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The Drunken Odyssey

~ A Podcast About the Writing Life

The Drunken Odyssey

Monthly Archives: December 2016

Episode 240: Irvine Welsh!

31 Saturday Dec 2016

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Craft of Fiction Writing, Episode

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A Decent Ride, Aleksander Hemon, Dublin, Edinburgh, Irvine Welsh, James Joyce, The City as Character, The Making of Zombie Wars, Trainspotting, Ulysses

Episode 240 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.

In this week’s episode, I talk to fiction writer Irvine Welsh about his latest novel, A Decent Ride, Edinburgh as a character, the influence of climate and populace on characterization, and the way to balance outrageous plot twists with earnestness, too.

TDO Irvine Welsh

Here I am with Irvine Welsh back in 2012.

I also share him reading from A Decent Ride, along with Aleksander Hemon reading from The Making of Zombie Wars.

TEXTS DISCUSSED

a-decent-ride

trainspotting

Ulyssesthe-making-of-zombie-wars

NOTES

Thanks to Pressure Wave (Jared Silvia) for his song “Two Thousand Six.”

jared-silvia


Episode 240 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.

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The Curator of Schlock #166: Beyond the Poseidon Adventure

30 Friday Dec 2016

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Blog Post, The Curator of Schlock

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Beyond the Poseidon Adventure, Irwin Allen, Michael Caine

The Curator of Schlock #166 by Jeff Shuster

Beyond the Poseidon Adventure

That’s Sir Michael Caine

It’s hard to believe that 2016 is almost over…finally. I wouldn’t say that this year has been as excruciating for me as it has for some because I’ve been reviewing nothing but pre-1980 classic schlock. Still, we’ve had a glaring omission here at the Museum of Schlock. We haven’t reviewed one single Michael Caine movie all year. This just isn’t done. For your reading pleasure, may I present the 1979 Irwin Allen classic, Beyond the Poseidon Adventure.

beyond1

Did The Poseidon Adventure need a sequel? No. Did The Poseidon Adventure need to be made in the first place? No, but it does stand apart by being one of the few New Year’s themed motion picture series, the first taking place on New Year’s Eve, the second on New Year’s Day. And with this cast is stellar: Michael Caine, Sally Field, Telly Savalas, Karl Malden, Shirley Jones, Jack Warden, Peter Boyle, Mark Harmon, and Slim Pickens! Holy cow! In case you were wondering, Slim Pickens plays a Poseidon waiter who’s pretending to be a Texas oil tycoon. Heaven help me.

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Michael Caine plays Captain Mike Turner, a down on his luck tugboat captain who happens upon the S.S. Poseidon with crewmates Wilbur Hubbard (Karl Malden) and Celeste Whitman (Sally Field). Turner figures there must be bags of money in that ship and claims salvage rights. Is that a thing? It sounds an awful lot like stealing to me. That makes Turner a pirate as far as I‘m concerned. Aaaarrrgh! That’s my imitation of a pirate. Pretty sweet, huh?

beyond3

A fancy yacht pulls up next to the upside-down wreckage of the S.S. Poseiden. We see none other than Telly Savalas at the helm. He plays Dr. Stefan Svevo, a medical doctor who wants to offer medical assistance to any survivors onboard. Turner doesn’t have a problem with Svevo and his crew saving lives as long as they keep their hands off the cash. Below deck, they run into to that same fiery pit of boiling water that the last movie ended with. This reminds me of when Nintendo made Super Luigi Bros., a version of Super Mario Bros. that’s played in reverse. I half expected them to find the boiled corpse of Gene Hackman.

beyond2

If you like to hear Michael Caine yelling a lot, this is the movie for you. Not since On Deadly Ground have I seen this man so perturbed. They run into some survivors. Peter Boyle’s Frank Mazzetti is particularly obnoxious. He’s always arguing with Turner over which direction to go in, pleads for them to help him find his missing daughter who he’s sure is still alive.

beyond5

Turner finds the safe with thousands of gold coins and precious diamonds. The bank won’t be repossessing his tugboat now! If only he can get off the ship with the treasure. This may be difficult. Dr. Svevo is actually a super villain who wants to steal a plutonium cache from the S.S. Poseidon in order to build a nuclear bomb.

