glove with the progressives in the bureaucracies and in the non-profit foundations.  These foundations were set up by the elites that use them to push for the programs that they support but do not affect them personally.  Their schools and homes and families are above the level of being disadvantaged or impinged upon by these forces, unlike the common people that they demonize whose lives are thrown into chaos by these anti-social measures.

Equally distressing is seeing how the leaders of industry sided with the progressives in order to gain access to cheap labor by both exporting jobs to the third world and importing these third world workers right here in the United States as either legal or illegal immigrants.  And once the Tech Revolution was in full swing, we are walked through how the American men who dominated this industry adopted the progressive cause and used their new found tools to obliterate the brick and mortar retail landscape of the entire United States.  And with the diminution of newspapers, radio and television as advertising channels, communication companies like Google and Facebook now get to decide who is allowed to do business and who is not.  And they decide it based on whether they like your politics.

So, we reach the present day where any dissent from the official narrative that demonizes white men is not just shouted down but answered with de-platforming, unemployment, physical assault and sometimes criminal prosecution.  And as the book signifies on its last page.  That is what gave us the Trump presidency.

Personally, this book reinforced in my mind the necessity of challenging affirmative action in front of a conservative Supreme Court.  The fig leaf that affirmative action employs to shield its unconstitutional nature is the importance of “diversity.”  But since diversity doesn’t appear in the Constitution, a brave and honest court should strike down all the quota driven fairness devices and strip the Federal and State bureaucracies of their discriminatory mechanisms.  All that needs to be asserted is that equality under the law doesn’t need to provide equal outcomes for every individual.  Some people are smarter or stronger or more hard working or crueler or more beautiful or taller or shorter or luckier.  I can live with those things and believe me there are enough things that I wish I could do that I can’t.  But facing that is called sanity.  And it’s far from a bad thing.

I highly recommend this book.  It’s about time that someone published something as honest and informative on the subject of America’s descent into the maelstrom of social justice insanity.  It’s time that we throw our support behind whichever men are brave enough to lead the fight back to sanity.  And I know it won’t be easy.  As Steve Bannon said “If you think they are going to give you your country back without a fight, you are sadly mistaken.”  He’s right.  They will fight at every step.  If the Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action, the big cities will riot and burn.  Well, that’s nothing new.  But it’s the only way back to a world where fairness and freedom even have their original meanings.

Good work Christopher Caldwell.  You wrote a horrible, urgently important, good book.  Bravo.

Shakespeare in Film – Part 4 – Hamlet – Introduction

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Shakespeare’s strongest plays are the tragedies.  The comedies have their merits and the pure histories have some very engaging characters like Falstaff and Prince Hal.  But the heavy hitters are Macbeth, King Lear, Richard III, Othello, Julius Caesar, Romeo and Juliet and most especially Hamlet.  Even the most ardent fan of the Bard will have scenes and characters that he dislikes even in his favorite play.  In fact, some plays are favorites only because of some especially powerful scene or character.  They are valued despite plot weaknesses or sections of dialogue or characters that disappoint.  And Hamlet is no exception.  I am sure every fan of the play dislikes some aspect of it.  But I will say that overall, the plot and the dialog exceed the other plays in how they engage the audience.  The characters are drawn in a lifelike way.  Even the villain is real.  And in the hands of a skilled cast, the play is fascinating to watch.

The character of Hamlet is famously defined by his indecision.  He has been commanded by his father’s ghost to exact vengeance against his murderer.  What could be more absolute than that?  And yet he vacillates throughout the play and is only goaded into action by his own assassination.  All this is obviously true but the action of the play shows us that this indecision is mostly due to his virtues and not his faults.  He is a noble, loyal, virtuous, intellectual, pious prince.  And all these instincts and talents work against his need to commit justifiable regicide.  His tender love for his mother is an almost insurmountable obstacle to exacting vengeance on her villainous husband.  His sense of justice prevents him from striking down his enemy when he believes that the timing, coming as the murderer is in prayer, would allow his victim’s soul to gain heaven instead of casting him down into hell.  His intellect even forbids him from escaping his problems through suicide.  He reasons through the consequences and arrives at the conclusion that possibly the afterlife might be filled with greater torment still.  He is a man haunted by the wreckage of his family, his life and even his sanity.  Think of what he has endured.  He has spoken with his father’s ghost, a thing more harrowing than any mortal occurrence.  His mother’s husband is his uncle, his father’s murderer and his king all at the same time and he must face him day in and out while his mother displays passionate affection for her husband’s murderer.  In order to dissemble his intentions, he plays at being mad and in doing so he loses the woman he loves.  There is literally no path available to him that doesn’t involve unthinkable crimes and madness.  I suppose indecision might be excused under such circumstances.

