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The Drunken Odyssey

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The Drunken Odyssey

Tag Archives: Game of Thrones

The Rogue’s Guide to Shakespeare on Film #26: Strange Brew [Hamlet] (1983)

22 Sunday May 2016

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

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Dave Thomas, Elsinore Beer, Game of Thrones, Hamlet, Max Von Sydow, Rick Moranis, Strange Brew, The Force Awakens, The Seventh Seal

Rogues Guide to Shakes on Film

26. Strange Brew [Hamlet] (1983)

Ever since I noticed that Jon Finch, who played the title role in Polanski’s Macbeth, looked like Max Von Sydow, I’ve been suffering from some degree of Sydowmania.

The Seventh Seal

The Swedish actor who played chess with Death in The Seventh Seal has recently lent his gravitas to The Force Awakens and Game of Thrones. He has played Ming the Merciless, Jesus Christ, and one of the incarnations of Bond villain Ernest Stavro Blofeld. He is 87 years old, and a titanic talent.

What shocked me is that he has never actually been in a Shakespeare film, as far as I could remember. Is this possible?

strange brew

Oh, right. He starred in Strange Brew, the zany comedy starring the lowbrow hijinks of two dimwitted Canadian brothers, Bob and Doug McKenzie, whose lives are devoted to the consumption of beer, not that this consumption has any bearing on their general moronitude.

Strange-Brew 1

When Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas transferred these clownish characters from the small screen to the big screen, they decided that these two buffoons could best serve a larger, more epic story than a silly one of their own. At first, Strange Brew seems to be a metacinematic experience about Bob and Doug McKenzie’s failure to produce a Hollywood film. The plot takes a turn, however, when they make a visit to the Elsinore brewery to try and cadge free beer, and find themselves, like Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Gildenstern, in a tragic story of a family broken by betrayal.

Strange Brew 9

Max Von Sydow plays a part that should be familiar to any fan of Hamlet: the mad scientist.

Strange Brew 1

So Elsinore is transferred to a brewery, the way so many modern productions of Shakespeare’s work reinterpret his settings. And the brewery just happens to adjoin a mental institution run by the brewmeister of Elsinore beer.

Strange Brew 2

You know he has to be evil, because, you know, the turtleneck sweater.

Strange Brew 8

Because scientists often practice in separate disciplines of science, such as beer-making and psychiatry, no one was curious when aggression and mind-control experiments were performed involving chemically-treated beer and hockey players.

Strange Brew 6

Okay, so maybe the thread leading our way back to Hamlet happens to be rather slender, but then why have the scene in which Claude cajoles his daughter-in-law Pam (presumably short for Pamlet) for being mean to her mother, Gertrude, and holding on too hard to her grief over her father’s death?

Strange Brew 12CLAUDE

You know, Pamela, I don’t want you to think that your mother and I don’t understand how you feel about losing your father.

GERTRUDE

If it had been ME, you’d have been over it by now.

CLAUDE

It’s easy to wallow in self pity–the hard thing is to go on living….

PAM

Don’t you think it’s a little unusual to get married so soon after the funeral?

I find this moment touching, since Strange Brew follows a classic Marx Brothers plot scheme, which is to say that the clowns subvert the story of straight, serious characters around them, and the existence of these straight plots is merely to provide a comic armature and maybe some eye candy. (I am looking at you, Zeppo Marx.)

Marx BrothersThat the seriousness of the A plot becomes momentarily real and Shakespearean is moving. The implication later on that Pam will be perpetually drugged into an unresponsive state is also an odd touch of bona fide storytelling. (Basic catatonia is what Gertrude wanted for her son, isn’t it?)

Strange Brew 13Dave Thomas and Rick Moranis wrote and directed this movie, and while this appropriation of Hamlet is more of an in-joke than a real engagement with the text, nevertheless, the dynamics between the Elsinore family were thought out carefully. The film would have been more memorable if there was just a little bit more tension between telling a real story and relishing in a comedic romp.

In Shakespearean comedy, the rougher clowns tend to be clearly secondary characters who do threaten to steal the show, but ultimately never quite do.