Yup.

That’s the plot.

Happy New Year!

_______

Jeffrey Shuster 3
Jeffrey Shuster (episode 47, episode 102, episode 124, and episode 131) is an MFA graduate from the University of Central Florida.

Episode 239: Rita Dove and Robert Pinsky!

24 Saturday Dec 2016

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Episode, Poetry

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Episode 239 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.

In this week’s episode, I talk to the poets Rita Dove and Robert Pinsky, and share the reading they gave together at Miami Book Fair International.

rita-dove-mbfi

robert-pinsky

rita-dove-robert-pinsky-mbfi

TEXTS DISCUSSED

collected-poems-dove

at-the-foundling-hotel

NOTES

Listen to my previous interview with Robert Pinsky here.


Episode 239 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.

The Curator of Schlock #165: Silent Night, Bloody Night

23 Friday Dec 2016

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Horror, The Curator of Schlock

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Silent Night Bloody Night

The Curator of Schlock #165 by Jeff Shuster

Silent Night, Bloody Night

It ain’t exactly silent when people are screaming as they’re hacked to pieces!

Merry Christmas everybody! We’re almost through 2016! 2017 has to be luckier. It has a 7 in it. 7 is a good number. Lucky 7. Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. 7-Up. Cherry 7-Up. 7 Golden Vampires! It two weeks, I’ll be reviewing a movie from 2016, one that’s supposed to tap into 1980s nostalgia. If it succeeds, my ban on post-1979 movies will end. If I watch another Pixels, though…

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Tonight’s movie is another Yuletide favorite, Silent Night, Bloody Night. And I don’t want hear any complaints about my choice of a Christmas movie. Not all Christmases are merry and bright. Some Christmases end with people getting murdered! MURDERED! That’s reality!

Sigh.

bloody3

This is not a good movie.

Okay. Silent Night, Bloody Night starts out with a man named Wilfred Butler burning to death. Yeah, he accidentally set himself on fire or someone set him on fire. So he’s running around on fire right outside his palatial estate.  The ground is covered with snow. Ummmm. Why doesn’t he just stop, drop and roll? There’s snow everywhere! He could put that fire out in jiffy. Instead, he just dies. Spooky!

Fast-forward about twenty years. The Butler estate is up for sale. A man named John Carter (Patrick O’Neal) is trying to sell the house to some prominent citizens like the mayor and the sheriff. The buyer wants $50,000 in cash for the house to be delivered to Mr. Carter the following morning. I think the mayor decides to buy the house or they pitch in as a group. They offer to put him up in a hotel, but John insists on staying in the Butler house overnight. Oh, and John has a beautiful assistant with him named Ingrid (Astrid Heeren). John is a happily married man, but that isn’t stopping him from having an affair with Ingrid.

I guess Patrick O’Neal is the major star of this motion picture. I have to confess that I had never heard of the man until I watched this movie. It seems he got much critical praise for starring in the original Broadway run of Tennessee Williams’ The Night of the Iguana. He also starred in The Way We Were, a film your curator of schlock has never seen due to religious reasons.

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 Oh, there’s also an escaped lunatic on the loose. We don’t see what the lunatic looks like, only his or her point of view. It’s a mystery waiting to be solved!

The lunatic stabs a dog to death. Not cool.

bloody2

Later, the lunatic hides out in the Butler mansion, waiting for some fresh victims. The lunatic hacks up John and Ingrid with an axe while they’re having sex in the master bedroom. It’s pretty gross. The lunatic hacks up John and Ingrid with an axe. Do you know what’s really depressing? John’s last meal was a bologna sandwich from the local delicatesse.

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More twists and turns ensue.

John Carradine shows up in some point.

That’s all I have to say. The movie is available on Amazon Prime. So is Scout’s Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse. I could have been watching that!

