{"id":344,"date":"2015-10-16T06:48:18","date_gmt":"2015-10-16T06:48:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.homeschoolmommoviemavin.com\/?p=344"},"modified":"2015-10-16T06:54:29","modified_gmt":"2015-10-16T06:54:29","slug":"smaug-does-shakespeare","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.homeschoolmommoviemavin.com\/index.php\/2015\/10\/16\/smaug-does-shakespeare\/","title":{"rendered":"Smaug Does Shakespeare???"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Hamlet<\/a>Absolutely not!!!!!<\/p>\n

In 1982 there was a movie called My Favorite Year<\/em> about a fictious appearance by Errol Flynn in the shank of his career appearing on the Sid Caeser variety show. Only Errol Flynn, in the movie, was called Alan Swann and was played hilariously by Peter O’Toole. And the Sid Caeser show was called King Kaiser. At one point in the movie Swann is called upon to perform before a live audience.\u00a0Understanding his own thespian limits he panics, bellowing:\"My<\/a> “I’m not an actor, I’m a movie star!!!!”<\/p>\n

In the Hamlet<\/em> we saw with Mr Cumberbatch, about the time our depressed aristocrat delivered his iconic “to be or not to be” speech my husband turned to me and uttered his ultimate complement about a performer: “He’s an actor, not\u00a0a movie star”.<\/p>\n

I’ve seen a lot of Shakespeare. I’ve always been fond of it but started to take it seriously when our homeschooled children were quite young. I remember taking my then two oldest at 6 and 8 in 1996 to the 4 HOUR Kenneth Branagh uncut, unabridged, unaltered version of Hamlet\u00a0<\/em>at the movie theater.\"Branagh\"<\/a>\u00a0In preparation we had read over some of the key speeches with them. But, sensibly, I brought backpacks for each of them including: snacks, crayons, a coloring book and a small flashlight so if they got really bored we could forestall an early departure as long as we could. They never even unzipped the bags. At intermission, 2 hours in, right after his “fight for a plot [of earth]…which is not tomb enough and continent to hide the slain” speech I turned to each and asked if they understood what was going on. They each gave a wide eyed and excited version of the plot: that Hamlet’s uncle had killed his father and now Hamlet was REALLY mad. And they couldn’t WAIT to find out what happened next. Well, it shouldn’t have come as a surprise to me. Shakespeare, as I\u00a0explain to anyone who will hold still long enough, was the Steven Spielberg of his time. Playing to large audiences of\u00a0the common man,\u00a0he understood the need to entertain in an accessible way. But Shakespeare also\u00a0respected the average person’s\u00a0ability to understand a heightened language which afforded a verbal pallet\u00a04 times richer than that used by\u00a0other of even the most educated and talented writers of\u00a0his time. No – literally. He used a vocabulary of 17,000 words – 4 TIMES that of the educated of his peers. He INVENTED 1,700 words!!! in that he was the first one to use them, changing nouns into verbs and verbs into adjectives, accessing and plumbing the depths of the Latin language which was competing with the relatively new English one at the time, to invent new ways to say things: metamorphize, equivocal, fashionable, hurried, obsequiously, ode and varied\u00a0being only a few of his gifts to the future Messeurs Merriam and Webster as well as the learned at Oxford and Cambridge.<\/p>\n

I LOVE Shakespeare. And I’ve seen, to date, Hamlet<\/em> played by a range from brilliant to terrible by:\u00a0Ethan Hawke, Mel Gibson, Derek Jacobi, Kevin Kline, David Tennet, Lawrence Olivier, Nicol Williamson (only part of this one – it was pretty bad) and the BEST: Kenneth Branagh. Plus I have seen reduced, condensed and spoofed Hamlet<\/em>s. This one with Cumberbatch was innovative, fresh, dark, and clever. \"Hamlet<\/a>\"Hamlet<\/a>\"Hamlet<\/a>Cumberbatch was amazing bringing new insight into the character just when I thought I was able to get all I could out of it (referring to my limited analytic talents, not a limit on the facets of the character). \"Hamlet<\/a>He managed to show me another variation, another explanation of the foundational reasons for Hamlet’s makeup by word and gesture of which I had never thought. And, while using all the original language (though with some rearrangement of scenes and some cropping of dialogue — I mean, it IS a VERY long play) Cumberbatch makes you believe you have never heard these words spoken quite this way before.<\/p>\n

\"Hamlet<\/a>This Hamlet<\/em>\u00a0is an ill-fated\u00a0man in a prolonged adolescence,\"Hamlet<\/a> internalizing and mentalizing all the righteous anger which should have spilled over into action, tragically prolonging intervention and responsibility until it is far too late. The analogy to the modern self-indulgent, overly spoiled, responsibility and moral dodging\u00a0Baby Boomers, Gen X\u00a0and\u00a0Gen Y -ers\u00a0are painfully, honestly, bravely and deservedly tweaked.<\/p>\n

At one point Hamlet<\/em> bemoans the challenge his life now requires he overcome and laments: “Oh cursed spite that ever I was born to set it right.” Well Cumberbatch was indeed born to set this role right, in one of the two most gripping versions of Hamlet<\/em> I have ever seen.\"Hamlet<\/a><\/p>\n

Hopefully it will be out on DVD soon. Keep and eye on National Theater.org<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Absolutely not!!!!! In 1982 there was a movie called My Favorite Year about a fictious appearance by Errol Flynn in the shank of his career appearing on the Sid Caeser variety show. Only Errol Flynn, in the movie, was called Alan Swann and was played hilariously by Peter O’Toole. And the Sid Caeser show was … Continue reading Smaug Does Shakespeare???<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-344","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6mhKV-5y","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.homeschoolmommoviemavin.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/344","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.homeschoolmommoviemavin.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.homeschoolmommoviemavin.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.homeschoolmommoviemavin.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.homeschoolmommoviemavin.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=344"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.homeschoolmommoviemavin.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/344\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":377,"href":"https:\/\/www.homeschoolmommoviemavin.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/344\/revisions\/377"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.homeschoolmommoviemavin.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=344"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.homeschoolmommoviemavin.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=344"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.homeschoolmommoviemavin.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=344"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}