One of the interesting implications is that in this retelling of Hamlet, Claude is a boob, whereas the truly dangerous person is Polonius. The part, though, is written as boilerplate 1970s TV show villain. Max Von Sydow, nevertheless, seems to have had a good attitude about the work.

Strange Brew 3

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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.

 

Episode 126: A Craft Discussion About Horace’s Ars Poetica, with Vanessa Blakeslee!

16 Sunday Nov 2014

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Craft of Fiction Writing, Episode, Poetry

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

Ars Poetica, Game of Thrones, horace, Shakespeare, The Wild Bunch

Episode 126 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 about Horace’s Ars Poetica with Vanessa Blakeslee,

Vanessa Blakesleeplus Sam Slaughter talks about the ignominious beginning of Two Drunken Writers Brewery.

Photo by Oxley Photography 2014

Photo by Oxley Photography 2014

 NOTES

At 3 P.M., on Tuesday, November 18, the memoirist and novelist Marya Hornbacher will read at the University of Central Florida. Get info here.

Hornbacher event

Book Fair

Repeal Day 2014Congrats to Tiffany Razzano, on the successful launch of Florida Bookstore day!

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Episode 126 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.

In Boozo Veritas #48: What to Drink in Westeros

30 Monday Jun 2014

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Drinking, In Boozo Veritas

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Dansk Mjød Viking Blod, Game of Thrones, George R. R. Martin, Red Light Red Light, Shade of the Evening, Teege Braune, Waiting for New Season of Game of Thrones, What to Drink in Westeros

In Boozo Veritas #48 by Teege Braune

What to Drink in Westeros

It has now been two weeks since the Game of Thrones’ season four finale aired, and if you are anything like me, the long, drawn-out, nearly endless interval before season five has you jonesing for an Ice and Fire fix. Common symptoms of withdrawal from GoT include nervousness, phobia of weddings, the fear that friends and loved ones will die violently without warning, itching, and hallucinations of Peter Dinklage.

What is one to do to assuage the agony? Binge on something like Supernatural just to get that dose of fantasy? No, of course it doesn’t hold up against Game of Thrones. Diehard fans, those with the worst yen, already know what’s going to happen in the next couple seasons as they’ve no doubt read the entirety of George R. R. Martin’s groundbreaking Song of Ice and Fire series. Furthermore, those who have followed Martin for any extended period of time, must be used to waiting by now as a period of over five years went by between the publications of A Feast for Crows and A Dance with Dragons, so what’s the big deal? Why the jittery, anxious impatience?

Untitled 1

Here’s the rub: even the most colorful imagination can’t always hold up against a cast of talented and often very attractive actors, lush sets and costumes, and a budget of millions of dollars. The TV series and the book series have a marvelous way of filling in each other’s gaps, and sometimes seeing how one’s favorite scene plays out is exciting as reading that scene in the first place.

If waiting is just that unbearable, there is one recourse left to you: have a drink, and then have another.

Anthropological evidence has recently suggested that alcohol is the oldest form of artificial patience in human history. Before folks were able to kill time with Facebook, iPhones, and HBO, they had booze. Additionally many of the characters in the technologically challenged land of Westeros combat their ennui with alcohol. In his books Martin mentions many different adult beverages enjoyed by his characters: ciders, dark beers and rich ales, and especially wines such as the highly regarded Arbor Gold and the strong, sour Dornish reds.

Untitled 5

The Inn at the Crossroads is the official food blog for The Song of Ice and Fire, and while they do an excellent job of recreating the exotic menus that Martin describes in his novels, their input on the booze is more limited. Much of the technology and culture found in Westeros is comparable to that of Europe in the late middle-ages, so one can imagine that the booze would be similarly linked. For example, the cider Brienne enjoys at the Inn at the Crossroads (the fictional one, not the blog) wouldn’t be the overly sweet, fizzy stuff we refer to as hard cider in the United States. A cider in Westeros would probably be very dry or tart with perhaps even a mineral quality such as Hogan’s Cider out of England. It would also likely be still or contain only a slight effervescence from the natural fermentation process.