_______

Jeffrey Shuster 3

Jeffrey Shuster (episode 47, episode 102, episode 124, and episode 131) is an MFA graduate from the University of Central Florida.

Pensive Prowler #2: Death Takes a Holiday

19 Monday Dec 2016

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Pensive Prowler

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David Bowie, Dmetri Kakmi, Leonard Cohen, Mildred Pierce, Pete Burns, Prince, Steve Strange, The Tempest, William Shakespeare

Pensive Prowler #2 by Dmetri Kakmi

Death Takes a Holiday

Take death for instance. It’s pretty final. Six feet under or a crematorium. Food for worms or grey ash, scattered to the winds. There’s no coming back from that. Though some threaten to return and eat brains, none have actually kept their promise. We’re still waiting.

In Australia there’s a death every three minutes and twenty seconds, and a birth every one minute and forty-four seconds. I’m not clever enough to do the math, but even I know that’s a lot of coming and going, given there’s 8760 hours in a year. Life, it seems, is a conveyor belt, shunting some on and others off. Babies come out of the great unknown and the infirm fall into a greater abyss, never to be seen or heard of again. Unless of course they had the good fortune to be caught on film or a sound recording; and even then it’s like encountering a phantom in the dark.

That’s how I felt the other night while watching Joan Crawford in Mildred Pierce. Most if not all the cast and crew that took part in the making of the spectacle are gone. They do not exist any more. Yet there they are, on the TV screen, shooting each other, making love and wearing huge shoulder pads. Though not always at the same time.

Mildred1

The wonder of it is they seem so vital and alive, as if nothing can touch them. The truth is they’re ghost caught in a loop, saying the same things and repeating the same actions for all time. A kind of purgatory ensnares them and won’t let go. And yet what pleasure they give us, these slaves to fantasies and entertainment.

You will agree that some days it seems the good depart and the arseholes remain.

In that regard, 2016 has been an annus horribilis. (That’s not an unsightly anus, by the way. It’s Latin for “horrible year”.) Surely it’s no coincidence that many luminaries died the same year Tramp and Melanoma moved their collective baggage into Casa Rococo, as the White House will be known hence forth. Here’s a list of the dead: George Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Tony Abbott, Pauline Hanson, Robert Mugabe, Reccep Tayip Erdogan, Gina Rinehart, Rupert Murdoch—

Oops, sorry, that’s my wish list. Silly me.

Here’s the real list: David Bowie, Prince, Leonard Cohen, Harper Lee, Mohammad Ali, Alan Rickman, Steve Strange, Pete Burns. Gone. And they’re just some of my favourites, the tip of a fathomless iceberg.

These individuals may be gone but they’re not forgotten. In death they are transfigured and become more than the sum total of themselves. Not in some icky religious way but in a purely earthly, organic fashion, turned from one thing to another.

When Prince died, for instance, I was so shocked I could barely speak. Yet when I pulled myself together, I thought no, he has turned into something else. The dust of his bones will one day push up dwarf iris and anemone, jacaranda and wisteria; his atoms will disperse and fall to earth in a purple rain one fine spring morning. That’s how it is with people who contribute to the betterment of humanity in one way or another.

David Bowie's The Next Day

When a famous person we admire dies we are shocked and astounded. It’s hard to believe it could happen. In the deepest, irrational part of our being we think that fame and talent confer immortality. Nothing could be further from the truth. Like everybody else, the luminary’s presence on earth is fugitive. They are comets shooting bright across the firmament and burning themselves out in the blink of the cosmic eye. The thing that gives me hope is that they leave behind an essence, a resplendent effulgence that permeates our being and lights up the world long after they are gone. Their transfigurement, should we be open to it, transforms us. And in the process we all leave the world a slightly better place than we found it. The same can’t be said about those who make it their mission to spread cretinism as if it’s going out of fashion.

Ovid devoted an entire book to the power of Metamorphoses. It’s still one of the great dark fantasy works.

But I believe Shakespeare’s sprite Ariel says it best when she sings,

Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes;
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.