But plot aside, it is the language of the play that engages me.  Hamlet is filled with phrases and thoughts that we meet everywhere in cultured discourse:

  • “Brevity is the soul of wit.”
  • “Though this be madness, yet there is method in’t.”
  • “Sweets to the sweet.”
  • “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.”
  • “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.”
  • “Get thee to a nunnery.”
  • “The Play’s the Thing, wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the King.”
  • “Neither a borrower nor a lender be, for loan oft loses both itself and friend, and borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.”
  • “There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
  • “This above all: to thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man.”
  • “What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form, in moving, how express and admirable! In action how like an angel! In apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world! The paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?”
  • “To be, or not to be: that is the question. Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing end them? To die: to sleep; no more; and by a sleep to say we end the heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to, ’tis a consummation devoutly to be wish’d. To die, to sleep; to sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub; for in that sleep of death what dreams may come when we have shuffled off this mortal coil, must give us pause: there’s the respect that makes calamity of so long life; for who would bear the whips and scorns of time, the oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely, the pangs of despised love, the law’s delay, the insolence of office and the spurns that patient merit of the unworthy takes, when he himself might his quietus make with a bare bodkin? Who would fardels bear, to grunt and sweat under a weary life, but that the dread of something after death, the undiscover’d country from whose bourn no traveller returns, puzzles the will and makes us rather bear those ills we have than fly to others that we know not of?  Thus conscience does make cowards of us all; and thus the native hue of resolution is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought, and enterprises of great pith and moment with this regard their currents turn awry, and lose the name of action.”

There is constant word play as Hamlet pretends to be mad and yet makes cunning and cutting mockery of his foes.  All in all, it is an enjoyable two and a half hours (in the shorter versions) of highbrow art that yet could appeal to anyone if he were in the right frame of mind.  I have seen three film versions of the play along with a stage setting.  I’ll go into my particular opinions of those in later installments of this post.

Guest Contributor – War Pig – Coronavirus and Sedition

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Trump is right, yet again. The left, including their slaves the media, are overstating the Coronavirus danger for political gain and to depress the stock market and drop the economy.

Since the beginning the Coronavirus has, according to the WHO and CDC, accounted for some 75 thousand illnesses and 2 thousand deaths. However, the regular influenza, the seasonal flu we vaccinate against every year, has from October 1st through the end of February, caused some 26 MILLION illnesses, a quarter of a million hospitalizations and over 14 THOUSAND deaths in the UNITED STATES ALONE.

Nobody is panicking over the seasonal flu. The selloff of stocks is caused by a manufactured panic NOT BASED IN FACT that the leftist media and politicians have contrived to weaken the Trump economy. Nobody is going bonkers over flu prevention and contagion. Coronavirus so far has about a 5% mortality rate, and that is in China where medical care and sanitation is not up to US or European standards. They are still selling raw monkey and other wild meats in Chinese open markets with no refrigeration, despite commie government orders to the contrary.

The Left Coast, with its masses of homeless defecating and urinating and vomiting and dying in the streets – may have cause for concern to some degree. They have set up a perfect breeding ground for disease and epidemic. I would not put it past the leftist governments to do a Stalin and let the epidemic take hold to kill off the excess homeless population for them. It’s what socialists/communists do. Population control through disease and starvation.

I also believe the left and their pimps in the media are manufacturing fear where there should be none, just to ding the Trump economy in an election year. Screw the economy, ruin it for political gain! Sedition and treason. Turn something which so far has been far less dangerous than a regular US flu season into a panic. Coronavirus mortality rate in China, which does not have the healthcare of the USA, is about 5-6%. US normal flu mortality rate is about 5%, depending on how it is counted, once an American is bad enough to be hospitalized. The vast majority of influenza cases in the US do not require hospitalization.

Why would the supposed “truth seekers” in the mainstream media lie like thieves? Because they are thieves, liars, seditionists, dastards, bastards and pluperfect scoundrels. They are reaping political gain and economic gain over fear mongering. In alliance with the DNC they are spreading false reports of a monstrous pandemic equal to the Spanish flu of the early 20th century. Nothing from the CDC or even the UN-controlled WHO have shown so far that this is the case. So the left and their taint-licking media pimps are flat out lying.

Should we keep an eye on the situation? Of course, and the CDC is doing that as I write. There are a lot of smart folks at the CDC and they have seen it all. Do we need to run around screaming Doom? Hell, no. I just wonder why Fox news is letting the leftist media get away with this without challenge. The CDC and WHO information took me a grand total of fifteen minutes on a fast cable internet connection to find. Surely Fox can do better.

So, yet again, Trump is right and the left is caught lying, although nobody at Fox will point at the emperor of the left and say he has no clothes.

Why? Is Fox going lefty since being bought by Disney?

I remember when the whole thing about W Bush’s military service was an outrage with “documents” to prove it. I took one look at them on the internet and pronounced them to be fakes on the (back then) debate boards I prowled. I know what classified documents and military orders look like and these were all wrong. They looked like someone who had read some spy stories had cobbled them together. Dan Rather doubled down on them and it cost him his career.

This panic over Coronavirus is likewise a manufactured hoax. So why aren’t more people than me yelling about it? Why aren’t careers in jeopardy over it?

How does the new coronavirus compare with the flu?