Untitled 6

Before he was gored to death by a wild boar, King Robert Baratheon was unconventional in more ways than one. While the nobles of GoT usually only drink wine, Robert seemed equally at home indulging in beer, a beverage that was a staple among the commoners and clergy of medieval Europe as well. Truth is, Robert was apt to drink anything he got his hands on, and his love of the common folk was more amorous that it was paternal. If the ales Robert enjoys share their origins with the ales of the middle ages, they would have most likely be missing the hops, which characterize the bitter flavors of American IPAs and pale ales. Before hops became a popular ingredient, ales were more akin to what we call gruit today, an odd, malt-forward fermented beverage that utilizes herbs and spices in place of hops, not something that is particularly easy to come by these days. Pale, crisp lagers weren’t even invented until the nineteenth century, but then again, the same goes for stouts, and we’re told that these exist in Westeros, so perhaps the seven kingdoms have a more developed brewing history than did the people of medieval Europe, or perhaps the strong, dark beers that Robert enjoys are more akin to Gouden Carolus Cuvée van der Keizer, which means Grand Cru of the Emperor, a rich, Belgian ale that is brewed every year in honor of Charles V, certainly a beer fit for a king.

If you want to drink like a Lannister, the wealthiest family in Westeros, then wine will be your pleasure and your poison. Other than their surname, the one thing Cersei and Tyrion have in common is that both our seldom seen without a chalice of wine in their hand. Martin describes many kinds of wine in The Song of Ice and Fire: along with the Arbor Gold and Dornish red, he mentions iced wine; honeyed wine; warm, spiced, mulled wine; wines made from plums, apricots, persimmons, or blackberries; spicy pepper wine. One’s mouth waters imagining slurping down all these delightful, albeit fictitious, beverages. TV does a shoddy job of filling in the gaps in this context, and what’s more, examining the wines of medieval Europe isn’t much help either. Is there a historical antecedent for the Dornish sour? Sour flavors are usually avoided in fine wines, and yet this is a prized vintage in Westeros. I imagine it has more in common with Flemish reds, such as Rodenbach, which while actually beer, have a tart, decadent, semi-sweet flavor, perhaps an acquired taste, but one that is worth the initial shock.

Mead, on the other hand, a staple of hospitality in the northern regions of Westeros, is easier to get one’s mind around. That is assuming one has tried mead in the first place. Brewed from water, honey, and occasionally spiced with other ingredients like hibiscus, hops, or ginger, mead is the oldest fermented beverage in the world, and has evolved relatively little in the last few centuries. Only recently rediscovered outside of a few small circles, mead has enjoyed a surge of popularity in Orlando thanks to its availability at innovative bars such as Redlight Redlight, Li’l Indies, and Oblivion Taproom. After all, how could fantasy fans resist something with a name like Dansk Mjød Viking Blod.

Untitled 3

There are other more illicit beverages floating around the world of Game of Thrones as well. Maesters often give a drink called milk of the poppy as an anesthetic, and we can assume this would be similar to laudanum. The warlocks of Qarth drink a mysterious beverage called Shade of the Evening that stains their lips blue and supposedly enhances their magic. Perhaps one could dissolve a grape Jolly Rancher in a tea of psilocybin mushrooms to capture this effect, though I can’t legally recommend you actually do this. Nevertheless, one can only imagine that a decent enough portion  of this drink would be ample to propel the uneasy fan, dreading the upcoming Game of Thrones-less year, straight into George R. R. Martin’s universe, a place that I, for one, would much rather observe than actually live in, but I’m the voyeuristic type who’d rather gander at other people’s cosplay than actually participate in it. Maybe a tripped-out, hallucinated afternoon in Westeros would be just the thing to ease the agony of waiting.

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teegenteege

Teege Braune (episode 72, episode 75, episode 77, episode 90, episode 102) is a writer of literary fiction, horror, essays, and poetry. Recently he has discovered the joys of drinking responsibly. He may or may not be a werewolf.

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