 

_______

dmetri-kakmi

Dmetri Kakmi (Episode 158) is a writer and editor based in Melbourne, Australia. The memoir Mother Land was shortlisted for the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards in Australia; and is published in England and Turkey. His essays and short stories appear in anthologies and journals. You can find out more about him here.

The Rogue’s Guide to Shakespeare on Film #44: Henry IV, Part 1 (2012)

18 Sunday Dec 2016

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Shakespeare, The Rogue's Guide to Shakespeare on Film

≈ 1 Comment

Rogues Guide to Shakes on Film

44. Richard Eyre’s Henry IV, Part 1 (2012)

There is no Richard II in episode two of The Hollow Crown, so already there was good reason to hope.

Episode two presents Henry IV, Part 1.

The title role is played not by Rory Kinnear, who performed the role admirably in Richard II, but instead by Jeremy Irons.

henry-iv-2

I presume this change was to simulate the jump in years the series takes. What is lost is that sense, right out of the gate, that the series lacks the continuity it was hoping to foster by coordinating its efforts like a Peter Jackson epic, or something out of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. But then what one gains is Jeremy Irons.

Just as Julius Caesar isn’t mostly about Caesar, though, Henry IV Part 1 and 2 have two other major roles: Prince Harry, played by Tom Hiddleston (speaking of the Marvel Cinematic Universe), and Sir John Falstaff, played by Simon Russell Beale.

henry-iv-9

The producers of The Hollow Crown might be forgiven over the string of episodes for naming this program the way they did.

Indeed, Richard II was an intolerable bit of hand-wringing about the fallibility of the supposedly divine right of kings. Part of what made that film hard to watch is that we, or Americans in a post-Nixon world anyway, have no such illusions about our leaders.

But Henry IV and Harry and Falstaff approach the ideals of nobility and one’s faith in these ideas more complexly. Henry, who ascended the throne in a coup over Richard II, cannot have the same hubris that Richard had about his nobility, which means that he can have no clear assurances at all about ruling England. If not from God, his mandate appears from nowhere in particular.

For the middle ages, this would have been radical.

Prince Henry intuited this problem, and therefore cultivated a reputation as a bad boy of privilege who slummed around with common drunkards and minor criminals rather than perform the customary duties of a prince at court.

While Hal (the prince’s nickname) seems to enjoy this misadventures, nevertheless, he is doing them to craft a political narrative by which he will seem noble not by the accident of his birth, but by contrast to his previous rough behavior.

Great Performances: The Hollow Crown - Henry IV Part One

His best friend in these scrapes is Falstaff, a knight whose title likely has its provenance in his own imagination. Like all the vices rolled into one fat, proud package, Sir John is like the presiding king of the bar scene.

henry-iv-10

One of my articles of faith in Shakespeare is that a good production can be understood by any English speaker on a first viewing. That might not be completely true in this case.

The plot of Henry IV Part 1 might get the viewer into the weeds in a hurry. Henry is dealing with political conflicts at home, with skirmishes in Scotland and Wales that leaves him arguing with the Percy family, who helped him rise to the throne over Richard.

The Percies are bitterly disappointed that the king does not (1) remember their service to him and (2) treat them with the loyalty they feel they deserve. Henry is frustrated that his command as king could seem so contingent to such angry, rebellious subjects—even though it was he himself who undermined the divine right of kings.

What makes this all the more frustrating to him is that young Henry Percy—whose nickname is Hotspur—shows so many noble and fierce qualities as a nobleman and soldier and leader, while his own son, Harry, is a dissipated, boozy lout.

Henry IV switches between the English court, the tavern, and the activities of the Percies. If one can follow the plot, and reading just as much summary as I have provided might accomplish that, then this film takes what has always seemed to me to be an uneven ramble of a play and makes it compelling.

Simon Russell Beale is considered the finest Shakespearean actor of his generation, yet has seldom had good opportunities to show this off in film. (Branagh made him the second gravedigger, rather than the first, in Hamlet.) In Falstaff, he was performing what was one of Shakespeare’s most beloved creations in his day.

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What is so remarkable is that he did not play Falstaff in comically broad terms, and while I wasn’t certain about this choice the first time I saw the film, the performance grows upon me with each viewing. There is a pathos to his sir John that shows the character to have a self-awareness about his own untenable situation, which makes his entry into the war with the Percies that much more poignant.

henry-iv-8

As Hal, Tom Hiddleston’s smile, that angular, restless grin, seems to be the key to the intelligence of his performance. That and his willingness to be sweaty and greasy.

Hotspur, played by Joe Armstrong, shows himself to be a worthy adversary, somehow sounding uncouth, yet shrewd in his Scottish accent. The biggest surprise with the Percy plot, however, is how well Michelle Dockery transforms Lady Percy’s protestations about her husband’s plans from potentially mealy-mouthed feminine whining to a wife’s tough, keen assertion of being half of the pairing her marriage has made her.

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We see real love between these two strong personalities, and that raises the dramatic stakes. Instead of a two-dimensional villain, Percy is a likable and bold human being who will die for his extended family, even if he does not get along with them.

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Jeremy Irons plays the king largely through breathing, and through his attempts to control not only the volume of his own speech, but others as well. And he plays the king in Part 1 as troubled by medical ailments—perhaps it is consumption, or heart palpitations, or both or more.

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Irons does not overplay this melodramatic tic, and instead uses it to infuse the outcome of the battle with more complex emotions other than mere, bland triumph.


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John King (Episode, well, all of them) holds a PhD in English from Purdue University, and an MFA from New York University. He has reviewed performances for Shakespeare Bulletin.

Episode 238: Sarah Sweeney!

17 Saturday Dec 2016

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Creative Nonfiction, Episode, Memoir, Poetry

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Barrelhouse Books, Mike Ingram, Sarah Sweeney, Tell me If You're Lying

Episode 238 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.

In this week’s episode, I talk to the essayist Sarah Sweeney about her debut collection, Tell Me If You’re Lying, the impediments and the value the academy can be to writing, and the essential relevance of poetry to the prose arts.

sarah-sweeney-headshot

TEXTS DISCUSSED

tell-me-if-youre-lying

with-or-without-youNOTE

Read Sarah Sweeney’s essay about cat-fishing musicians here.


Episode 238 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.

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The Rogue’s Guide to Shakespeare on Film #43: Richard II (2012)

11 Sunday Dec 2016

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Shakespeare, The Rogue's Guide to Shakespeare on Film

≈ 6 Comments

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Ben Whishaw, Clémence Poésy, Patrick Stewart, Rupert Goold, The Hollow Crown

Rogues Guide to Shakes on Film

43. Rupert Goold’s Richard II (2012)

Dear readers, your indulgent rogue sometimes has a difficult time out of doors during those times when he is recognized as such a keen evaluator of the films made from Shakespeare. “Will you review this film?” they yip, and “Will you review that film?” they yap. I can’t stick my head inside Trader Joe’s or Publix or Walt Disney World without people keeping me from my business. I am happy to be your Sherpa through the blessed and damned efforts of filmmakers with the bard, but it isn’t always easy. I have taken to wearing disguises.

The truth is that any film having any pretense to having to do with Shakespeare I do intend to seek out.

Except for the BBC’s Shakespeare Collection, filmed in television studios from 1978 to 1985. This is the most ambitious filmic attempt at Shakespeare, in that every one of Shakespeare’s plays was attempted. Every one of them is un-fucking-watchable despite having so many ideal acts of casting. In the opening fight scene of Romeo and Juliet, Alan Rickman didn’t stumble upon his mark the way he was supposed to after being shoved, so he fake-stumbled a few feet more to land upon his mark. Anthony Hopkins and Bob Hoskins played Othello and Iago, respectively, and the performances are wasted.

othello

John Cleese as Petruchio is boring. (To have Richard Burton in one’s memory also makes this performance difficult to suffer, despite Cleese being a wonderful actor, not just in comic roles.) The sense of all of these productions is that they were cheaply and hastily made, and the talented actors could not rescue the doomed, made-for-television aesthetic of the whole horrible lot. They lack the integrity of Strange Brew.

In 2012, The BBC perhaps tried to atone for its shameful ruination of all of Shakespeare’s plays by filming, much more cinematically, four of Shakespeare’s history plays that tell a concurrent story: Richard II, Henry IV Part 1, Henry IV Part 2, and Henry V. They called this series The Hollow Crown, after one of Richard II’s speeches that is worth quoting at length:

No matter where; of comfort no man speak:

Let’s talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs;

Make dust our paper and with rainy eyes

Write sorrow on the bosom of the earth,

Let’s choose executors and talk of wills:

And yet not so, for what can we bequeath

Save our deposed bodies to the ground?

Our lands, our lives and all are Bolingbroke’s,

And nothing can we call our own but death

And that small model of the barren earth

Which serves as paste and cover to our bones.

For God’s sake, let us sit upon the ground

And tell sad stories of the death of kings;

How some have been deposed; some slain in war,

Some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed;

Some poison’d by their wives: some sleeping kill’d;

All murder’d: for within the hollow crown

That rounds the mortal temples of a king

Keeps Death his court and there the antic sits,

Scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp,

Allowing him a breath, a little scene,

To monarchize, be fear’d and kill with looks,

Infusing him with self and vain conceit,

As if this flesh which walls about our life,

Were brass impregnable, and humour’d thus

Comes at the last and with a little pin

Bores through his castle wall, and farewell king!

Cover your heads and mock not flesh and blood

With solemn reverence: throw away respect,

Tradition, form and ceremonious duty,

For you have but mistook me all this while:

I live with bread like you, feel want,

Taste grief, need friends: subjected thus,

How can you say to me, I am a king?

The four plays in The Hollow Crown, season 1, chronicle the existential problems of politics and the idea of nobility in terms of social class. Such a run of narratives could be of great use to us Americans now, in an America whose political reality seems beyond our grasp. The Hollow Crown has authentic locations that are grandly cinematic in scope, and there is not a single actor who seems ill-prepared. A perk of running concurrent productions is that the recurring characters can be played by the same tremendous actors and locations can be meaningfully re-used, giving each play continuity with the other plays. These movies automatically vault over the horrors of The Shakespeare Collection.

But.

Richard II is difficult for me to like.

To be specific, this version of Richard II leaves me no character to root for, when good productions might make me root for every character.

richard-ii

Richard II is a meditation on the idea of nobility and the divine right of kings. Or maybe it is a grotesque rutting around in such themes.

Richard seems to take pride in being a cruel king while posturing himself as Christ incarnate. Ben Whishaw (who plays Q in the most recent James Bond films) micromanages a painter at work on a martyr portrait. And when he decides to banish Henry Bolingbroke and Thomas Mowbray, for their hubris in insisting upon their conflicting honors, he can barely pay attention to them while feeding his monkey.

The monkey, incidentally, is very cute. He is truly the most likeable character.

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Patrick Stewart plays John of Gaunt, and it is a joy to hear him recite Shakespeare.

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If I have to pick on any actors in this film, I can’t find it in me to do so.

Adam Cork’s music is fine.

The settings are perfect.

So why can’t I like this?

One problem is that the series is named for a phrase from Richard’s speech of despair, when he realizes that being king will not save or protect him anymore. And the speech is used as an voice-over to begin the film, in case we didn’t get the theme, and then appears later at the normal place in the play.

If Richard would have seemed more complex, he might seem like a wonderful trickster character whose morality would be really interesting: testing the culture of English nobility from the vantage point of someone who is beyond the reach of those he is testing, unless they wish to forgo their own convictions about nobility.

But this Richard seems too self-absorbed, too simpering, and only takes an interest in others for the sake of cruelty. Ben Whishaw’s voice is a wonderful match to Shakespeare’s language, but his take on the role is unbearable.

Clémence Poésy, as Queen Isabella, is the emotional center of this story, in that she manages to convey an awareness of the stakes before things have gone fully wrong. She has, unlike most of these characters in this film, an emotional IQ.

richard-ii-6

She doesn’t have a lot of scenes.

And the monkey is very cute.

photo: Nick briggs

And Richard complains rather a lot. Ug.

_______

1flip

John King (Episode, well, all of them) holds a PhD in English from Purdue University, and an MFA from New York University. He has reviewed performances for Shakespeare Bulletin.

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Episode 237: Glendaliz Camacho!

10 Saturday Dec 2016

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Craft of Fiction Writing, Episode

≈ 1 Comment

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Glendaliz Camacho, Washington Heights

Episode 237 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.

In this week’s episode, I talk to fiction writer Glendaliz Camacho near the end of her residency at the Kerouac House in Orlando.

glendaliz-camacho

Photo by Linda Nieves-Powell

 

NOTES

Check out Glendaliz’s work:

  • Pigeons (short story)
  • Full Battle Rattle (personal essay)
  • Dominoes (short story)

Reinaldo Arenas’s story “The Glass Tower” appears in Mona and Other Tales

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The Curator of Schlock #164: Black Christmas

09 Friday Dec 2016

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Christmas, The Curator of Schlock

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The Curator of Schlock #164 by Jeff Shuster

Black Christmas

Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill!

Did you know that the English used to tell ghost stories around Christmas time?

No?

Neither did I.

Apparently, this was a thing back in Victorian England. As a proud American, I feel a bit funny about this. In fact, I kind of put a moratorium around this sort of thing around Christmas time. This is supposed to be the feel good season. May our days be merry and bright and all that? Still, our illustrious editor John King pleaded with your curator to supply some Christmas horror movies this year. The post 1980 ban limits my choices, but there is one that’s been on the back burner for a while now: Black Christmas.

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Some of you out there don’t like slasher movies, and that’s okay. Some of you out there don’t like horror movies, and that’s okay. Some of you out there would be rude to a middle-aged hostess at an Italian restaurant run by Rocky Balboa, and that’s–no! Nope. That’s not okay. Rocky will give you a talking to. Where was I?

Black Christmas.

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Black Christmas is a 1974 slasher movie from director Bob Clark, famous for such horror movies as Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things and Dead of Night. It stars Margot Kidder and John Saxon. Margot Kidder guest starred on Smallville. John Saxon did not. He needs to have serious talk with his agent. Yes, I’m talking about Smallville again! When you waste ten years of your life waiting for Clark Kent to put the damn suit on, your regrets are many.

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Olivia Hussey also stars in Black Christmas. She played Juliet in Franco Zeffirelli’s adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. We had to watch that one back in my freshman English class. The boys from the first period English class had informed me that I’d be seeing Juliet’s bare breasts and Romeo’s bare butt. I seem to recall a conversation that’s too crude to mention here. Speaking of too crude, Black Christmas starts out with a sorority receiving obscene phone calls from a deranged man talking about his private parts and what he’d like members of the sorority to do to his private parts. The mysterious caller also goes on about his tongue and what he plans to do with it. A member of the sorority named Barbara Courd (Margot Kidder) tells him off. He says that he will kill her.

black_4

 It turns out the guy is living in the attic of the sorority house. No one notices he’s there until he’s about to murder them. Like their lush of housemother, Mrs. Mac. She has bottles of whiskey hidden all over the house, even in the toilet tank. When one of the sorority girls goes missing, the police mount a search and rescue to no avail. The police finally get around to tracing where the obscene phone calls are coming from and, brace yourself, they’re coming from inside the house!

black_2

By the way, it would seem that Bob Clark directed another Christmas classic: A Christmas Story, based on the book by Jean Shepherd. I know TNT runs those A Christmas Story marathons each Christmas. They should switch out Black Christmas for A Christmas Story this year, mix things up a bit. We should start a petition.

_______

Jeffrey Shuster 1

Photo by Leslie Salas

Jeffrey Shuster (episode 47, episode 102, episode 124, and episode 131) is an MFA graduate from the University of Central Florida.

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